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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."
It's amazing that BP can drill for oil with no provable solution to a catastrophic failure. It's like operating on a patient and going 'Trust me, I'm a doctor'.
Why don't they start pumping into the well all the bullshit they've been spouting for the last month. That should plug that sucker up real quick.
And so proponents of nuclear energy are seriously considering trusting companies like BP with nuclear power?
Nuts..
Unfortunately, BP has been using dispersants on the failed well to prevent the oil from slicking on the surface. Because there is so much oil, the slicks on the surface are still happening, but this isn't all of the oil. I don't know of any defensible estimates for the % of oil that is getting to the surface versus hanging out in "clouds of oil". However, it seems that most people, even BP, will acknowledge that this is a nontrivial amount of oil. Though it would be nice to do something more about the oil. Perhaps it could even dissuade them from using the dispersants... (Haha, I kid. They wouldn't backpedal on the effectiveness of dispersants now.)
Two BP representatives scheduled to testify in Lousiana on Thursday, today, dropped out. Mr. Vidrine cited an undisclosed medical issue. Another top BP official, the well-site leader, who was scheduled to testify, Robert Kaluza, declined to do so, asserting his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. Transocean's assistant marine engineer on the Deepwater Horizon also called in sick.
Can you cover your ears with your hands and sing "la la la" loudly please?
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
I've come to the conclusion that this is mostly for show.
Best case estimates of success for any of the proposed solutions have been incredibly low.
Repeated failures are changing the problem conditions with each attempt.
BP has to appear to be trying absolutely everything (and I suppose they are), but I think there is an executive acceptance that nothing before the relief wells kick in (August!) is going to make a dent in the flow of escaping oil and gas.
The ROV operators and everyone with a real job to do are doing amazing, admirable work, but I just feel that this is all futile.
We are down to real basic mechanical approaches.
No technological solutions exist, none have been developed as there is no demand, as the oil companies have not invested in disaster management technology. Unproven response measures like the dispersants have been at best useless, and increasingly appear to have had an overall negative effect on the situation.
We seriously don't have any bright ideas about dealing with this, and it's already too late.
"There is nothing nice about Steve Jobs and nothing evil about Bill Gates." - Chuck Peddle
LaRouche and his ilk are nutters. Why are you even linking to that nonsense?
Well I presume that it would mean the sterlization of the Gulf of Mexico and the poisoning of the South of the USA.
Firstly this is not the same domain of competence and risk, to drill an oil well thousand of feet deep, and to maintain a nuclear plant. Secondly nobody is trusting BP with a nuclear plant, but trusting other company. Finally there are many nuclear plant world wide maintained in a satisfactory state, and only a few major incident, none in the last 20 years with the latest design. There isn't many bulk way to generate energy for a baseline and/or peak electricity generation, fission, coal, gas, oil. Note on how 3 of those release carbon in the atmosphere which was trapped for a long time. Without going into global warming debate, nuclear plant are today the only baseline/peak generation which avoid that. Other generation method do exists, but the possibility are either exhausted (hydroelectric) are not compatible with baseline generation (wind, solar for example).
So carbon or nuclear, by govt or by private, TAKE YOUR POISON. The only real alternative is to go back to a pre-modern society.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
>larouchepac
These are the same people over the past decades who have done nothing except spout nonsense.
They're the nuttier parts of the Tea Party. They're the ones comparing Obama to Hitler. They're the ones that said your grandma is going into an oven. They're the ones that came up with "death panels" bullshit.
They. Are. Nuts.
I've seen other people calling you out being modded down. Go ahead, mods, mod me down, but before you do, look here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyndon_LaRouche
I wouldn't trust a Larouchian to tell me the sun was going to rise in the east.
--
BMO
1. It's not just BP - the other oil companies are doing exactly the same thing. It's just that BP drew the short straw today.
2. We do tons of things with no provable solution to a catastrophic failer. Do you want the short list or the long?
I have another idea for an operation with a name 'Top Kill'.
Here are the details.
You can't handle the truth.
Here's an idea for how to really motivate BP - and any other company with the potential to cause such massive havoc...
For every day that the oil continues to gush, the top 10% of their employees, by total compensation, should be required to work for a day on the clean-up crews. Not simply going to meetings and coming up with plans - they are to get down and dirty scraping oil off rocks and washing birds. The kind of work that gets oil under your fingernails and in your hair, with the smell soaked so deeply into your skin that it takes weeks to get it out.
