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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."
How long will the American government keep allowing BP to blunder its way into not fixing this problem?
Maybe the government should step in and put and end to this situation themselves.
Why didn't they just do this in the first place? Why muck about with wholly unproven methods? They should have sealed this thing up weeks ago. They greed and attempts to keep the well usable are a fucking disgrace.
Living With a Nerd
The question is, though, will the government be able to do any better? I say let a disinterested (disinterested in the collection of the oil, that is) tackle the problem. Get BP out of the equation completely (aside from paying for the 3rd-parties services).
"There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." Proverbs 16:25 (NKJV)
Everybody wants to blame the need for oil, or greedy corporations, or a slew of other things for this disaster. Not once do they acknowledge that (a) this is an unprecidented engineering failure, (b) there were multiple safeguards, (c) it's an economic necessity that we drill for oil, and (d) Murphy's law -- no matter how hard you try, eventually mistakes will be made.
BP is doing everything possible to fix the problem, while we sit on the sidelines and debate their ineffectiveness. I don't think that's really fair -- 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.
But when it's a large corporation, we somehow think they should be held to a higher standard? No, I don't think they should. They're holding themselves to the same standard the average person would.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
They do, it's called an uncontained oil leak.
"There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." Proverbs 16:25 (NKJV)
Privatized profits. Socialize losses!
BP wont ever end up paying much of the real cost involved in this. Any fines they do face will be a tiny percent of their yearly profit.
And they will go on to do this again in the future.. Saving a buck or two on safety to make some money. Just like they did 20 years ago for their last major disaster.
Yeah know, we really need the oil.. But i'd say we need someplace to live way way more.
Someday we're really going to have to hold corporations accountable in a REAL way for the lives and things they destroy.
Major oil spill cuz you skiped on some safety that we have invented already? Shoot the CEO in the head.
Sooner or later companys will stop doing things that endanger the environment or peoples lives... Or we'll run out of CEO's. either way... it would be an improvement.
Do you know WHY governmental regulation has been so bad in the last dozen or so years? It's because presidential administrations and Congress have NOT ALLOWED it to be good. They have purposefully put people in those political jobs knowing that they weren't going to regulate on purpose. The Bush administration did this more than anyone else. The Clinton administration was 2nd only to Bush, and Bush, Sr. was a close 3rd.
Do you think government can't get the experts it needs to professionally oversee these companies? Are you kidding? They could in a second. It's that the politicos don't want to put competent people without conflicts of interest in these positions. And we're paying the price for it now and he gulf cost will be paying the price for the next century or so....
The top kill is what happens when the oil gets to the surface. These desperate (and failing) attempts to contain the spill should have inspired the government to take control of the situation earlier. It's clear that BP doesn't know what the hell they're doing.
I hope everyone who chanted "drill baby drill!" during the last election cycle is willing to go down to the gulf coast and help with the cleanup. What a mess!
Facts have a liberal bias.
Heck the SIPHONING 5,000 a day from the line they put into the one breach! And that isn't even getting everything coming out of that breach, and there is ANOTHER breach on the line which is gushing oil. The 5,000 a day value is an out and out LIE, and needs to be published as such. The estimates of 20,000-50,000 seem a lot more realistic, which would mean that this would already be the worst spill in history (620,000 - 1,550,000 barrels). And even those seem small considering the rig itself was producing 300,000 - 500,000 barrels a day.
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
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.
As others in this thread have mentioned, several aspects of this accident are unprecedented, and although the oil industry should be faulted for pushing too hard too quickly, this accident may simply have to serve as a learning experience, given that it's entirely possible that BP, Transocean, SLB, and Halliburton were all following the established safety protocols in conformance with past experience.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Maybe the government should step in and put and end to this situation themselves.
So long as they send the bill to BP and not the taxpayers, I'm for it.
Reply to That ||
since when did "dump a bunch of shit on it and hope that plugs it up" become a formal strategy?
About a week ago, if I recall correctly.
Before that, it was "let's slip a tube down in the middle of the hole so we can keep sucking some of the oil out of it, while we fill a couple of tankers and stall for time."
Before that, it was "let's put a funnel on top of it so we can keep sucking the oil out of it."
The "top kill" only became an option after all other options that allowed them to continue extracting at least a small portion of the oil from the well were utterly exhausted.
And, remember, the "top kill" option will probably require the fast drilling of a couple of "relief wells" nearby - and since they are "relief wells" there will be a great deal of push to exclude the same fucking safety features that would have prevented this disaster in the first place in the name of urgency this time rather than saving money. I wouldn't be at all surprised if some congresscritter managed to get the relief wells paid for with FEMA money.
