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BP Says "Top Kill" Operation Has Failed
MrShaggy sends a quote from a CBC story: "BP has scuttled the 'top kill' procedure of shooting heavy drilling mud into its blown-out oil well in the Gulf of Mexico after it failed to plug the leak. BP chief operating officer Doug Suttles told reporters on Saturday that over the last three days, the company has pumped more than 30,000 barrels of mud and other materials down the well but has not been able to stop the flow. 'These repeated pumping[s], we don't believe will likely achieve success, so at this point it's time to move to the next option,' Suttles said."
This is all deja vu. This has occures before. In 1979 a oil well in the gulf blew and it took 9 months to close the gap, using the same techniques they used so far.
So expect repost of failed attempts for the next 9 months.... in the true /. tradition. If it is important it will be posted again. ;)
We are drilling off our own too. And we're drilling off your coast because you gave us the contract to do so.
I suspect that they always knew their attempts to fix it would fall short, this is all make-busy to give the appearance that everything that could be done is being done. The correct solution appears to be forcing oil companies to drill relief wells for existing exploitation. The idea here is that the relief well is mostly completed so that if a disaster occurs, instead of taking months to connect to the main well, the work can be done within days.
BP's experience is showing us that the relief well is the only solution that will work.
It's why the Canadian government is taking the position that one must be drilled at the same time as a new well is being built. Unsurprisingly, oil companies are already lobbying hard to have these measures curtailed.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/ottawa-will-take-tough-stand-on-offshore-drilling/article1557095/
"At issue in talks between the oil industry and the National Energy Board on relief wells in the North is whether they must be drilled during the same season as the primary exploration well. The window for drilling in the North is only a few months because of ice conditions. However, allowing oil companies to wait a season to drill relief wells could leave a new well exposed to a potential rupture for a year or more. Mr. Pryce at CAPP said the policy for relief wells was devised in the 1970s, and alternative technology for dealing with ruptures has advanced considerably. "
Do not spread "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0" over the internet, thank you.
"Mud" is a technical term for all sorts of drilling fluids specifically designed to keep the pressure on an oil well.
In this case, they used a special type of "Mud", even, "Kill Mud".
But it still failed (and the failure has quite possibly damaged the Blowout Preventer atop the borehole further, potentially increasing the amount of oil gushing into the ocean.
BP is actually the result of a merger between AMOCO (AMerican Oil COmpany) and the old BP.
No, really. If Rachel Maddow is right this has happened before and continues to happen in the same way. All same players, all same tactics, all same outcomes.
Kinda WTF, but check this out:
http://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/c8sqn/rachel_maddow_finds_one_massive_wtf/
Hhhmmm, I don't know, but I think this would have been a really simple thing to prevent... no need for any new technology whatsoever
There was absolutely no need for this mess. BP played loose and fast with the lives of millions of people. Hell, they virtually murdered the drilling crew. They knew they were engaged in risky behavior, they cut dozens of corners, shaved the rules, lied about their problems, and did anything at all to cut their expense and increase their profit. At some point, when a company creates, literally manufactures a disaster of this proportion, and the only significant cause is a blatant and callous disregard for human life, and environmental safety, I think it's only fair to invite them to leave the country permanently. They've demonstrated they have absolutely no interest whatsoever in being responsible, decent, or even vaguely accountable. We're still the largest consumer of petroleum products in the world. They must serve us, and not the other way.
>What does LaRouche have to do with the TeaParty?
The LaRouchians are within your ranks. Get to know them.
If this is not obvious to you, YOU SHOULD BE MORE OBSERVANT.
>Its rallies have actually be characterized by being peaceful and resulting in less damage to property and shared services than Obama political rallies.
Not when you ransack classrooms when you don't like the New Deal collage on the wall.
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/joan_walsh/politics/2010/05/14/maine_tea_party_worse_than_you_thought
Posting with no karma bonus, because it's off topic.
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BMO
And the company which was sub-contracted to do this job is the same company which caused the 1979 Gulf Of Mexico oil spill (apparently) Link: http://www.wimp.com/oilspills/
Divide a cake by zero. Is it still a cake?
