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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."
let's try Bottom Seduction.
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'.
I believe the proper tag for this is 'now what'
the good people at larouchepac have compiled nice laundry list of crimes they've committed floating around out there... this is compiled from state and federal testimony.
What would that mean for the environment?
Lets try the same thing again, except with BP senior execs
Okay, plugging the leak is important, but why aren't BP also doing something like this to contain the effect of the leaked oil: use 'empty supertankers to suck the spill off the surface, treat and discharge the contaminated water, and either salvage or destroy the slick.' Instead, they're just rolling out containment booms and sending people out to mop up beaches, never mind trying to initially insist that the crude was red tide, dishwashing-liquid runoff, or mud. Oh wait, the supertanker idea costs a lot of money. Sorry, sorry, my bad.
'If Christ had tweeted the sermon on the mount, it might have lasted until nightfall.' - John Perry Barlow
Doug Suttles later stated that BP is hard at work to come up with even cooler names for their next failed attempts to stop the oil leak. When questioned about their competence to do the job, he was quoted saying "we're stuck between overkill and final death."
'Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.' - Mao Tse-tung
Seems all to be a Déjà-vu : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHmhxpQEGPo
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.
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. ;)
And so proponents of nuclear energy are seriously considering trusting companies like BP with nuclear power?
Nuts..
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.
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
Hmm. The problem here is you are asking Brits to fix a leaking pipe. Queue lots of sucking of teeth, scratching of heads and HUGE estimates. There is probably a guy there right now, using the undersea robot to tap the pipe and go, "well your problem, mate, is its all your own fault see, no offence, I've got a bit of twig I broke off a tree in my van. I'll stick that in the hole and wiggle it around while I think of something more plausible but it will cost you..." Call in the Poles. They have great plumbers: quick, efficient, well qualified. They'll have it fixed in a jiffy and clean up the mess afterwards.
... because your BP shares are going to be worth a lot less ;-)
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, and I can only imagine regulation around oil drilling will become more strict rather than less after this has all been sorted out. Given that the USA does love to consume energy I would have thought that the silver lining might be increased investment in alternative energy sources; you've got a huge country with a lot of space for generating wind/solar/wave power. Now might be a time to explore more than pilot projects? Possibly an increased nuclear power plant program as well though I am not too sure about whether this is in political favour at the moment?
One thing amazes me about the present fiasco is that we don't hear of more accidents like this, how many offshore oilrigs are there round the world? I guess the oil industry is either pretty careful or pretty lucky when it comes to oil extraction (or good on PR cover-ups...)
"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.
Obligatory link: http://twitter.com/BPGlobalPR
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
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.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
well you can sell the Americans anything if you give it macho BS military stylee language. They get all excited if you use words like "kill". Throw in a cowboy metaphor and you're away. Expect the next solution to be something like "predator total destruction high plains stealth option" or something similar ;-)
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/
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.
I would add the following few lists to the above.
You can't handle the truth.
Maybe those russians should take a second look at it...
Yes maybe they could launch the operation from Cuba. Its quite close you know.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
/faceplam
The new BP is just a rebrand after the BP + AMOCO (ie. AMerican Oil COmpany) merger.
:. Ultimate Control Dedicated/VM Servers
The Russians have done it 5 times and it's worked 4 of those times. It was posted on slashdot a week or so ago, go read it. You're a moron for assuming it's a rumor without doing any checking.
That said, OP is a dumbass too. The conditions in former soviet waters are possibly quite different from these waters and the nuke isn't an infallible solution with no ill effects. It's a nuclear bomb, there's obviously some dangers.
However, what IS disturbing is that the nuke option is being dismissed out of hand. It has a track record of some real success, this indicates that's is not some crackpot theory that someone drempt up while high on meth. It's a valid option that deserves consideration.
Every option has risks. Nukes, top kill, and anything else BP or anyone else will present. These options need to be considered and judged. But here's the issue, this is an ENGINEERING problem. We need ENGINEERS to stop this oil leak. It's being handled by politicians, lobbyists, and the business and accounting majors at BP. Not a real surprise that nothing is getting done.
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
Not as deeply submerged, and just in strong rock.
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
You have a false Dilema situation:
are they pursuing the only thing sure to work, which is drilling at a tactically chosen spot of the same oil field to relieve or nullify the pressure at the leak?
