BP's Final "Top Kill" Procedure For Gulf Oil Spill

eldavojohn writes "So far every attempted fix has resulted in failure to contain the Gulf of Mexico oil spill with the exception of the riser insertion method that appears to be little more than a mile-long tube sucking up oil. After attempting many options to allow the continued collection of crude oil, BP is finally considering a 'top kill' option that will kill the well. A vessel at the surface will use 30,000 horsepower pumps to slam kill mud and clay into the well's bent riser, allowing them to cap the well off with two relief wells (which won't be ready for several months). If that fails, the vessel will move on to a 'junk shot' that involves spewing larger debris like shredded rubber and golf balls into the lines to gum up the flow and stop it. Government officials acknowledge that while this may provide a solution, it may also worsen the situation if the resulting pressure causes the lines to blow or fail at other points. While this is likely one of the worst environmental disasters to hit the gulf, BP's debacle has caused Shell to pre-build cofferdams into seven wells that it is currently drilling in the gulf. These would drop into place in the event of such a catastrophic failure of a riser under the well."

Comments

Wrong summary

[MouseR]

The mud or junk will not be inserted through the riser pipe.

There are access pipes on the BOP itself for this kind of stuff.

The mud or junk will therefore be inserted BEFORE the riser pipe.

Blocking the riser would be useless given it's bent, cracked at the BOP and could potentially rip off due to the blockage.

Re:Environmentalism

[Pojut]

if we get into a car accident, we're quick to shrug it off as just that: an accident. Nobody's fault. We pick up the pieces and move on.

I would just like to say that, as a former mechanic, I've been blamed for accidents caused by a completely unrelated item I worked on.

"You worked on my car, and I got in an accident three days later! It's your fault!"
"Sir, I replaced your air filter and both O2 sensors."
"And now my car didn't stop in time!"
"Sir, what happend exactly"
"I was texting my wife, and next thing I knew I had run into someone! I tried to stop but I couldn't!"
(What I wanted to say): "Sir, life isn't like Mechwarrior, you can't stop instantly."
(What I actually said): "Sir, why were you texting and driving?"

I think a lot of people forget this

[Sycraft-fu]

While you can come up with all kinds of theoretical methods for dealing with something like this, it isn't the sort of thing you can test. I mean it is unfeasible (not to mention irresponsible) to build an oil rig and then break it just to test and see how fixes might work. So pretty much everything is unproven, untested and you just have to try shit and see what works.

Now this isn't to say BP is blameless here, there are remediation measures they should have taken, but didn't. The biggest would be having enough booms ready to contain a well disaster (it would take a lot, but really not cost all that much) and training their people in proper booming. That is a proven method for reducing the spread.

However it is just to help deal with the spread, it doesn't actually fix the problem. The problem fixes, well you just don't know since it cannot be tested until an actual disaster happens.

Re:Environmentalism

[Jaysyn]

There are multiple accounts saying that BP cut corners when it came to oil rig safety. If this is the case then they need to be held criminally as well as financially accountable for their "accident". If this bankrupts them, so be it.

http://www.thecablevine.com/forum/showthread.php?2434-Eyewitness-Says-BP-Cut...

http://www.blacklistednews.com/?news_id=8748

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/5/17/867129/-60-Minutes:-Despite-damaged-blowout-preventer,-BP-cut-corners-immediately-before-explosion

http://ac360.blogs.cnn.com/2010/04/30/evening-buzz-did-bp-cut-safety-corners-before-oil-rig-blew-up/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/05/12/bp-whistleblower-claimed_n_573839.html

Re:What KILLS me is...

[h4rr4r]

What does that have to do with anything?

You think Phillip Morris should be allowed to kill babies since cigarette taxes are so high?

Re:How many blunders will the American gov't allow

[Red Flayer]

given that it was designed and certified to protect against this very sort of disaster.

Designed? Possibly. Certain safety standards that are mandatory for offshore drilling near other countries were not used on this rig. Certified? Not really. If someone did certify the safety precautions, they should lose whatever authority they have to certify anything. How many reports of safety precautions and features being overlooked, ignored, or just plain not done properly do we need before we can consider that this well was not being built with adequate safety precautions?

given that it's entirely possible that BP, Transocean, SLB, and Halliburton were all following the established safety protocols in conformance with past experience.