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
The leak is not uncontained. The BOP and (partially-destroyed) riser stack are providing resistance against the flow of oil. The concern is that this proposed solution could cause enough pressure to build up inside the BOP that the entire apparatus fails completely, which could then increase the flow of oil by at least an order of magnitude.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Does it have something to do with enabling the microorganisms in the ocean that are capable of consuming hydrocarbons to consume them?
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
this is why the doctrine of reasonable prevention would have gone so much farther here. the oil industry doesn't have much experience drilling these super-deep wells, they certainly have no experience dealing with problems in them.
going down there with a known not-properly-functioning BOP and untested cementing was blatantly stupid. now they have to try to fix the problem with stuff that's essentially untested and could make the whole thing worse.
---
Is this the MPAA? Is this the RIAA? Is this the DMCA? I thought it was the USA!
If someone did certify the safety precautions, they should lose whatever authority they have to certify anything.
Certifying a process and making sure the process is performed are two very separate acts. I would investigate how much of each were to blame before going nuts.
From what I can tell, there are hugely involved and expensive processes in place to prevent this sort of disaster. Could the procedures be better? Probably. Were the procedures followed to the letter? I seriously doubt it.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
Or, to rephrase... Explosives are often used to put out oil well fires on land. Then, utilizing the remaining wellhead (and possibly Christmas tree) structure (which, fortunately, weren't all vaporized by cowboys who think "if some explosives are good, more are better"), crews cap the well using mechanical means (such as installing a new valve).
It seems to me that the last thing that one would want to do in this case is blow up the BOP - it's routing, and apparently choking off much of, the flow. If a failed explosive attempt were to destroy/disconnect the BOP yet not seal the well I think we would be looking back at the current flow nostalgically. Given the apparent lack of experience using explosives to deal with a situation like this it seems likely too risky to attempt -- given that the relief wells are eventually expected to solve the problem.
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
On what basis do you claim that the dispersant has been effective in reducing the impact? I have to say I trust the judgment of the EPA on that more than I trust J. Random Slashdotter or BP, but I'm willing to look at expert opinion if you can cite some.
When corporate criminals are fouling the planet, I'm all for government agencies interfering with them.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
(Note well: This assumes the survivor was telling the truth.)
Indeed it does. And when you've got this much press coverage, I think it's reasonable to conclude somebody might want to make a few bucks on the talk show circuit. They can always recant later, when the truth comes out and say they were "mistaken".
This was people cutting corners and getting caught.
Neither of us, I'm pretty sure, are qualified to say whether it was within tolerances to put two plugs instead of three down, or what pieces of rubber coming out might mean. And nobody who is qualified to make those claims has stepped forward to make the conclusion the media has made. The reason is because there aren't enough facts yet to form a professional conclusion -- and all of this is speculation. The media is great at speculation, jumping to conclusions, and reporting only half the facts, then over-analyzing and saying "what if".
This is why I have mostly ignored the media's reporting of what caused the accident: The objective and full truth will still take months, if not years, to be known. It is very likely to be like most disasters: There was no single point of failure, but a series of failures and mistakes that led to the disaster, and nobody at the time had all the facts to realize "oh shit, it's a perfect storm!"
People say this is all about BP making a profit by cutting corners and that's what caused it. In reality, it makes no sense to allow a production rig to explode and topple into the ocean and kill your employees to save a buck. They likely did a risk assessment and concluded it was safe. The assessment was probably flawed somehow and retrospectively we'll find out how.
But again, that's years from now, not today. Today, people just want a name to vent their rage at -- and people hate waiting when they're angry.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
I'm almost afraid to say this, for fear of a flame war. Really I'm not trying to make a statement for or against a political figure, I'm making a comment about the fickleness of the Americans:
I am no fan of G.W. Bush, but you can bet if he were in charge, he would be getting reamed up and down over this. I am astonished, flabbergasted, that I haven't seen Obama held accountable at the same level that Bush would have been (and was, on similar disasters).
Have I just been missing it (because I don't watch Fox News), or am I right?
And is this a statement of the fickleness of the Americans? or is this a statement of how effective Obama's team is at deflecting blame? or is there still a halo around him?
Please, don't let this evolve into a "GWB suxors" or "One Big A$$ Mistake, America" argument. I'm curious if I'm right or wrong on my assessment, not if you think Obama sucks or rocks. I DO think that the president should be held accountable to protect us from "all threats, both foreign and domestic", but I don't think that the "reaming" of the president is necessarily in order. I'm more interested in consistency of accountability.
