Scientists Attempt To Calm Volcano

An anonymous reader writes "Since May 2006, a mud volcano in Indonesia has spewed out up to 126,000 cubic metres of mud a day, flooding an area of more than 4 square kilometres. This unprecedented natural disaster has become so bad that geophysicists now plan to enact an untested scheme to try and slow the flow: dropping concrete balls into the volcano."

Comments

Not a natural disaster.

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

This was not a natural disaster:

The disaster occurred as the company, Lapindo Brantas, drilled thousands of feet to tap natural gas and used practices that geologists, mining engineers and Indonesian officials described as faulty.

but a poster child for why environmental regulation is a cornerstone to a successful economy:

Eight villages are completely or partly submerged, with homes and more than 20 factories buried to the rooftops. Some 13,000 people have been evacuated. The four-lane highway west of here has been cut in two, as has the rail line, dealing a serious blow to the economy of this region in East Java, an area vital to the country's economy. The muck has already inundated an area covering one and a half square miles.

Sadly, the company responsible is shirking their responsibilities:

But as the liabilities have escalated, Lapindo was sold - for $2 - last month to an offshore company, owned by the Bakrie Group, and many fear it will declare bankruptcy, allowing its owners to walk away.

Have a look at some hi res satellite images of the disaster

Dangerous

[jonadab]

Sounds like a good way to turn a shield volcano into a stratovolcano.

The milk jug analogy is flawed. With holes in the bottom of a milk jug, it's just gravity that lets the water pour out under the force of its own weight, so yes, plugging one hole, or plugging the hole halfway, reduces the rate of flow and doesn't change the pressure -- because there's no pressure in the first place.

Hook up a garden hose to the milk jug and then try it, though, and you've got an entirely different situation. Now you can turn the jug _over_, so that the holes are on the top, and you'll still get water squirting out, just like mud flowing *up* out of a volcano, against gravity. Plug one of the holes in the jug then, and you will indeed get more flow out the other hole.

If the article accurately describes their strategy, they're only going to make matters worse, not better.

Re:A more practical solution

[phayes]

As I remember it from the initial stories, the problem arose when the oil company drilled through a relatively thin clay layer into a very thick mud bearing layer under very high pressure. The clay layer acted as a dike to stop the underlying liquids from migrating upward. Normal drilling technique when such geography is present would have been to insert a liner in the drillhole in order to protect the clay strata from erosion, but this was not employed here. When the drillhole pierced the clay strata, the high pressure mud below it quickly eroded the initial breach into a large breach which followed the drillhole upward to transform it into the mud volcano that now exists.

It is a situation that has a lot in common with the levee breaches in NO after Katrina. In NO, initial attempts to repair the levee breaches by transporting large, heavy blocks into the breaches were unsuccessful as the breaches were just too large and the blocks were swept away. I expect the big ball method described in TFA to have as little effect as the big block method did in NO. It was only when the water levels equalized in NO that the corps were able to finally seal off the breaches.

It seems to me that your method of using explosives to fix the problem would do nothing to help and would probably only widen the breach in the clay layer, much as using explosives would not have helped in NO. Using explosives in the mud bearing layer is impractical (beyond just getting the into place as another poster noted) as the mud bearing layer is too thick to be obstructed in this manner. Using explosives in the clay layer would only widen the breach. Using explosives above the clay layer would do nothingf as the pressure is already high enough to work it's way to the surface once it is through the clay layer.

The only means of resealing the breach as I see it would be to drill through the clay layer (using liners to protect the clay from erosion) and then inject cement in large enough quantities to cause a plug to be formed below the clay. I have no idea if it is feasible as I do not know how large the breach has become and how much cement could be pumped in before being swept away.

The "experiment" described in TFA where the debit was halved by plugging one out of two holes in a bottle is false as there is only one hole at present. Even if they achieve their goal of dumping the balls so that they settle on the clay layer, the mudflow will just erode around them and create a yet larger breach as nothing in the plan allows for the erosion of the mud layer.