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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
He's somewhere in Amsterdam's red light district, sticking his finger in dykes.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
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
Why didn't they call Aquaman? This is probably the only time where his superpower would actually be useful.
Developers: We can use your help.
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.
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...
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
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.
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.
Holy run-on sentence Batman!
Periods are a renewable resource. Feel free to use them.
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.
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.
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
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