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Gulf Oil Leak Plugged?
RobHart writes "The LA Times is reporting that the Gulf oil leak appears to have been plugged by the 'top kill.' 'Thad Allen, who is coordinating the government response, says the well still has low pressure, but cement will be used to cap the well permanently as soon as the pressure hits zero.'"
This is just step one of the top kill. It's just plugged with mud, which is still streaming out of the hole. Don't start celebrating until they actually top it with concrete.
I've got to wonder, if this does work is BP going to go ahead with their "relief well".
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
First of all, that's now that the grandparent is saying at all. The GP is talking about what the CEO is saying, not the decisions made that caused this disaster. (And he's joking, at that. That much should have been obvious.)
So really, you're off on a tangent to grind your own ax, here.
There's a big difference between blaming someone and actually holding them to accounts. If the BP CEO is willing to pay for the cleanup and potentially go to prison for any malfeasance, then sure, he deserves the massive salary. However, past experience shows that this never actually happens and that the CEOs get a huge salary and take none of the real consequences. It's more likely the little guys with the low salaries who get canned, fined, or jailed.
Either way, I doubt that the GP can do anything against the CEO of BP, so again, you're sort of off on a tangent of your own making here.
They had to fabricate all kinds of gear that had never been made before. This was a herculean effort by 100's of the most skilled deepwater engineers in the world, and they actually did it in record time. This was not a small task, it would normally take months to pull something like this off.
I'm looking forward to seeing BP get raked over the coals. Bastards. The way they attempted to cover up how bad the spill is is really disgusting. See http://www.newsweek.com/2010/05/26/the-missing-oil-spill-photos.html
Do you think he's an undersea oil well engineer with the resources of the company the size of BP?
Resources take time to deploy. Research has to be done before repairs can be attempted. The criticism still isn't fair.
It's my understanding that they had plans for Top Kill from almost the beginning of this crisis but were doing investigation/research to ensure that it wouldn't make the problem worse. Or would you prefer that they move ahead blindly and ignore the possibility of doing more harm than good?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
They (BB) say they can't confirm that. They will give an updated status later today. This is from Danish TV, so no link, sorry.
latest "live" thread with great insights in the comments: http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6515
Relevant links to top kill procedure (scroll to comments in each, they're very good.)
Deepwater Oil Spill - Permissions and Concerns about Top Kill http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6513
Deep Water Spill - Waiting for Top Kill (more updated tech) http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6509
The Gulf Deepwater Oil Spill - the Top Kill Attempt (the technical aspect of what just happened) http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6505
The Gulf Deepwater Oil Spill, barriers, flow rates, and top kill http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6501
Hope you find this informative...
Absolutely wrong.
Officers and Directors indemnification insurance is for shareholder derivative suits and has nothing to do with tort liability.
Officers and directors would to covered by the corporation's general liability policy, the same as every other employee.
Though the name's confusing, a "relief well" isn't a separate well into the original reservoir that can be put into production. It's a well that's drilled at at an angle, calculated to intercept the bore of the original well somewhere in the rock above the reservoir. If it intercepts it, pressure gets diverted up through the new well, which is presumably under control, and then a bunch of heavy mud is pumped in to plug it up.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Well, I'm not going to do the work finding the links for you, but Michael Brown, Rush Limbaugh and Fox News Hosts and guests all claimed at one point that this was allowed to happen by the administration to sabotage the Energy Bill going through congress.
Whether or not there is some sort of god, I'm not supposed to say/god is a word and the argument ends there-Smog
If you want to follow live feed from down below here is the link i have been watching over the past few days. http://www.bp.com/liveassets/bp_internet/globalbp/globalbp_uk_english/homepage/STAGING/local_assets/bp_homepage/html/rov_stream.html
The Gulf is very different from Prince William Sound. There was another large blowing in the Gulf in 1989 - the IXTOC I released 3 million barrels of oil over 8 months. About 10 times more than the BP spill.
Environmental assessments showed it took about 3 years for sea life to fully recover. My guess is it will be faster this time because of the much smaller quantities of oil and the heavy use of dispersants to break up the oil which makes biodegradation much faster.
The far-right kooks have been pushing an Obama conspiracy theory for a while now. For example, Limbaugh: "what better way to head off more oil drilling, nuclear plants than by blowing up a rig?"