Yeah... you might want to read up on that some... it is quite clear to anyone who has read any of the reports out there that safety protocols and industry best practices were not followed.

BP makes 93 mil a day

[jDeepbeep]

Except that the government makes more off taxes on oil and it's downstream products than companies like BP make in profit on oil.

I don't have the tax numbers at my fingertips, but it seems that BP posted $93,000,000 USD profits per day for the first quarter of 2010.

Re:BP makes 93 mil a day

[demigod]

Where did you get $13 billion?

I looked up BP's 2009 revenue and came up with $246.14 billion

Also I think your confusing and/or commingling taxes and royalties

The government collects production royalties to compensate the general public for the market value of the resources that businesses remove from public lands.

It's not BP's oil, it the people of the United States oil. We agreed to let them take it out of our ground and sell it, if they give us a share. That's not a tax.

Accident vs. Negligence

[archer, the]

I was watching a documentary on this Sunday. They interviewed one of the rig survivors. According to the survivor, pieces of the blowout prevention device had come up the pipe weeks before. They didn't bother to fix the BOP. When one of the controllers on the BOP failed, again, weeks before the accident, they didn't bother to fix the BOP. When Transocean wanted to put 3 cement plugs in the well, sandwiching the heavy drilling fluid, the BP managers said "No, use 2 plugs," so that it would take BP less time to unseal the well when they hooked up the pumping rig. According to the survivor, it was when they took the pressure off the well, with only two plugs, that the plugs failed.

This is people putting money before safety. This isn't an "accident". I would consider an earthquake ripping the BOP off the well an accident. I would consider a jet crashing on the rig and somehow managing to destroy the BOP an accident. This was people cutting corners and getting caught.

(Note well: This assumes the survivor was telling the truth.)

Re:How many blunders will the American gov't allow

[Halo1]

In all fairness, we still have no idea what went wrong. I want BP to be dragged across the coals for this as much as the next guy, but the truth of the matter is that we still don't know why the BOP failed, given that it was designed and certified to protect against this very sort of disaster.

There's at least one survivor who claims that the BOP was punctured weeks before the blast, but that they were pressured in continuing operations regardless because they were running behind schedule and "time is money".

Re:How many blunders will the American gov't allow

[OnlineAlias]

Uh, yes we do. The BOP failed because the gasket that was in it sheared off and came back up the pipe. Despite this, BP executives told them to push on and not worry about it because they were already behind.

"...during a test, they closed the gasket. But while it was shut tight, a crewman on deck accidentally nudged a joystick, applying hundreds of thousands of pounds of force, and moving 15 feet of drill pipe through the closed blowout preventer. Later, a man monitoring drilling fluid rising to the top made a troubling find.

"He discovered chunks of rubber in the drilling fluid. He thought it was important enough to gather this double handful of chunks of rubber and bring them into the driller shack. I recall asking the supervisor if this was out of the ordinary. And he says, 'Oh, it's no big deal.' And I thought, 'How can it be not a big deal? There's chunks of our seal is now missing,'"

And there you have it. They were being pushed too hard, and made huge mistakes. BP needs to pay dearly for this, maybe even be put out of business completely, so that all the other companies can witness what happens to them if they do the same thing.

Let them factor that in to their actuarial tables..a big fat "closed for business" if a mistake like this takes place.

Re:How many blunders will the American gov't allow

[UnknowingFool]

According to this 60 minutes report, the BOP was possibly damaged weeks before the incident but not fixed and one of the two control modules of the BOP wasn't functioning properly but this condition was not investigated fully and corrected.

Also Transocean wanted to finish the well by inserting 3 concrete plugs with finishing mud in between them to close off the pipe. BP didn't want the mud. This would sped up the next phase of production but it removed some of the effectiveness of the plugs to seal the pipe. BP got it's way.

Re:Environmentalism

[girlintraining]

All of your links are to a single person, Mike Mason, an electrical engineer, making claims about equipment he doesn't service.

Now, where's my +5, Informative? Or will this be a -1, Troll for not immediately jumping to hysterics and saying we should burn BP to the ground as profiteering gluttons -- which is what's happened to all my other posts so far.