Link
Criminal Negligence.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
IMHO there is little to no difference between using other “weapons of mass destruction” and this one. It’s just that there aren’t 10,000 people affected, but it’s spread over millions of people. It’s still mass destruction of a giant area. Imagine this happening on land. Inside the USA. They’d roll in the army and shoot everyone in sight (e.g. BP officials), before stopping it.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
So, once again the design wasn't really that bad. It was the humans running the equipment that screwed it up. Hearing stuff like this, especially when you bring up rubber seals, reminds me of the Challenger disaster.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
"After attempting many options to allow the continued collection of crude oil, BP is finally considering a 'top kill' option that will kill the well."
Why are people coming up with this fantasy that BP wants to keep the hole viable, and wants to continue collecting or be able in the future to collect oil from this hole? Some people have developed the misconception that the only reason BP hasn't tried to plug the hole is that they want the oil to flow -- i.e. $$$$$$. It's total nonsense. Why?
A) the hole at depth and the equipment on top of it is damaged. It would be foolhardy and inconsistent with industry practice in a situation like this -- especially if instability in the hole due to melting hydrates is an issue at depth in the well -- to try to keep the hole operational. The plan was, and always will be, to stop the flow from the hole and then cement and abandon this hole once it is stopped. To produce this field they will have to drill new holes. That was and always will be the case, and BP said that was the case from the start;
B) they deployed various collection devices earlier because they are faster to deploy and do not depend on being certain about the state of the deeper borehole or the blowout preventer (BOP), both of which had to be thoroughly assessed before attempting techniques that would plug the well, especially when it was known that the BOP failed to perform the way it was supposed to and the hole was unstable. You don't fiddle with things like this when they are in an "unknown state". If they proceeded to try a "top kill" without that assessment they would run the risk of making things worse if a subsurface blowout occurred when pressures built up (i.e. the pipe failed below the sea bottom) or something failed in the BOP;
C) the oil coming out (even with upward-revised numbers) is a piddling amount compared to normal oil production rates in these types of wells when they are working properly, and the value of the oil is dwarfed by the costs of collecting it like this. Even if it were flowing at 10000 barrels a day and they collected it all, that's a "mere" $700000/day (10000 * ~$70 USD/barrel), which wouldn't cover half the daily costs of all the vessels and other gear they have on-site trying to fix the problem ($500k/day is routine for ONE rig when you add in all the materials, personnel, and support. Here are costs for just the rig contract alone -- the Semisub 4000'+ WD is the relevant one at $411k/day). Usually a rig or subsea production system in this setting will be producing from multiple holes simultaneously -- that's the only way it is economic. It would be economically stupid to try to produce from the well in its current state and with the setup they have on site. Get a clue, people!
Anyone who thinks the delay in resorting to a "top kill" solution is due to some kind of ulterior financial motive on the part of BP doesn't understand the technical challenges of doing any of this stuff at extreme depths or what the real economic situation is. They're resorting to a "top kill" now because they've finished the X-ray and gamma-ray studies of the damaged BOP that give them confidence the whole thing isn't going to blow up in their face when they try to plug it. The other techniques were worth trying in the interim. That's the whole explanation for what they've done. It's nothing nefarious.
Hold BP and other oil companies responsible for accidents. Remember that they are drilling at the ends of the Earth to satisfy *your* demand for this resource, so perhaps try to cut back a bit. Beef up safety regulations and inspections. Diligently work on alternative energy sources. But for god's green Earth's sake, leave the stupid conspiracy theories out of it. This "they haven't plugged it because they want the oil to flow so they can make money" one doesn't make a speck of technical or economic sense.
You have no idea what you're talking about.
First, it's not a bay. It's the Gulf of Mexico.
Second, no attempt was made to "save the well". If you knew anything about drilling (or even if you'd even of bothered to read the freaking summary) you'd know that the reason drastic measures like injecting a plug into the well have not been tried is that there's a very real possibility this might do further damage to the well and make the spill significantly worse, possibly to the point of not being able to stop the leak at all. Every step of this process (from remotely activating the blowout preventer, placing the "dome" on top of the break, and syphoning off the oil as it comes up) has been done with meticulous care specifically to prevent making the situation worse, as we still don't even know why it happened!
Do you know why we don't have "disinterested" parties regulating this industry or overseeing the cleanup? Because they're people like you, who don't know what the hell they're talking about but are perfectly happy to act like the solutions are obvious and simple.
Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them
Does not matter one bit if their risk assessment was wrong. Maybe I like to go out drinking and driving because my risk assessment says I will never hit a church van full of preschoolers, but when I do you had better bet I will be in deep shit.
You wait your couple years and see, BP will only pay but a tiny portion of these costs.
Are you so young you do not remember Exxon Valdez? Exxon paid not even pennies on the dollar for that one.
I'm beginning to think their chief engineer on this project is Wile E. Coyote.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
(vote libertarian)
So we can get folks Rand Paul into office? No thanks. Bad enough his father already holds office, now we got his son in there too, and it would appear the apple didn't fall far from the tree.
