Methane-Trapping Ice May Have Triggered Gulf Spill

sciencehabit writes with an excerpt from Science that begins: "Methane-trapping ice of the kind that has frustrated the first attempt to contain oil gushing offshore of Louisiana may have been a root cause of the blowout that started the spill in the first place, according to [UC Berkeley] professor Robert Bea, who has extensive access to BP p.l.c. documents on the incident. If methane hydrates are eventually implicated, the US oil and gas industry would have to tread even more lightly as it pushes farther and farther offshore in search of energy."

Comments

interestingly, themselves sometimes touted

[Trepidity]

Since these methane hydrates contain a significant amount of methane (i.e. natural gas), in the years since it was discovered that there are large deposits of them, they've periodically been touted as something we should actively drill for, as e.g. in this 1997 PopSci article.

Re:interestingly, themselves sometimes touted

[interkin3tic]

Since these methane hydrates contain a significant amount of methane (i.e. natural gas), in the years since it was discovered that there are large deposits of them

The article says 168 liters of methane from 1 liter of methane hydrates... I have no idea how much methane hydrates would be released, or how much methane would have to be released before it became an issue, but that sounds like a lot of methane and I've heard methane is quite a bit better at soaking up heat from solar rays than carbon dioxide.

So, is that a concern, or would that just be a small drop in the bucket?

Re:interestingly, themselves sometimes touted

[mr_mischief]

If it's methane gas that will otherwise be freed to the atmosphere, it's much better to burn that for fuel than to free it and drill for oil under it. Methane is a much more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, by about 80 times.

Re:interestingly, themselves sometimes touted

[smaddox]

I would like to point out 2 things.

First of all, 20x more effective at trapping heat is very different from the 80x more powerful than the GP quoted.

Second of all, the half life of CO2 is ~38 years, which is several times longer than methane. So, although methane traps more heat while it is in the atmosphere, it does not stay in the atmosphere near as long.

Arctic?

[RobertM1968]

I wonder how they've avoided the problems up around Alaska or other places where it's actually cold enough for there to be ice - much less methane trapping ice.

Re:Arctic?

[LehiNephi]

Hydrates require both high pressure and low temperature to form, along with the proper composition of water and methane. Take away any of the three, and hydrates disappear. Typically the gas/water/oil is warm enough when it reaches the surface that hydrates do not form, and by the time it cools down enough, it has already been processed so that the water and methane are no longer mixed.

Re:Arctic?

[Albinoman]

I've been wondering how warm oil is coming out of ground. Surely the oil coming out from such deep depths and with all the friction from the sand it carries along the way, the oil should be pretty hot.

oil leaks aren't natural?

[3seas]

Don't cha just gotta wonder with ocean floor earthquakes why we havn't have more natural oil spills in the ocean?

Re:oil leaks aren't natural?

[Huntr]

The oil deposits are about 20000 ft below the sea floor. If there were an earthquake that could unleash a significant amount of oil from 4 miles down, i.e., similar to this or other man-made oil disasters, we might have bigger problems to worry about.

Re:probably a bit ignorant here

[morgan_greywolf]

And, more importantly, why do we want to make drilling off the cost of Florida legal?

I'll tell you why: it's the same reason we aren't all driving electric cars. Because the oil industry, by hook and crook, has done everything it can to make damned sure we're totally dependent on them for our transportation needs, such as buying up all the patents to make sure NIMH and Li-Ion batteries couldn't be used in cars, lobbying hard against ZEV-promoting initiatives, etc. See Who Killed the Electric Car?.

Re:Spill baby spill!

[Shakrai]

One liter of water ice that has trapped individual methane molecules in the "cages" of its crystal structure can release 168 liters of methane gas when the ice decomposes."

I wonder if that can be harnessed as an energy source?

Re:Better Article

[nbauman]

I agree. That was the best story of dozens that I read on the entire subject.

There were 2 reasons for that: (1) Schwartz and Weber interviewed Robert Bea http://www.ce.berkeley.edu/~bea/ and (2) They were smart enough to understand what Bea was talking about.

The reason Bea is so brilliant is that (1) He understands the technology thoroughly and (2) He concentrates on the question of why engineers don't do what they know they have to do in order to prevent accidents. Bea does for civil engineering what Feynmann did for the Challenger disaster.

Re:probably a bit ignorant here

[Anonymous Coward]

Precisely. You know what people these days REALLY need to watch? The first episode of James Burke's Connections.

Re:Spill baby spill!

[Lars T.]

this is why I'm against sudden rapid expansions of industry into sensitive environmental areas.

Article says "Drillers have long been wary of methane hydrates because they can pack a powerful punch. One liter of water ice that has trapped individual methane molecules in the "cages" of its crystal structure can release 168 liters of methane gas when the ice decomposes."

Doesn't exactly sound like this was a new and unforseen problem, it doesn't sound like this happened because we were being hasty.

But it does sound like a sudden rapid expansion. And it sure does sound that the problem was hastily ignored, because preventing it simply cost too much money.

The good news is that there will be a charity concert in New Orleans, so BP won't have to pay so much money to their victims.

Article says 7665 gal/day.

[Chris Burke]

The California seafloor leaks are much larger. I don't think they know exactly how much, but this source quotes "8-80 Exxon Valdez spills", I would guess they mean annually. That's somewhere between 86.4 and 864 million gallons.

