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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.
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.
They will and are already paying.
As they should....
Veni, Vidi, Velcro!
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!
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. "
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.
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.
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.
Even if the equipment to do all this is available on site ready to go you could not move that rapidly. For example with the "Top Kill" BP is having to carefully X-Ray the existing valve structure at a depth of 1 mile using robot subs to determine if the structure can withstand the pressure of pumping mud through the system. They have working on determining the risks of this process for at least two weeks. Just rushing ahead without careful consideration of the side effects could do a hell of a lot more harm than good.
The BP well is the deepest well to ever blow out. It is not surprising that there is difficulty getting it under control. In fact things are moving far more quickly than in the case of the IXTOC-1 blowout which was also in the Gulf but at a depth of only 165 ft. That took nearly 10 months to cap. Total oil released by IXTOC-1 was about 3,000,000 barrels.
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.