Correct action, wrong intention. The goal is to fill the well, from the bottom up, with heavy mud, just like when it was drilled. The "only" way to do that, which always works, is to drill the relief well. 100% odds of success. It just takes "about a quarter" to do. If you want to get all technical about pressures, the goal is to get the pressure due to the drilling mud to equal the down hole formation pressure... then theres no flow. (Once nothing is moving, you replace the heavy mud with heavy concrete, with predictable permanent results)
Or are they really going through all options sequentially, with the least costly and fastest solutions first.
Correct action, wrong intention. Its all PR. The stuff they're trying is basically PR with a slight chance of working and minimal odds of making the situation worse. I'm surprised they don't have the FIRST robotics schoolkids working on it for PR purposes, etc. For PR reasons you can't show the relief wells digging deeper for three months on TV every night, even if thats the only thing that'll work for certain. Also depending on random luck, three months is about the minimum time required. Unlike everything done so far, it'll work for certain, but it might take... six months due to problems, who knows.
Some good life-advice is anyone whom tries to promise how fast they can dig a well, other than setting a finite lower time limit, is basically either being vague to the point of uselessness, talking about averages, or is a total B.S.er.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
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
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.
Perhaps we should start with some of our enormous conventional bombs before going nuclear?
If all that's needed is an intense explosion to collapse the surrounding seafloor I see no reason something like a MOAB with no radiological repercussions couldn't work. Hell, anything's better than a 4" tube trying to suck it all up as it comes out.
Why haven't we tried getting some of the enormous dredges used in the middle east at the moment to build private islands for the rich? We could have them suck up a boatload of silt from somewhere like the Mississippi delta and dump it in a concise pile on top of the spill. We could feasibly do this repeatedly until an island forms over the riser. If that's not enough to stop the oil, I don't know that anything would be.
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
"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.
Wait, I heard about this. It's called Reaganomics. But maybe the kids have a new name for it these days, what do I know?
LOL. The mere mention of Reagan is the equivalent of viagra for Conservatives.
Really. It was just a joke! Guys, OK? Guys? Guys! Hey. Hey! HEY! Whaddya doing with that missile? GUYS!!!!
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
...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.
According to Peak Oil, oil will possibly never run out - economically extractable oil runs out. You gotta be blind not seeing this happen right now. Why do you think we are drilling under such extreme conditions - deep water, arctic? The shallow, easily extractable wells are dry. There have been no giant fields explored for decades. Just a number for perspective: The Macondo field currently spilling into the Gulf contains an estimated 100 megabarrels - That satisfies world consumption for about 30 hours. All this effort drilling at the edge of technology, all these investments, all this infrastructure, for a day's worth of oil.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
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.
One article said that the oil flow stopped while they were pumping in the mud. Why not continue the pumping operation with seawater to keep the pressure in the BOP as high as possible?
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.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
A better way of stating it would be: "The Soviet Union, a secretive dictatorship whose track record for telling the truth was even lower than BPs, used the Nuclear option five times. Of these, one time is known to have resulted in an even bigger environmental catastrophe than the original, while the exact results of the other remains largely unknown."
If the Nuclear option was likely to work and unlikely to result in decades of radioactive oil pumping into the sea, I think the powers that be would be seriously considering it.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
... was supposed to be a 'junk shot' where they jamb the BOP with plastic and rubber to keep the mud from squirting out. So when is BP going to whip out its junk and shove it in the hole?
Have gnu, will travel.
Yeah, but no, but yeah but:
You have to realize that all those recent estimates are generally from folks whom financially benefit from enhanced estimates of reserve size. Its kind of a game on "theoildrum.com" to guess just how much they overestimate vs what is actually produced.
Typical example from wikipedia quoting some initial reports from 2008 "The condition and size of the Carioca/Sugar Loaf field has yet to be clarified[1], however there is speculation that it could contain between 25 and 40 billion barrels["
Two years later we get:
http://oglobo.globo.com/pais/mat/2010/05/12/anp-anuncia-megacampo-de-petroleo-no-pre-sal-da-bacia-de-santos-916568146.asp
Petrobras says its only 4.5 billion barrels.
Similarly, one can read news.google articles watching Tupi estimated drop over the years from above 8 billion to now only about 5 billion.
The oil biz is somewhat less transparent and open than most slashdotters are used to.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger