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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.'"
I'm glad to see that this solution seems to be working well. The aftermath, however, is going to be a freakin' political circus. I'm simultaneously excited and dreading it.
Living With a Nerd
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!
to control the flow of nonsense over the failed well, contractors will first pump T5000 cement into his mouth under pressure, then fit ankle weights, and send him to inspect the work personally in the Gulf.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Pretty soon we can move on to fining BP off the face of that planet.
Raters gon' rate.
An interesting comparison between the 1979 Ixtoc oil disaster and the BP disaster. Note that indeed Transocean and Sedco merged in 1999.
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=127_1274931222
Why didn't they just call the Little Dutch Boy?
"No matter where you go, there you are." -- Buckaroo Banzai
I've got to wonder, if this does work is BP going to go ahead with their "relief well".
You can bet on it, got to keep up the cash flow.
I thought the 5000 barrel estimate came from BP, but the article lays it at the feet of the Coast Guard... is this just mistaken reporting, or did it really come from the Coast Guard? If I put on my paranoid hat for a minute, this is BP engaging in post-operation PR cleanup...
http://www.tenjou.net/
Good thing we waited over a month to do this.
if you had a policy which ignored industry and federal and state and local standards on driver hours per week or hours per day, and it was reasonable to conclude that your policy played a role in the driver falling asleep, then yes.
If, on the other hand, you had a policy which reinforced (or even outdid) the safety procedures, and despite quality employee and contractor screening, despite training, despite good policy, something bad still happened (individual negligence or simply bad luck), then no.
In short, management's role is reducing the likelihood of major disasters. Did they do their job? I don't know the answer, but I suspect that the next few years will include a number of investigations to figure that out.
Support a few technologists in Washington.
Whew...I was getting worried about this one. But, it looks like we can chalk up another victory for Obama and his environmental record. This incident should put a stop to offshore drilling, which is good. The price of gasoline should go up to eight dollars a gallon, that should keep people from wasting it.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
The person at the top of this mess in the US gov (the director of mineral resources) got invited to resign (and did). Im sure that a few of the others are going to follow her example.
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
Sometimes we need to toughen up those pansy-ass dolphins, birds, and turtles. If we hadn't cuddled them for so long they wouldn't be going extinct. Adversity breeds strength.
And the same goes for you, Pandas. You're next! Oh, you'll be mating up a storm when we finish.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Right, because the relief well doesn't have anything to do with, you know, being a relief well.
Now maybe we can bring in Kevin Costner to clean up the water. To be fair to Costner, I don't see why at least some significant portion of the oil could not be centrifuged out of the water if one had a big enough cream separator and access to the 30,000HP engine that they used for the top kill pumping.
Nullius in verba
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...
Now it's plugged with mud. With the flow much reduced, concrete can be put in.
One hurricane season and the mess will be gone. 8 to 14 hurricanes are expected in the Atlantic region by the end of the year.
Relief wells will be drilled; after all, there's definitely oil down there. The reservoir will be pumped out.
Everybody will be a lot more serious about blowout preventers.
More equipment for dealing with such problems will be on standby in some Gulf port for decades to come.
No big deal.
You're right! They should have just edited a config file or two. It's easy! They just sat there for a month! It would have been, like, reported in the news if they had tried anything else. I saw *nothing* on Boing Boing or Daily WTF about it.
Honestly, this site sometimes...
Perhaps I just don't understand all the complicated factors involved with this type of situation, but I was wondering why BP couldn't have just slid a larger tube over the rupture and essentially funnel much of the oil some place contained. If you can divert the oil to another tube you could then pump it to a taker-barge and then deal with it there *before* it gets into the Gulf.
Yeah, I've got nothing...
With 9/11 being a conspiracy (Bush knew about/planned it), and Katrina's handling being a conspiracy theory (Bush blew up the levies)... Where are all the conspiracy theorists on this one? Did Obama cause the leak so that he can push against the oil companies and car companies even more?
I'm not supporting such a theory, just curious why such theories haven't been pushed by those same people pushing the former theories.
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
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
now if only we could plug the flow of money to the bastards.
A Relief Well isn't for production. So yes, it's not really something you can question...
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
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The point of the relief well is to relieve pressure on the main well and then seal it safely.
Do you realize what kind of political fallout BP would receive if they were actually wasting time trying to salvage the well?
http://twitpic.com/1rkm7d
in for a penny, in for a pound... I really don't things would be all that much worse tbh
the preceding post was not spell checked... suck it.
Do you realize what kind of political fallout BP would receive if they were actually wasting time trying to salvage the well?
"absolutely none at all?"
Obviously you haven't been paying attention to the masses not paying attention to the media not paying attention to this issues that I consider to be mission-cricital.
