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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."
Just nuke the damn thing, it's worked before and surely nothing can go wrong.
Admit nothing. Deny Everything. Make Counter-accusations.
You know what I really can't understand ? Why wouldn't there at least be tested methods for this sort of thing? I can't believe that industries are allowed to do things like drill for oil underwater (which is complex and when failure can cost billions USD and human lives) without having set, tested plans in place in case of this sort of catastrophe.
But you're clearly much cleverer than they are. Either that or perhaps you should stfu if you don't actually know anything about the subject.
Yeah, but would you have any cash left to spare for coke and hookers? Didn't thinks so...
They will and are already paying.
As they should....
Veni, Vidi, Velcro!
Actually the blowout preventer does exactly that. When it has not been swapped out for a test fixture and damaged (known at the time) known leaking hydraulic fluid.
The bad cement job was also known to be bad before they replaced the drill mud with salt water.
There were so many things done wrong. All of them had to be bad for this to happen. B.P. knew these were all wrong and went ahead anyway.
They belong in prison and sued out of existence.
It didn't fail on it's own though. An employee broke it and BP senior execs didn't think it was important enough to delay further to fix 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.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
And according to 60 Minutes, when broken pieces of rubber come up which are obviously pieces of the blowout preventer's seal, you don't ignore it and continue, hoping you'll never need your blowout preventer.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
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.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article7129225.ece
"According to a survivor’s account... blowout preventer...was punctured in the weeks before the blast but nothing was done to fix it.
"a crewman accidentally nudged a joystick, which sent 15ft of the oil pipe through the closed device"
"Mr Williams added that a crewman “discovered chunks of rubber in the drilling fluid”. He thought that it was important enough to 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’
"two control pods that operate the blowout preventer had lost some of its function weeks before the explosion, and the batteries on the device were weak. With the schedule slipping, Mr Williams said that a BP manager ordered a quicker pace. The faster drilling had caused the bottom of the well to split open, swallowing tools. “There’s always pressure [on the crew], but yes, the pressure was increased,” he said. "
Unfortunately, BP is doing something very intelligent . . . they are wiping their hands from the affair and trying to disassociate themselves from the whole disaster. "What?!?! Liability?!?! Not us!"
Seriously? All I've heard from them, over and over, was they're not going to hide behind the legal liability limit. If you can provide any actual quotes that their position is now to do the exact opposite, that would be very insightful.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
So what do you do? Pretty much what they did - cotinue and hope for the best.
Wrong. You stop drilling and eat the $10 million you've dropped on the well so far. If that's not acceptable to you, don't drill off my damn coast.
It should be illegal to say that freedom of speech should be limited.
No, there isn't an oil spill in the Gulf. There is a slight water spill in the Gulf oil pit.
Pretty much everyone has condemned the way BP has tried to 'save' the well during their attempts to 'solve' the problem, instead of taking a more direct approach, but it cannot be stressed enough. The oil rig explosion was on the 20th April. It's now the 23rd of May. For a company which is in control of, basically a WMD, there should have been contingency after contingency lined up.
No dice on the blow off valve? Next day try the cap, next day try the plug, then the current 'top kill' method; we'd be at the current progress within a week. At the moment it seems BP is making it up as they go along, that may be all they can do at the moment, but it is unacceptable that there was no preparation or protocol for a worse case scenario, which even this isn't. A tanker full of cement and rubber could have been there within a few hours, this is a disgrace.
It's going to be a long time before new drilling is permitted in the Gulf of Mexico, I hope that time is spent drafting up legislation that sets up some sort of oil spill crisis management that has direct authority to intervene immediately when something like this happens. This sort of task absolutely should not be in the hands of people who have such a blatant conflict of interest.
Although this old pseudolibertarian meme seems to always come up, that's not actually how markets work. BP is a corporation with a variable rate of profit, in a competitive market in which they have almost no pricing power (oil prices are set in a global market whose price is controlled much more by OPEC than by western oil corporations). The most likely outcome is that BP's shareholders will be the ones to ultimately pay, through lower profits.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
You fucking plug the well and stop. The last thing you do is act like social psychopaths in search of money at any cost and continue. They KNEW what the consequences were to the environment, the economies of the coastal states in the US, not to mention other countries.
But what the fuck does a BP executive care about a hard working family in Texas, Louisiana, or Mississippi that depends on the ocean for their livelihood? That's right nothing. Saying that is not hyperbole either. If the executives knew of the fragile state of the BOP and continued, they should be put in Prison. Plain and Simple.
Dear God Almighty man. The last thing you do is hope for the best and continue when the consequences of your actions can affect so many many other lives for decades to come. Your plain assertion that they really had no choice in their actions is appallingly offensive.
Of course they had a choice. They could have stopped.
So what do you do? Pretty much what they did - cotinue and hope for the best.