You have no idea what your electricity costs, do you?
I'd be willing to pay maybe $0.05/kwh more, 33-50% increase, but I'm not too interested in the 300-500% increase you seem to be willing to accept!
Probably around 10 billion barrels. Seriously. Undersea wells can produce unbelievable amounts of oil.
10 BBL would be the biggest entire-field discovery of the last half century, at least. I think no oil fields in the last quarter century have been found above single digit billions.
Actual production from a professionally managed well, in a legendarily great field, that undergoes multiple enhancement and recovery operations, would be a world record setter at 100 MBL or so.
Since this is a hybrid gas/oil well, and in a "eh" of a field, and nothing kills future production like overproduction today, I think a high guess for this well would be 5 MBL liquid oil.
Assuming constant production (huge mistake), 5 MBL producible, and a reasonable leak rate of about 10 KBL/day, the well would stop on it's own sometime next summer. If you believe the idiots whom claim its leaking 200 KBL/day (more than any historical well has ever produced under any circumstances, as far as I know), it would have emptied out a couple weeks ago.
However, wells actually produce in an exponential decay, more or less.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_depletion#Oil_well_production_decline
So, the well will never quite go to zero, but once it drops to less than the battleship Arizona leak rate, I think we can stop worrying.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Genda probable got those statements from 60 minutes. This is what they are reporting. There is mounting evidence that at least some of these facts are true. Bottom line - compare what was in the application to drill, with what they did, and they either outright lied or cut corners.
Which energy source can, with better economics, replace oil as a transportation fuel ? (better, since you say it's a conspiracy "holding us back", which only makes sense if there's a better alternative)
Using technology developed in the 1980s by the USDOE at Sandia NREL, we could replace our transportation fuel needs with biodiesel using a fraction of our available desert land, growing algae in open raceways, using seawater as the medium. Since so much of our oil-related energy need is indeed diesel-fuel based (in transportation, shipping, and even power generation) this is a feasible solution today. Yet, no oil company is building biodiesel plants, even though we literally have suitable technology twenty years old.
In the 1970s, it was known that solar panels would pay back the energy cost of their production in less than seven years, and in the 1980s GM built electric cars that were suitable for most households, being capable of serving the automotive needs of about 90% of the population. Yet no energy company built out large PV installations, and GM wound up crushing the cars. Yes, we could have been on a primarily-electric personal transportation infrastructure long before now. But power companies are in bed with oil companies, and power companies aren't required to buy power from producers at a reasonable rate, so there's no meaningful competition.
Anyway, I have provided two examples of replacements which are viable, if not complete. There's not going to be a single answer anyway. Heavy vehicles or long-range ones can stick with diesel, and run on biodiesel with zero modifications; it's a good idea to run a veg-oil crankcase lube if you run biodiesel, because the blow-by from bio is less compatible with petro oil than the blow-by from petrodiesel. Small and short-range vehicles can be full-EVs. In between we can have series hybrids with diesel engines or regenerating microturbine generators using 1960s Chrysler technology! All of these problems are long-solved (twenty years or more) and your ignorance amounts to deliberate obtuseness. If you were qualified to contribute to this conversation nobody would have had to tell you any of this.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I was about to post the same thing. After reading the LaRouche commentary on the spill, I clicked to see their video, "The Case for Impeachment". At 0:36 in the video: "In characteristic negro fashion, the president went absolutely berserk and demanded that all such senate insubordination be crushed immediately." This, to me, raises some red flags as to the credibility of their other arguments.
Did they think it wasn't racist because the guy they paid to read the script is Black?
Well, you're right, but "I can show you two power plants" is not a good argument. It's fairly easy to take a look at the DOE list of US electricity sources to see that we get (as of 2009) 48.2% of our energy from coal, 1.1% from petroleum liquids and "petroleum coke" (whatever that is). Another 21.4% comes from natural gas, which I guess could be considered oil, but usually is in a separate category.
It would definitely be accurate to say that most of our energy comes from fossil fuels or non-renewable resources, but we actually only get a small amount of our electricity from oil.