My prognostication is that this will be safely forgotten by 95% of the population three weeks after it is "resolved" and the media moves on to the next shiny thing. (Well, except for shrimp lovers and when the next hurricane comes up the gulf...)
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Could you explain to me if they could quickly and easily shut down the well what is the point of having the leak continue until another well is ready? That's a lot of oil being wasted in the ocean (evaporation, treated, burned, ect.) and a lot of expense in both PR and 'faking' other solutions.
Your telling me somehow that month long PR nightmare turning into congressional committees to investigate and fine the company so that they can-- what did you propose? -- Extract the oil from sea water for profit?? You're telling me that is more economically beneficial to them then shutting the well down quickly and easily as you believe they can, thus having no public outcry and a 4 day story on the loss of life, and then drill a new well a month later and then get all that oil INTACT?
You honestly believe BP's CEO is sitting at the end of a table making an evil finger pyramid saying: "MUuHaahahaha, my ridiculously circuitous plan is now nearly one quarter complete. Now we just have to extract all this oil from the ocean's surface which my evil engineers who assisted in putting the bottomless pit in the Emperor's throne room insist is much easier than extracting it from a well using a pipe."
So what's he supposed to have done? All the experts on plugging wells are working in or for the oil industry, the US Government doesn't have anybody better than what BP already has access to. Start ordering BP to do things? BP will simply haul out 8 years of rulings from agencies during the Bush administration saying they don't have the authority to order companies around, and the whole thing'll end up tied up in court for years. Penalize BP for failing to meet regulatory requirements? The Bush administration gutted those regulatory requirements to the point that BP simply hasn't broken any rules here.
I'm sorry, but a year and a half isn't nearly enough to undo 8 years of "Government should get out of business's way and let it do what it does best. We can't regulate it to death, and government shouldn't be telling it what to do.". Although if I were Obama, you can bet that once the well's confirmed capped there would be a request to Congress to add specific regulations covering what went wrong here, plus a request for a 100% increase in the budgets of various regulatory agencies (eg. MSHA, OSHA, MMS) with the additional money earmarked specifically for inspections and enforcement.
BP posted a link with a "Live" video feed of the belching oil. The running time-stamp on the image was accurate until today, when it seems to be about 2 minutes 24 seconds behind. Anybody else seeing this time delay? Is BP introducing a time delay to bleep out bad words? Since last week, the image typically showed the actual oil exiting a pipe, but ever since the top kill effort began, the image tends to show pretty green pipes and hoses...anything but oil. Has BP shows the previous view since the news reports of partial success? Live video link: http://www.bp.com/liveassets/bp_internet/globalbp/globalbp_uk_english/homepage/STAGING/local_assets/bp_homepage/html/rov_stream.html
Actually, I haven't heard a lot of people complaining about CEO pay-rates. What I *have* heard them complaining about is how CEO's and upper-managers gave themselves big bonuses while their companies/etc were going down the toilet.
Part of the issues is that a CEO people should be one of great responsibility, but often it's the CEO's that float away on a "golden parachute" when things go wrong, escaping from legal issues that they were perfectly aware of (or should have been if doing their jobs), or they collect huge "performance bonuses" when there's actually very little performance and the company is going bankrupt...
If a truck driver falls asleep at the wheel, that's one thing. If the truck crashed because the company decides rather consistently to not service its fleet vehicles, or to actively ignore/subvert necessary safety measures on a regular basis, then yeah perhaps it *should* be on him. We need to send a message to the corporate world in general that this sort of crap is no longer acceptable. Perhaps it means establishing that CEO's should definitely *not* be ignoring safety for profit (and can be held accountable for doing so), but at the same time have power to enforce such without getting canned, etc.
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.
Well here in the UK petrol/gasoline is 1.20 GBP / litre, there are 3.79 litres to 1 US gallon = 4.55 GBP / gallon, x 1.45 (pounds to dollars) and we're at $6.60 /US gallon in my local gas station, so I don't see $8 / gallon so far off, that's only about another 18% rise.
Wow do you have no idea what you're talking about.
1) Relief wells can't be used to tap the oil. The last step in plugging the gusher with a relief well is to pump concrete into the relief well. It's surprisingly difficult to pump oil through concrete. And assuming top-kill actually worked, they still need to do a "bottom-kill", or risk the well blowing out again.
2) Relief wells aren't anywhere near ready yet. They're only about 1/2 way done.
Feel free to keep railing against multinational corps, but please don't make stuff up. It greatly weakens your argument.
the profits from the relief well will pay for the cleanup, and then some.
they'll do only as much cleanup as we force them to do, though, so unless the terms are "every fucking molecule scrubbed from the ocean and the beaches" they'll stop spending as soon as they can.
The US needs to basically say "If you have the needed stuff and can give us a plan you get to keep any oil you recover" and then cut the spill area into grid squares and say okay you say you can clean XK gallons so you can use these grid squares and you have these squares ect.
BP of course can buy the oil from the various folks at whatever price or maybe have their own folks scooping up oil.
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
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.
CEOs "earning" their paycheck. Some of them do, but I'm willing to bet that a lot don't earn their paycheck, or have severely distorted definitions for the word "earn".
:(){
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.
Actually, isn't BP a Belgian company, despite the name?
I honestly wondered what they were doing with a big ass wrench down there. Now I know.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
...although it may be some time before we really know if it worked. The reason they waited this long to try this particular method is that there is a chance of things going disastrously wrong. I hope that pressure drops fast.
They don't really use aggregate in deep see drilling.
So the summary is correct when it says cement. I am assuming that it what you are talking about, because I didn't really see any comments talking about concrete. Ref:
http://www.glossary.oilfield.slb.com/Display.cfm?Term=cement
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
http://globalwarming.house.gov/spillcam this should make it obvious that the cap isn't working.
http://www.slate.com/id/2254979/
Seems they were responsible for cementing the base of the well and their people were unfortunately part of the accident day.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_bed_reactor
recent tech from germany, many generations technologically removed form the 1960s era tech all of our china syndrome fears are based on
air cooled, passive safety system. there is no failure that can cause an accident, because anything and everything can fail and nothing bad will happen: you can just walk away from a pebble bed reactor, they are foolproof
the only issue is terrorism (not as in bombing the plant, but as in stealing fissile material and placing it in times square), so you need a really good inventory security apparatus
nuclear+electric cars is obviously the solution to our environmental, energy, and geopolitical problems
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I'm just glad nobody has mentioned nukes yet...
Is there a word for a miniature Streisand effect? Is it like a Knights Who Say Ni effect?
Yeah, well...I bet it'd, like...fall on some birds and make a lot of noise!
(for the record I also support nuclear, but I'll save my jokes for now).
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
If this had been a shallow well rig the leak would have been stopped weeks ago, but they were forced to drill further off the coast because of environmentalists
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
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Is that an absolute overall liability, or perhaps they can be hit with the "maximum" for several issues. First, $75m for the leak. $75m per safety issue/protocol ignored. $75m for every beach damaged. $75m for underwater ecoculture. $75m for each person whose livelyhood is gone for the next fifty+ years, etc
Or, just let them pay the max for the leak, and an uncapped amount for the negligence and/or blatant disregard for safety.
...from operation Junk Shot? 'cause that's no operation I want to see.
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
I accept that neither the GP nor I know much about petroleum engineering. And also that if it is actually a standard relief well, that your statements are correct.
Unfortunately, BP has earned a reputation for lying and carelessness about side effects. So I don't believe that just because they say it's one thing, that's actually what it is. It's actually even worse that trusting a promise from Microsoft. (Though only because MS software isn't quite as damaging.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
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
According to MSNBC at a bit after 7:00pm CDT the mud pumping was resumed. The plume in the video now is tricolored, and new cracks in the pipe seem to be present.
Can I deduce that this halt in pumping was authorized by the government? Is there a continuation of a stop gap cover up by the corporation?
Michael J. Burns
You think the only reason oil companies dont drill in shallower waters is NIMBY's worried about their view? You think the very same regulators that caused this mess by rubber stamping everything would give two shits about some assholes view?
Dude. If BP could be drilling in shallow waters, they'd be drilling in shallow waters NIMBY's be damned.
The elephant in the room here is they didn't. Why? Simple--we've tapped out all the oil in cheap & easy to reach locations.
A Relief Well isn't for production. So yes, it's not really something you can question...
But that's the point. They can claim it's purely as a precautionary measure, even though it can potentially provide them with profit and a way to avoid the moratorium on new offshore drills.
Just because they call it a relief well, doesn't mean they won't use it for production or that it's only going to be used to releive that pressure. Besides, what did you think they would do with the oil that comes from the relief well, other than sell it?
Mods are on crack again. Why, how dare you hold a contradictory opinion. Clearly you are trolling!
I hope you have karma to burn like I do, that way these petty irritable little egos accomplish nothing except wasting their points.
For what it's worth, I doubt they'd get much oil (if any) from a relief well. Oil is not what it buys them. It's a face-saving investment that helps to secure their future offshort drilling ventures. Simply put, the more capable they are of containing this disaster the less likely it'll be that they are denied such opportunities to drill in the future. At this point, decent damage control is all they can hope for but that's much better than nothing if they want to continue harvesting such sources of oil.
I guess the above paragraph is more trolling on my part. Mod away.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
It seems to me that success would be indicated by an increasingly accelerating decrease in the flow. Isn't this so?
Maybe they are already injecting junk.
Michael J. Burns
A link found from The Oil Drum: "Top Kill" Has Failed
"wahts woring iwth my tyoping?"
This is just a what if question. I no expertise in Earth science so I hope someone can answer it. What if an equal amount of natural gas leaked from the well instead of oil? How would that affect the waters of the Gulf?
Drilling fluid and the ocean push against the natural gas and oil. Too heavy and it runs into the well and then the flow reverses in yet another blow out. Too little and the mud is pushed out and we have a blow out.
The process can involve material to clog the formations down hole allowing positive pressure to be maintained.
It appears that sufficient positive pressure can be imposed from the top of the well head to move material like cement down hole and plug the well.
In an ideal world a cement plug is not the first choice. A better situation is one where control of the well is regained and the stack of valves (Christmas tree) repaired. If this stack of valves can be repaired then pressure can be relieved by directing oil and gas to a recovery pipeline. A cement plug can fail as can surrounding rock and the multiple casing making things worse.
The reverse unbalance situation has not been discussed on the media. But if one was able to fill the hole with a "heavy" barite laden fluid it is possible that formations above or below the current oil and gas sources fail and drain down and in all the heavy mud/ fluid. Once this down flow drains and de-pressurizes formations the well fails again perhaps worse than it is now.
Also one of the nasty problems here is a tangle of regulations that prohibit centrifuging and in place incineration of oil recovered from the sea. A smallish flotilla of recovery vessels (skimmers) cannot be deployed because recovery of oil and waste must be tankered away and disposed of "properly".
One obvious place for incineration in place is the top-hat box that was first tried. No one reported on the reality of managing all the oil and gas that that device might have directed to the surface. A flood of warm surface water might have dispersed the methane-hydrates and opened up the pipe (BTW, pipe was too small) to the surface.
The soda straw while it siphoned off and continues to siphon off some oil qualifies as a pressure/ flow sensor. That exercise would have been a critical "sensor" for ongoing efforts.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
There are a handful of reasons to stop pumping none of which mean that the top kill process was stopped.
If the weight of the mud was wrong it needs to be adjusted. And there is a mile of mud above the well head. At approx 18 pounds per square inch per foot of head we are working with massive pressures. One atmosphere of pressure about 15psi is about 30 feet of water so they are pushing thirty times the pressure of the water column at the well head.
A month ago I was watching CCN because they had a bias I liked. Today the screen if full of IDIOTS that are fomenting dissatisfaction. Back to Fox and the New York times.
The sound byte(sic) of the governor saying he might have ten miles of sand berms built had he been given a go ahead. OK that may be so but ten miles out of how many total and possible.
They should be blowing shredded straw and news print then lighting the "wick" on fire. BUT the EPA rules not let those smoky fires get started.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
just about when gasoline hits $10/gallon
which is inevitable as the economies improve, and with brazil, india, china, etc. beginning to consume gasoline like the west and with oil only getting deeper and deeper
it will be amazing how all of the nuanced negatives with reactors will fade away when the rules of economic reality come into play
2015, 2020: "why didn't we build these things awhile ago!"
pffft
mankind seems to be short on foresight
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Goldman Sachs Reveals it Shorted Gulf of Mexico NEW YORK (The Borowitz Report) - In what is looming as another public relations predicament for Goldman Sachs, the banking giant admitted today that it made "a substantial financial bet against the Gulf of Mexico" one day before the sinking of an oil rig in that body of water. The new revelations came to light after government investigators turned up new emails from Goldman employee Fabrice "Fabulous Fab" Tourre in which he bragged to a girlfriend that the firm was taking a "big short" position on the Gulf. "One oil rig goes down and we're going to be rolling in dough," Mr. Tourre wrote in one email. "Suck it, fishies and birdies!" The news about Goldman's bet against the Gulf comes on the heels of embarrassing revelations that the firm had taken a short position on Lindsay Lohan's acting career. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andy-borowitz/goldman-sachs-reveals-it_b_558774.html ALSO SEE: Criminal Negligence: Despite Knowing It Had a Damaged Blowout Preventer, BP STILL Cut Corners By Removing the Single Most Important Safety Measure - http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2010/05/despite-knowing-it-had-damaged-blowout.html AND Prominent Oil Industry Insider: "There's Another Leak, Much Bigger, 5 to 6 Miles Away" - http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2010/05/prominent-oil-industry-insider-theres.html