BP Prepares Complex "Top Kill" Bid To Plug Well

shmG excerpts from the International Business Times: "Government and BP officials are hopeful after extensive preparations, but are not guaranteeing that a complex attempt early this week to cap an uncontrolled underwater oil spill from a well in the Gulf of Mexico will be successful. The so-called 'top kill' procedure that oil major BP is tentatively scheduled to attempt on Tuesday involves plugging up the well by pumping thick 'drilling mud' and cement into it. While it had been attempted on above-ground wells, it has never been tried at the depths involved with this spill, nearly 5,000 feet below the surface."

Comments

Dubble Bubble

[rueger]

At this point it's pretty obvious that BP is out of ideas - well, aside from a nuke - so maybe chewing gum is the next option?

You know, If I was drilling oil via a pipe that went 5000 ft straight down into the water I'd have made sure there was a pretty much foolproof way to shut the damned thing down before beginning.

Re:Dubble Bubble

[Anonymous Coward]

"You know, If I was drilling oil via a pipe that went 5000 ft straight down into the water I'd have made sure there was a pretty much foolproof way to shut the damned thing down before beginning."

That way is called a blowout preventer (BOP).

It failed.

Re:Dubble Bubble

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, I've also heard news reports have said one of the seals might have been screwed up from BP / Transocean mistreating it. Alternatively maybe the BOP was defective from the start but the problem went undetected. We don't know for sure yet, but I'm sure the lawsuits will settle it many years from now.

Regardless, the implication that oil companies don't work with multiple redundant ways to close off the well when things go wrong is simply false. Spikes in well pressure happen all the time. First the drillers try increasing the drilling mud weight, then the BOP does it's job if that doesn't work. It *is* the backup when other things go wrong. A typical BOP has multiple valves and types of valves, and multiple ways to trigger them from the surface. There are thousands of wells drilled around the world without incident every year with BOPs doing their job properly. There's nothing in the papers about it because it's a non-event. Unfortunately there is no piece of equipment that is truly foolproof. If BP / Transocean did screw up the BOP then this will be a lesson in not letting your failsafes go bad: you stop drilling or doing any other well operations and fix the problem before proceeding, like you're supposed to. Time will tell whether it was mismanagement of the situation or an unforeseeable technical problem.

Re:Dubble Bubble

[Rakshasa Taisab]

Halliburton does not have the responsibility of doing checks to ensure the cementing is not faulty. A job like that will always have the risk of being faulty thus tests should be conducted.

There were actually BP employees on the rig telling Transocean to change their plans in order to speed up the process, so they're not without responsibility here. Investigations will likely need to be made to determine how much blame each deserve.

will they pay ?

[C0vardeAn0nim0]

i just want to see how long, or _if_, it's gonna take for the authorities to stick a huge, multi-billion dolar fine on BP.

but it's not going to happen, right ?

the way these corporations learned to manipulate the legal system, the way they're in bed with politicians, is just sickening.

Re:will they pay ?

[dimeglio]

BP is a corporation. What's the point of suing them or making them pay? All that's going to happen is an increase in your petrol prices (orchestrated together by all oil companies). I think charging BP/subcontractors of criminal negligence is more likely to be a deterrent.

Re:And how would you do that?

[ColdWetDog]

You can't test this kind of shit. It appears that there was a failsafe for this, but it didn't work. Should it have been better? Apparently, but that wasn't known and there wasn't a way to test it.

Then you do what you know how to do and you do it correctly

You keep your batteries charged in the BOP.
You tighten ALL the fittings and TEST them.
You double check everything and write it down, check it again. Stop when you find out you've missed something.
You don't send the crew with the test equipment home before they even start.
You have adequate mitigation strategies and you deploy them correctly.
You ask yourself 'whatcouldpossiblygowrong' and you try to answer the question. You keep the suits well away from engineering decisions.

Just like most man made disasters, multiple fuckups had to happen before the Shit Hits the Fan. This one is just another example of hubris.

Re:Let's wish them luck

[vlm]

Although he used the term "reduce the risk". There is always risk but this procedure seems the most logical one so far for all I know about oil well drilling.