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
From a recent CSM article here: http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2010/0513/Exxon-Valdez-cleanup-holds-lessons-for-Gulf-oil-spill
Two decades after the Exxon Valdez supertanker ran aground and ripped open its cargo tanks, the spill still marks Alaska's environment. Pockets of fresh crude are buried in beaches scattered around Prince William Sound and segments outside it, in isolated spots along more than 1,200 miles of coastline that received oil in 1989.
The discovery confounded earlier predictions that remnant crude would quickly weather and disperse as waves washed it into the sea.
"At this rate, the remaining oil will take decades and possibly centuries to disappear entirely," concluded the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Trustee Council, the federal-state panel that administers the $900 million civil settlement struck in 1991 between the governments and Exxon for natural resource damages.
Now, the Exxon Valdez dumped 11 million gallons of oil. There are 42 gallons per barrel, and the conservative estimate for this leak was 5000 barrels a day. That makes 210 thousand gallons a DAY, for what, 37 days now? For a total of 7.7 million gallons, and still leaking. Oh, and most experts NOT working for BP seem to think the flow was up to double that 5k. This is on par with Exxon Valdez.
The difference? Open beaches in Prince William Sound, where the oil could be cleaned up. The oil from this spill is settling in the marshlands, which may well be impossible to clean, and most definitely will NOT just wash clean at the first sign of a hurricane. You do also understand that being blown away by a hurricane is not the same as "disposed of", right? It will go somewhere.
Lets not also forget we have to add in the effects of the dispersant used, which is extremely toxic.
He's not talking about the well pressure but simply the water pressure at that depth. That's not going to be removed
I was told by one of my old girlfriends who works for Schlumberger (she has her own sources) that this isn't a permanent fix. They are doing a top fill because it is faster than waiting for the relief well to do a bottom fill. This top fill is likely a temporary measure, and they are still going to have to drill a relief well to intercept the main well which is going to take time.
We can only pray that once they cap this, it sticks till they can get the relief well fully drilled.
That is essentailly what they tried the first few times. Apparently there are problems due to the pressure/temperature at this depth.
Before you accuse other people of ignorance it might help to do a little research. By many estimates this spill is much larger than the Exxon Valdez spill. See for example http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20100527/us_nm/us_oil_rig_flowrate.
Relief wells can't be used to get oil. The relief wells are used to "bottom kill" the well, which is still necessary - "top kill" is just a band-aid. The last step in said "bottom kill" is to pump concrete into the relief well, and it's really, really hard to pump oil out through concrete.
That being said, we can be pretty sure that a new production well will be drilled somewhere nearby.
The relief well does not divert the pressure. They can use it to inject mud (which has a density much higher than oil or seawater) into the original bore. As the mud fills the well, the higher density will increase the pressure until it matches the outward pressure of the reservoir.
So 8,000 vertical feet of seawater/oil is not enough to stop the leak, but 8,000 vertical feet of drilling mud that has a much higher density can do the job.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
You are describing the containment dome, which was tried and failed.
It failed because of the high pressure and low temperature. Methane from the well was forming Methane Clathrates, which would plug up the hole.
The "Top hat" fix was going to use a dome into which they pumped hot methanol to keep the pipe clear, but it seemed less likely to work than the current approach.
This relief well is designed to hit the reservoir and then bullhead it with kill-weight mud. Pressure is not diverted - this is solely a means to destroy the payzone's ability to produce oil. BTW, most wells are "drilled at an angle." It's called directional drilling and has been around for years.
I'm just glad nobody has mentioned nukes yet...
As others have said in this thread, a relief well will not allow continuing operations. It is meant to provide a means for a "Bottom Kill", filling the well with mud and concrete from below, which is much more effective and permanent than the "Top Kill" that they're doing now.
My little calculation using the units calculator at the Linux command line shows that 20 minutes is roughly, within a factor of ten, the endurance of a column of mud when its pumping is halted.
The pumping is now reported to have halted around midnight. It is a stretch for me to imagine that the mudding job is not now mostly undone.
My viewing of the leak video 4 hours later did not encourage me to think that the leak was capped. I thought that I saw light colored natural gas, ruddy brown petroleum, and black petroleum exiting the leaks. Now the only change is that the black substance is not apparent, and the ruddiness is intermittent.
Somebody might want to try to correct this impression, please.
Michael J. Burns