After all, these guys have so much money in the bank that firing them won't hurt, and fining the company will just translate into higher oil prices. If they had some real skin in the game, I think we would have seen them take the problem a whole lot more seriously from day one.
BP top execs are corporate psychopaths - that is, psychopaths that happened to be smart enough to manipulate their way into high-paying, high-repsonsibility (without the responsibility) positions. They don't care about you, your family, or just about anyone's lives'.One buck in their pockets is worth more than a human life, for that kind of people.
Furthermore, psychopathy is NOT curable - all those fancy activities at correctional institutions, like training guide dogs for the blind, do NOT work with psychopaths (they do work with other criminals, though, and I am all for them, don't get me wrong). Having these corporate psychopaths clean up beaches and marine life will be pointless from an educational POV. But the real, greatest argument why I am against this idea is: these animals (mostly birds) have already tried cleaning themselves, by the time they are taken into cure by the various NGOs. Doing so, these birds have ingested copious amounts of crude oil, and typically die a few days, a week tops, after being cleaned. I look at this cleaning as a last mercy shown by humankind before they die. I do not want a corporate pig psychopath administering that "mercy" - it is simply revolting, and would be done utterly perfunctorily.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Nuking the hole. You really sound as if you knew what you are talking about. Proven by the Russians? It's at most rumor, and there are known records on Soviet dexterity in things nuclear (Chernobyl is just one among several).
Go nuke your hole if you feel like that.
Fifth amendment not to testify? Well, isn't the next step to start a criminal investigation against all of these people, including all of the top management in all of the companies involved?
The fifth amendment exists to protect the innocent, not the guilty. It's probably the smartest thing someone could do if called to testify in front of Congress for something like this, particularly if they aren't guilty of any wrongdoing.
Oh, don't get me started!!!! Everybody starts screaming "renewable energy" when something like this happens, and then starts blathering about windmills and solar and junk like that. CLUE: NONE OF THAT WILL POWER YOUR CAR DOWN THE HIGHWAY!!!! For that, right now, you need OIL! That's the bottom line. Period. End of story! No solar farm, no wind farm, no geothermal plant is going to change that until we get a really sexy battery breakthrough.
Almost every day, we seem to have another researcher somewhere that claims to have done that breakthru. Ha! Last best one I saw was from a couple university researchers that announced a nanowire lithium battery in December, 2007. Keep reading, find out that their nanowire anode is good for 10X capacity ONLY if a similar breakthrough is found for the cathode, which it has not. Without that, it is a 3X capacity nanowire battery. Plus, further research has been "funded" by... the Saudis, on Saudi soil. You think we're ever going to see this battery again, considering what success might do to Saudi oil exports???? Not freakin' likely!
The Chevy Volt will be about the best we can come up with for probably a really long time in the future. Most people's daily travels, about 85% of them, are less than 40 miles round trip, so 85% of most people's daily travels could be 100% electrically powered, and shifted to... coal, or natural gas. Nope, we STILL aren't going to be building enough windchargers or solar farms to do much about that for a VERY long time. Scientific American's January 2008 issue (possibly 2009, I forget) outlined a plan to go 100% solar, but that has a little drawback of requiring a breakthru in solar cell efficiency AND it'd take 100 years to implement. Back to the drawing board...
Lacking a battery breakthrough and an absolute necessity to stop using fossil fuels, maybe a crash program with solar thermal, which works already, and a smart grid to dristribute power could be combined with a 100% electric car transportation system that could (somehow) get its electricity in real time like the buses that get their power from overhead wires. Still needs a battery 'cuz you can't string those everywhere on the planet, but might work. Hideously expensive. Plus, you'd have to shoot all envirowackos of the sort that trump up roadblocks like some in California that a power wire running through a forest is somehow unacceptable. Geeeezzzzz... I'd like to boil these guys in oil, every one.
All the motivation in the world is not going to make any of these engineering procedures work any better. You can throw as much money at it as you want, but if it doesn't work then it doesn't work.
It might also be possible to do it using a bomb or bombs with conventional explosives. The biggest current US conventional explosive bombs might be as effective as some smaller nukes. It's not implausible that they're as effective as the nukes Soviets used in the
'60s and '70s oil leak bombings.
That'd probably make the nuke-worried people a bit less worried. Although the thing to realize is that, really, the contamination from that nuclear explosion would still be orders of magnitude less than what the oil spill will cause if it's left untreated for much longer. So, if it calls for a nuke, then nuke it should be.