I like the Civil Rights Act as is.
It is *not* easy to gather up the oil in the water and it is definitely *not* easy to just stick a cap in the tube.
Also, you speak of waste (and other people speak of BP being greedy and wanting solutions that gather the oil rather than stop it)...I saw evidence somewhere that the total amount of oil expected to spill was on the order of magnitude of 7.5 minutes worth of the worlds consumption. Believe me, this is not significant waste and certainly not a significant financial loss to BP (in terms of the oil value)--they want this thing shut quickly and cheaply just as much as you do.
Bottles.
Obama hasn't "taken charge" because he knows that BP is going to catch the blame when none of these other "fixes" work. That's smart. Contrast this with the actual Katrina: there were known things that could have been done to relieve the disaster situation in New Orleans, that were actually the responsibility of the Federal government to do, that did not get done. Bush actually failed to act when there was work to be done, whereas there is not much here for Obama to do.
Humans tend to fuck up. A design that doesn't fail safe in that case, IS bad. You gotta take that factor into account.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
There is more than one Mike in them there links.
Mike Mason, the guy in the photo there and Mike Williams, the guy in the CBS' 60 Minutes". The "electrical engineer".
BTW, those two Mikes talk about different cases of negligence by BP.
Also, the first link in the GPP is an analysis report by another guy called Glenn Stehle, an engineer with "extensive experience in drilling operations".
Then there is Bob Bea, a professor of engineering at the University of California, who got the job to analyze the Deepwater Horizon accident.
That is like.. four guys and a couple of cases of "cutting corners when it came to oil rig safety" already.
Then there are couple of more guys in that second link.
So like... Do I now get my +5 Informative or a +5 Insightful?
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Just start selling Hummers to all the fish- they'll use up all that oil in no time.
My webcomic
Unless we prove they were criminally negligent, the most BP will pay is $75 million. Those are the laws we passed when we opened the Gulf up to drilling. Because, you know, oil companies make so little profit off of all this, there's no way they could afford to pay for their mistakes. And this is America, land of the free! We don't hold corporations accountable for their mistakes here, that would be infringing on their FREEDOMS!
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
With the pressures and temperatures involved this is actually a very difficult problem to solve.
Obviously. That's why BP has billions of dollars to hire as many of the world's best engineers as they need.
Also, you can't just turn a valve under the blowout preventer - it is pretty much the bottom valve. So replacing this isn't an option - you are pretty much stuck with it unless you are prepared to do something drastic.
You know what you can do when the bottom valve partially fails? You can stop whatever you're doing and wait for the engineers to figure something out. Maybe you add another safety system that makes up for what the BOP can no longer do. Maybe you abandon the well and make a not to not fuck up the BOP next time.
What you can't do is rush the remaining work, increasing the odds of something catastrophic happening even further. Partly damaged BOP, fine, install some other safeguard or find a way to be more careful. Partly damaged BOP, and a botched cement job, and a smaller plug than the engineers originally specified? Whoever signed off on that should be in fucking jail.
The US could, I suppose, nationalize BP because of this.
Or they could see to it that BP pays for every bit of damage and cleans up everything that's humanly possible to clean up. You could force them to immediately release all pertinent data on the spill so that other experts can make informed suggestions and so that containment and cleanup efforts can be properly directed. You could fine the shit out of them for being negligent in the first place. You could put the people that signed off on the various rush jobs in prison. You know, you could be reasonable but firm.
Hell, you could do all that and BP would probably still turn a profit this year.
* There was a leak in the hydraulic system that provides power to the shear rams.
* The BOP had been modified in unexpected ways. The underwater control panel had been disconnected from the bore ram, and instead connected to a test ram. Drawings of the BOP provided by Transocean to BP do not correspond to the structure that is on the ocean bottom.
* The BOP's shear ram is not powerful enough to cut through joints in the well pipe. It is only effective on the body of a drill pipe. Since 10% of the drill pipe is threaded joints, the BOP is expected to succeed on only 90% of the drill pipe.
* Emergency control to the BOP may have failed in multiple ways. Cameron, the BOP's manufacturer, has stated that the explosion may have severed the communication link so the BOP never received the instruction to engage. Before the backup dead man's switch will engage, communications, power and hydraulic lines must all be severed; Cameron, has stated it is possible BOPs hydraulic lines were intact after the explosion, in which case the unit would not engage. Of the two control pods for the deadman switch, the one that has been inspected so far had a dead battery.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepwater_Horizon_oil_spill#Investigation
Obviously in your case "as far as I'm aware" isn't very far at all. You have been arguing a false position for multiple posts without bothering to check your facts in even the most cursory way.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton