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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?
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
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!
I thought the 5000 barrel estimate came from BP, but the article lays it at the feet of the Coast Guard, BP's willing PR lackey,...
There. Fixed that for ya'.
The lack of leadership on the part of the federal government, and the Coast Guard in particular, is a national embarrassment.
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
There is an insane amount of engineering that had to go into this. Getting it wrong would have been an even bigger disaster.
For some excellent discussions on all of this, head over to http://theoildrum.com/
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.
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.
Regulators don't work - the companies just buy them off directly or indirectly.
The only thing that works is accountability.
Of course, they'll buy off the prosecuters too.
Maybe the best thing we can do in cases like this is publish the home address of the individuals responsible and let nature take it's course.
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.
Because they hate the environment. They had everything sitting around and it was trivially easy to to do but knocking out the environment was more fun.
every anarchist is a baffled dictator. Benito_Mussolini
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.
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 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?
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."
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
given that Obama is waiting till Friday to even have a first look at the spill and that there were NO coat card cutters or any government boat for that matter that Obama want an environmental impact study done on dredging barrier islands to protect the estuary's when we already know the oil is going to be FAR FAR worse then what re-building some barrier islands is going to do deploying oil barriers and that BP cant do anything unless the government says ok you can do it and that there wasn't even an assessment of the oil rigs in the last 1 year 4 months you kinda have to wonder just how much Obama is dragging his feet and letting this thing grow just to go you see this is why we need a carbon tax to drive energy prices up so we can push " green " energy that cant even produce 50% of our power for 1 day solar stops working after sundown wind is interment at best coal and oil keeps the damn lights on
Because the pipe didn't break off at the BOP; it fell over sideways.
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.
To be fair to you, perhaps you've never been out in open water and don't understand just how big something like the gulf is. You're not just looking at filtering 20 million gallons of oil, you're looking at filtering 20 million gallons of oil and billions of gallons of water.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
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.
That is essentailly what they tried the first few times. Apparently there are problems due to the pressure/temperature at this depth.
I'm glad you're on the other side.
Holy run-on sentence Batman!
Periods are a renewable resource. Feel free to use them.
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.
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.
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
From the looks of it, the mud is working. The outflow's brown, not black, looks like it's mostly drilling mud blowing out of the pipe and not crude oil. That'd indicate the mud's stabilizing the pressure and stopping the flow of oil up the well, which is step 1. Step 2 is to pump concrete in below where they're injecting the mud, into an area where the well fluid's under pressure but now not flowing and blowing any plug away before it can harden. Step 3 happens after the plug's big enough and hardened: backing off on the drilling mud and seeing if the plug holds under well pressure or not.
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