They're talking about the total volume of oil residue contained in the down-stream sediments in the seabed, deposited over an unknown period of time. And it seems like they're talking equivalent pre-biodegraded volume, but I'm not sure.

The statement about the rate of seepage was slightly further down:

There is an oil spill everyday at Coal Oil Point (COP), the natural seeps off Santa Barbara, where 20-25 tons of oil have leaked from the seafloor each day for the last several hundred thousand years.

25 tons/day * 7.3 bbl/ton * 42 gal/bbl = 7665 gallons/day.

That's tiny compared to this spill at 200,000 gal/day.

Re:You're seeing the problem

[b4upoo]

I do not get why lowering a containment dome over the leak allowed freezing. I don't know what an oil and water mix can take to freeze solid. If that is the issue why not simply add a heater inside that container?
                    Further why do we not have containers poised above every valve cluster in case of urgent need? Why was this never required? Why were the shut off valves not tested every day or two? And why not simply bolt some lead on that container to increase its weight? I am on the edge of believing that the entire drilling industry is not composed of mental rejects with about the morality of a mass murderer.

Re:Spill baby spill!

[budgenator]

"This well had been giving some problems all the way down and was a big discovery. Big pressure, *16ppg+ mud weight*. They ran a long string of 7" production casing - not a liner, the confusion arising from the fact that all casing strings on a floating rig are run on drill pipe and hung off on the wellhead on the sea floor, like a "liner". They cemented this casing with lightweight cement containing nitrogen because they were having lost circulation in between the well kicking all the way down. The calculations and the execution of this kind of a cement job are complex, in order that you neither let the well flow from too little hydrostatic pressure nor break it down and lose the fluid and cement from too much hydrostatic. But you gotta believe BP had 8 or 10 of their best double and triple checking everything. On the outside of the top joint of casing is a seal assembly - "packoff" - that sets inside the subsea wellhead and seals. This was set and tested to 10,000 psi, OK. This was the end of the well until testing was to begin at a later time, so a temporary "bridge plug" was run in on drill pipe to set somewhere near the top of the well below 5,000 ft. This is the second barrier, you always have to have 2, and the casing was the first one. It is not know if this was actually set or not. At the same time they took the 16+ ppg mud out of the riser and replaced it with sea water so that they could pull the riser, lay it down, and move off. When they did this, they of course took away hydrostatic on the well. But this was OK, normal, since the well was plugged both on the inside with the casing and on the outside with the tested packoff. But something turned loose all of a
sudden, and the conventional wisdom would be the packoff on the outside of the casing. Gas and oil rushed up the riser; there was little wind, and a gas cloud got all over the rig. When the main inductions of the engines got a whiff, they ran away and exploded. Blew them right off the rig. This set everything on fire. A similar explosion in the mud pit / mud pump room blew the mud pumps overboard. Another in the mud sack storage room, sited most unfortunately right next to the living quarters, took out all the interior walls where everyone was hanging out having - I am not making this up - a party to celebrate 7 years of accident free work on this rig. 7 BP bigwigs were there visiting from town. In this sense they were lucky that the only ones lost were the 9 rig crew on the rig floor and 2 mud engineers down on the pits." TRANSOCEAN DEEPWATER HORIZON EXPLOSION-A DISCUSSION OF WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED? Reply by Garry Denke on May 4, 2010 at 6:06pm

The "kicks" he's talking about are pressure surges from gas in the well, so everybody knew what the well was doing because it was kicking all the way down, so no surprises there. The well was drilled, Halliburton was contracted to cement the casing which was done and tested and they were pumping out the mud from the riser pipe and filling it with seawater when the explosion occurred. The riser pipes is rated for 15,000 PSI and have a 3.5 million pound load-carrying capacity, between these riser pipes and the blowout preventer is a connector device rated for 7 million foot-pounds of bending load capacity. Right now this riser pipe comes out of the well head goes up 1500 feet and is bent over and the free end is now buried in the seabed. I don't see where they were cutting costs too much. Deepwater Horizon would probably have disconnected from the well and moved on in a day or two if there hadn't been an explosion.

Re:Spill baby spill!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, tea-partier, we can do much better, we can get that deep sea drilled oil from Brazil. They doing that way much deeper than BP was trying to do, and is costing them only 17 bucks per barrel, way much better than we ever did.
Our oil industry always sucked ass and balls anyways. if we didn't had our boys dying in wars so they can get fields in Iraq for free they probably be bankrupt long time ago.
Now, pack your shit and go hide in Nazi Germany, err, sorry, Arizona, together with the other Aryan retards that think like you...

Options...

[Anonymous Coward]

You are being disingenuous: there is a continuum between option 4 and options 2&3. And it is clear that we have to aim at some point on this continuum right now. That means raising the energy prices in a gradual and predictable manner starting now (heck -- we should have started 10-30 years ago, but wtf), re-investing every penny raised this way into cleaner energy sources.

Oh, and the price raise should be noticeable enough that it motivates us to spend less energy. If it doesn't change (a bit) our ways of life, then it ain't no good -- we are living unsustainably after all.

But meh.

Re:Spill baby spill!

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't this what China *just started doing?

http://www.physorg.com/news187622107.html