Funny how there's a bunch of SF movies where we use nukes to avert a catastrophe, although it's almost exclusively of the "asteroid will hit Earth" variety. Well, here we have a different scenario on our hands, and it's real, and it needs to be solved soon.
Sig erased via substitution of an identical one.
It does happen every few years or so. We just don't hear about it because they aren't usually as large as this one, nor in as deep water, which exacerbates the difficulty of any possible fixes including relief wells (but you can expect more and more deepwater wells in the future). Also, the public and the media have short attention spans, and the oil companies will cover these things up if they can and/or wait for the public outcry to die down. BP tried the same thing here, claiming that the well was only putting out 5000 barrels per day and it wasn't until oil started showing up on shorelines that anyone questioned them. Exxon never paid more than half the money they were supposed to after the Valdez, they just funded an endless stream of lawyers to move it around in court until people gave up trying to get it.
You'd think that would be the case, but the oil industry lobbyists are already probably in high gear waiting for the news media to switch to some other topic so they can go back to baiting the rabid conservative segment of the population with drill, baby, drill slogans and paying off their favorite politicians and funding their reelection campaigns. On the other hand, after the Exxon Valdez the U.S. did start requiring that oil tankers docked in their ports had double hulls. But I guess that a certain political party will resist any new regulations for drilling in the current political climate.
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the war room!
"The fact is if you look at the Teaparty has lots of intelligent educated members"
Where's the "-1 Hilariously Misinformed" when you need it?
The fact that your signature indicates a desire to repeal a pretty crucial constitutional amendment, and that you spout support for a troupe of batshit crazy republicans in disguise, leads me to believe I shouldn't listen to anything you have to say.
If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits
Of-course this is just of top of the head and maybe stupid
^^ This ^^
30 years ago, drilling a well at this depth was not possible. Drilling technology has advanced to the point where drilling at this depth is now possible. Technology has also advanced to the point where the "same shit they tried 30 years ago" is even an available option at 5000+ ft down.
As an engineer, I take offense when people come up with stuff off the top of their head and assume that teams of professionals haven't considered the same options and rationally analyzed the feasibility.
I can assure you, all the crazy ideas you can possibly consider, and more, are being discussed among the engineers at BP who actually have experience in this industry. Yes, this spill is horrible. No, I can't believe BP doesn't want to have this fixed ASAP. The engineers on the front line simply don't have time to address the media, therefore you are left with execs so far removed from the actual work that they look like incompetent boobs
"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".
Specifically it's an engineered fluid of precise, high density. It is dense enough to float most rock.
IIRC, it's injected down the space inside the drill pipe, then makes a u-turn after exiting at the drill face and flushes the drilled rock particles up between the drill pipe and the bore wall, thereby clearing the "drilled chips" out of the way.
For an excellent treatment of drilling technique, see "A Hole in the Bottom of the Sea: The Story of the Mohole Project" http://www.amazon.com/Hole-Bottom-Sea-Mohole-Project/dp/B000NPVA56/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1275221670&sr=1-3 by Willard Bascom. He was director of the project some 50 years ago.
One example: To get an idea of the scale of a drill pipe, imagine a circular stairwell in a tall building with a marble first floor. Hang out over the railing from a few stories up. Grasp the end of a piece of piano wire that reaches to the marble floor. Now spin the wire with your fingers. It must reach the floor. It must also bear against the floor just hard enough that the properly-shaped tip of the wire can drill into the marble. You must not let the tip bear too hard against the marble or the wire above the tip will bend sideways and collapse out of vertical, making it unable to continue drilling. Easy.
Also explains how the actual bore need not be vertical, but can be bent off to the side. This was part of the justification Iraq used for invading Kuwait before Gulf I. The Iraqis claimed that the Kuwaitis were drilling wells near their mutual border, but curving the bores sideways into pools which were actually vertically under Iraqi territory.
Lost in all the discussion is that, according to one account I heard, the bore starts on the seabed some 5K feet down, but the end of the drill was already an additional 13K feet below that level. Expensive crap to lose.
...forgiving the deaths of their addict-friends due to a bad batch of heroin, since they won't do anything to jeopardise their own supply. Ban offshore drilling. Oil will cost more, but the cost of not doing so is far dearer.
Seriously though this accident has thrown up a lot of interesting information - such as how the US imports vastly more oil than it produces on its own territories
According to the media, this well's oil would have been sold on the international market.
People who think "drill baby drill" will make their gasoline prices drop are living in a fantasy land.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Government does end up fucking things up. It seemed like a good idea to come up with new regulations after the Exxon Valdez spill, so what did both parties of Congress do? Cap liability for oil spills at $75 million. Really only the free-market is strong enough to regulate a business with piles of money before which politicians swoon. Losing a platform, dumping your product in the ocean, paying the full cost of cleanup, and having difficulty with future leases is plenty of incentive for oil companies to regulate themselves if government didn't continually skew the market in corporations' favor.
Oh, and the BP fucked up the boom installation thus allowing the oil to come to the shore lines, to the marshes, they also use the dispersants in 1979 and now.
Most importantly, and which puts a nail into the coffin of your argument, every step of the way BP and Transocean and Halliburton engineers were trumped by the management and told not to pay attention to any of the known problems: the broken BOP, the rubber coming up, the dead battery, the bad concrete seals, the pumping of the mud out, the disregard to their own standards in terms of testing, they did not do a SINGLE thing right to PREVENT this and they had Nothing ready to stop this.
So to all of the 'engineers' taking 'offense' - shut the fuck up. You lost all of this and that's why there is this disaster and nothing is working to stop it. The only thing that worked before and may work now is drilling the relief wells.
I say take the BP engineers and management out, put in engineers from other oil companies and from NASA and Military and do what is necessary. Whether it means dumping a whole bunch of containers with rocks on top or using a nuke or both or anything else. The people who are in charge there right now cannot be trusted.
You can't handle the truth.
Yes, it is an oversimplification. But the oceans are huge. 10 billion gallons spread over the 335 million square kilometers of ocean surface would have an average depth of 0.00012 millimeters (yes, that's right, 0.12 microns).
Of course, that is still an oversimplification, because it will not spread evenly over the entire surface of the ocean (but much of it will degrade, boil off or mix into deeper water). But it does at least start to put the numbers into some sort of context.
And that's the nothing goes right for many years scenario, the more likely scenario is that they limit the spilled oil to several hundred million gallons. Which is still a huge freaking disaster, especially in the gulf, but anyone worrying about the future of sea life in general is being irrational.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
It sounds like you're suggesting that for every deep-water oil rig that's built, the oil companies should build a spare "just in case" and have it start the drilling operation to get a lead in case there's a problem on the production platform.
And what's wrong with that? It's not going to double the cost. There's lots of other costs. Also, biodiesel can be produced right now, profitably, as the USDOE projected at Sandia NREL in the 1980s. Or in other words, that fuel could have come from algae in the desert, but because of greed, it must be pumped from the bottom of the ocean instead. I reject the notion that offshore oil drilling is even necessary, and thus I have no problem with mandating that it be done sensibly.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Electricity is NOT oil powered.
ALL USA power corps get huge massive government welfare that has historically been many times larger than alternatives. It has not been a fair playing field, where alternatives must not only compete with the collection of free energy (created by nature over millions of years) but ALSO the government subsidies and they need much more R&D being literally 100+ years behind the conventional fuel R&D.
Part of the problem is that it is difficult to monetize the additional costs of poor fuel choices and too many shallow and selfish Americans (which in the last few generations is practically our defining trait) do not care and elect people who easily fool them by thinly veiled tax games (and wars, and 3rd world exploitation) to keep costs down.
GOVERNMENT reflects the populace. That is how it works. When you bash American government, you bash the American people who are totally responsible for it. I find that most miss this reality because its a product of masses of people and not doing what they personally want all the time -- eg; this is an example of the shallow minded lack of thought that goes on. The culture encourages this dysfunction which means it will spiral downward to some floor which will likely heavily be influenced by the effectiveness of the media to report to the people what is being done in their name.
The MOB BOSS who makes vague orders and doesn't want to know how they are implemented but harshly judges those who do not deliver is a lot like how a representative democracy works! Public corp CEOs function similarly-- increase share price but don't get caught and don't tell us!
CANADA requires a relief well be drilled AT THE SAME TIME. Their people still have a functioning government. I expected naive Americans to be upset when Obama didn't quietly clean up all their messes yesterday; he is not the naive one, the populace is. Furthermore, its like people thought he was a dictator superman (the super hero thing even became a cynical joke;) forgetting only the corrupt have "power" because they are going WITH the flow of the current system. A true reformer has little power and arguably can only go 1 step forward and 2 backward in our collective fubar.
Welcome to reality. I'll think there is hope when I'm not modded down for speaking unpleasant truths.
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