1) Research the formation pressure vs the burst strength of the casing. They are way too close for comfort. Statically they're technically OK, before you collapse a drilling rig on top of them and have a month long blowout scour them from the inside out. Bad Slashdot Analogy : Its like using a racing engine, after its been in a crash, to power a fire truck. Its not like the theoretical burst pressure limit of the casing is a factor of 100x the internal pressure... They're cutting it close, maybe too close.

2) Contemplate that the root cause of the blowout was a cement bond failure... And cement is crazy weak in tension. So hooking up ultra high pressure pumps to push down extra hard, is not exactly the ideal situation.

So, the relief well is about 1/3 of the way done. It'll work no problemo. Top kill has a modest chance of working, a modest chance of failing without damage, and a modest chance of splitting the casing wide open like a sausage on the grill.

So its a simple game theory exercise:

Solution 1 has a 100% success rate but takes three months. PR folks will vaporize themselves waiting.

Solution 2 has a, lets say, 1/3 chance of doing nothing, 1/3 chance of success, and 1/3 chance of splitting the casing like an overcooked bratwurst, thus increasing the oil squirt rate by a factor of maybe 3. So leak rate is going to zero, stay the same, or increase perhaps a factor of 3, all equally likely.

Meanwhile the longer you wait, the lower formation pressure/leak rate drops. While at the same time sandstone is scraping out the inside of the BOP and casing making the leak larger. And both effects are very non-linear. So, it starts out very slow, gets very big, and gradually declines.

Some supercomputer or whatever calculated the optimum solution is : Wait until the relief well is about 1/3 of the way there.
I have no idea if anyone in slashdot-land can replicate the game theory math that lead to that answer.

Re:Really?

[amorsen]

There are set, tested plans. They are a) let the blow-out-preventer do its job so that the whole event ends up at the bottom of page 19 and b) if the blow-out-preventer fails, drill a relief well. Well they did a) and it failed spectacularly, so now they're doing b) which takes 3 months. They are also doing a lot of crazy things from c) through z) which weren't ever planned, but that's better than everyone thinking they are doing nothing at all.

Re:And how would you do that?

[cdrguru]

So what do you do at that point? Remember, the blowout preventer is 5,000 feet down in an evironment where people can't work and there is over 100,000 PSI of pressure on it. Changing it out for a new one is not an option. Neither is disassembling the blowout preventer when it is connected to the wellhead.

So what do you do? Pretty much what they did - cotinue and hope for the best. Because the alternatives are damned few at that point. There is no valve to turn off, mostly because the blowout preventer is the valve. When it was damaged about the only thing that could be hoped for was that a blowout didn't happen because that hope is about all you have.

Which it sounds like is what did happen.

Re:It's simple really

[Goaway]

You know those wacky "kiloton" and "megaton" numbers they use about nukes? That's exactly the weight of the equivalent conventional explosive charge.

Do you have fifteen thousand tons of C4 lying around somewhere?

Re:And how would you do that?

[mindbrane]

I've little to no idea of the procedures and parts you wrote of but I think it speaks eloquently to the Scientific American article that points out BP is the only entity with what is seen as viable technology and the know how to implement it. Any forced change over from BP to U.S. government control of the spill catastrophe might interfere with technical management and solution deployment. I would like to see BP made to comply with total transparency and openness as regards all information requirements necessary to fully understand the entire incident.

Re:And how would you do that?

[omglolbah]

The cleanup is always a fecking pain in the arse.

That is why you prevent it from happening in the first place... I also work in the oil and gas business and the whole pile of neglect in the current case pisses me off to no end.

Last week Statoil in Norway had a blowout situation at a rig and the first safety barrier failed. If this had been the system in the gulf of mexico we'd be fucked over here too.... BUT there was a -second- barrier which stopped the problem. They locked down the well and there was no spill.

It is causing all manner of hell for Statoil at the moment though... people are quite nervous ;)

60 Minutes had a good piece

[dafing]

I listen to American 60 minutes through the podcast audio edition, a quick Search brought up this clip http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=6503436n&tag=contentMain;contentBody

What an absolutely harrowing experience. The mention of light bulbs brightened before popping, computer screens blowing out, and then 3 inch thick steel "fire proof" door being blown off its SIX hinges by the sudden explosion...pinning one of the survivors. To escape from this situation, to jump into the water, and risk being burnt by burning oil on the surface...just awful.

It sounds like there were failures on multiple levels, but perhaps all caused by drilling through a rubber seal?

I wish the people working to fix this the best of luck