Re:How many blunders will the American gov't allow

[MrHanky]

Related link from Harpers.org April 2009:

On Friday, the New York Times reported that the federal Minerals Management Service (MMS) repeatedly violated environmental requirements when approving oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, ignoring and overruling scientists who noted the risk of potentially catastrophic spills. In the April 2009 issue of Harper’s Magazine, Bryant Urstadt discussed the “culture of ethical failure” at the MMS and its wasteful Royalty-in-Kind program.

It's not very long (a few pages), but a shocking read.

Summary (unsurprisingly) misstates TFA

[uncqual]

I believe the summary misstates the article (I know that's shocking).

The summary:

A vessel at the surface will use 30,000 horsepower pumps to slam kill mud and clay into the well's bent riser,

The article:

It will use the BOP's three-inch-diameter choke and kill lines, which open into the space between the well's casing and the drill pipe that runs up the riser. The lines are being cut and spliced into hoses connected to the Q4000, a vessel on the surface, whose 30,000-horsepower pumps will drive a dense mix of clay and other substances called kill mud into the lines.

The kill line is part of the BOP. Nothing is being forced back down the riser (the bent, broken, patched, leaking mile long pipe now laying on the ocean floor).

Here's nice graphic showing what they seem to be trying to do.

Re:What KILLS me is...

[coaxial]

You think Phillip Morris should be allowed to kill babies since cigarette taxes are so high?

Look, it's not like they use the whole baby during the manufacturing process.

Re:How many blunders will the American gov't allow

[metrometro]

Obama is getting a pass because the other side uses "Drill, Baby, Drill" to taunt him for his lack of enthusiasm for domestic oil production. His position on offshore drilling was pretty moderate: allow it after some environmental impact studies. But that wasn't enough for the right. This makes it a little awkward for them now, and I think they'd rather pretend the whole thing has gone away.

And, yes, Fox News was pushing the "this is Obama's Katrina" meme for a while.

Here you go:

[denzacar]

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/05/16/60minutes/main6490197.shtml?tag=contentMain;cbsCarousel

Re:How many blunders will the American gov't allow

[uncqual]

Don't forget that a production rig and a semi-submersible drilling rig are not the same. There's a reason BP never planned to leave the Deepwater Horizon sitting there pumping oil - that's not what it's for. Similarly production rigs are not made for optimal(?) drilling.

The Development Driller III is the semi submersible that BP brought in to drill the first relief well. This was already under contract to BP - but it may have been in use (probably making the contract issues easier, but possibly requiring shutting down another drilling operation safely). Note this is not your "fathers" drilling rig. It was on site on April 27 - about five days after the rig collapsed on April 22. Unless it was close by and not in use (and, obviously, these things are not bought/leased to sit around idle), that's pretty good in my book. Note that, unsurprisingly, BP doesn't have a lot of suitable idle rigs in the Gulf (note that the Mad Dog, for example, isn't suitable -- if nothing else because its rated water depth is inadequate).

Also, getting a less capable rig in two days earlier, for example, would make no sense if that rig would require four days more to drill the relief well (because, for example, it used 93-foot-long stands of pipe rather than 135-foot-long stands of pipe or had longer setup time).

And, how exactly, would you get a semi-sub "anywhere in the world" in 24 hours? The Discoverer Enterprise (which I believe is being used to drill the second relief well) weighs more than 75 million pounds, is 835 feet long, and 418 feet tall. The only way I know to move ANYTHING halfway around the world in less than 24 hours is by air -- and I'm pretty sure this beast won't fit in a First Class seat, let alone a Coach seat. Come to think about it, even the Antonov An-225 comes up a bit short (by about 74.5 million pounds in weight capacity, about 414 feet in height, and at least 560 feet in length). Oh, and since there would be insufficient time to deliver it from land via traditional oceangoing tugs and the An-225 can't land in the ocean (well, at least not more than once), one would have to do an airdrop. Building the world's largest (to put it mildly) parachute to set this the Discoverer Enterprise down at the right place would be challenging to say the least. And, I don't know of any existing rockets that could be successfully used to slow its descent.