Umm, I have to say I work on all surface stacks, but if I was the company man in charge - and yes that is my current job for another major (... okay, fine, company person) - we'd shut the pipe rams, bleed the pressure above them, and fix the annular. Changing out an annular preventer on a surface stack is a relatively routine procedure. Close the pipe rams, bleed the pressure off, unbolt the top, remove the annular, cut a new one in half to go around the pipe, replace it, retighten the bolts, retest, and get on with it. I find it hard to believe that they don't have a way to replace the annular with an ROV. The blowout preventer is not a singular piece of equipment. The annular, the pipe rams, and the blinds can all be functioned and replaced separately. If your blinds are messed up, you have to get more complicated and start setting plugs, but anything above that you should be able to change fairly easily.
The Navy offered its ROVs, but the industry had better ones.
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.
ideopath @ play
There's a few docs online from one of the oil field "auditors" (the ones that value reserves and help measure risk, advise on investing and so are familiar with the science) and it looks to me from those reports that there's a good chance that everyone knows why the well blew out. The BOPs failing is a separate subject. A BOP are like airbags in a car. They help mitigate the damage, and the BOPs didn't. What it looks like is that the cement job failed, and the design of the pipe in the hole didn't allow for a casing hanger. Start with this document: http://www.tudorpickering.com/pdfs/tph.well.slides.pdf Look at Schematic #3. You'll see the 7" x 9 7/8" (tapered) casing is run to surface, through the 9 7/8" lnr (not run to surface) There is a space and the possibility that the blowout happened from poor cement across the oil/gas formation and then between the 7" and 9 7/8" liner. It would have a free run all the way up to the base of the BOP. This also implies the 7" x 9 7/8" casing is still viable and still has cement plugs in place. If all true, then it also means that this well would have blown out with heavy mud in the casing. For the heavy mud to get down in a large 9 7/8" space with the oil flowing is one thing, as it's being engineered for. For that same heavy mud to get into a much smaller space , the space between the 9 7/8" pipe and the 16" casing (again, look at the red line/arrows in the diagram) with the oil and gas "jetting out" is going to be much tougher. What may happen is the heavy mud goes in, and gets rejected out, and _then_ the call goes out to put in the junk, stopping up the flow partially, and then trying more heavy mud. They've got plenty of mud, so they say, so they'll try this to see what happens.
At this point, and I am talking out of my ass here, I think it's time public funds were applied to fix this, once and for all. Prosecute any and every executive related to this incident, jail them, seize ALL their assets to recover the public expenses, and call it a day.
They fucked up, they neglected to install proper failsafes, and completely failed to plan and execute a proper cleanup. When you screw up this badly, you don't deserve to ever play the business game again. Do not pass go, do not start a new oil scam, go directly to jail and then die.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
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 ;)
No, that's all just liberal propaganda to harm poor BP.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
If you fine (or tax) a corporation, it just means the customers and stockholders get shafted. The corporation just passes the cost on.
Shafted? That's nonsense. There's no easy way to say this, so I'm going to just lay it out for you. If you buy stock in murder, you are a murderer. Those who held IBM stock during the holocaust have to take their share of the blame, because IBM built the concentration camp management systems. Those who work for BP must take their share of the blame; every employee of BP shares in the profits, therefore all of them must share the blame. Why should BP's stockholders be any different?
If it is a bad enough hit, or if they can't pass it on, they go bankrupt.
Good.
That'll really help the situation ... NOT.
Your snarky sarcasm doesn't change the truth; permitting the same cast of characters to do the same nefarious shit again and again is the alternative. We must invoke the corporate death penalty on those corporations which deserve it. The people the corporations are made up of have a choice — they elected to go to work for a planet-raping corporations too irresponsible to even clean up its own messes, and they deserve no quarter from any right-thinking person. Every shareholder is just as guilty as every BP executive, no more, and no less.
And if you think stockholders mean a bunch of greedy billionaires, think again. There are countless little guys with 401K and IRA funds in that stock.
Greed is greed regardless of scale, and investing in a corporation known to do truly disgusting levels of damage to the ecosystem is just another expression of greed. There's plenty of nature-friendly investments they could make. Might they make less money? Sure. If that means they have to settle for a truck camper instead of a diesel pusher RV for their retirement, so be it. But if your argument is that people in rich countries should face no penalty for investing in the destruction of our ecosystem, you're making a morally bankrupt argument. When you invest, you're putting your money to work, and you have a responsibility to make that investment... responsibly.
But yes, the corruptocracy which is a collusion between government, bureaucracy, and megacorporations is sickening.
Corporations and governments are made up of people. Without those people they don't exist. Shareholders are critical to a public company and without them the corporation loses its ability to do evil. Ditto for employees. Therefore, the shareholders and employees of BP are evil. There's no two ways about it. If you work for big oil, you're fucking scum, even if you're one of the people who is there to contain spills, or prevent accidents. I don't care if you have to feed your family. If the price of your family's continuance is oil spills which have severe repercussions for the continuance of the entire human race, then it is both illogical and immoral to keep them going. You do not have an inherent right to life; we all die. Why should oil companies be permitted, however, to hasten that for all?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"