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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'
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. ;)
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 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...)
Well I presume that it would mean the sterlization of the Gulf of Mexico and the poisoning of the South of the USA.
"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/
>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
Don't shovel that crap you fucking industry shill.
Nothing but a very small number of anaerobic microbes can survive in an oil-saturated environment, as oil coats cell surfaces and prevents oxygen transfer. A dumping of that much oil into the world's ecosystem will have catastrophic results, and if it makes its way into the Gulf Stream, it'll be spread globally with results too great for me to describe without sounding like a crazed religious apocalyptic doomsayer.
If the entire well is emptied into the global current system, it will be enough to reduce fish populations to levels where seafood is taken off of humanity's menu. It's unlikely that whales will survive, as krill cannot survive even with trace amounts of oil in their water. And the effect on atmospheric oxygen with phytoplankton levels reduces is impossible to predict, but it'll be large.
This is a catastrophe, not some "shift in ecological balance". Take your misinformation and downplaying tactics elsewhere.
I hate printers.
I have another idea for an operation with a name 'Top Kill'.
Here are the details.
You can't handle the truth.
>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.
--
BMO
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.
"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."
Oh shit, well as long as everyone else is doing it then I guess it's OK.
"2. We do tons of things with no provable solution to a catastrophic failer. Do you want the short list or the long?"
Take your long list. Now restrict it to things in which "catastrophic failure" also includes "catastrophic consequences". For example, the space shuttle disasters, catastrophic disaster resulted in the deaths of less than 10 people per shuttle. All of whom were volunteers with full knowledge of the risks. The risks they took were their own and the consequences were felt only by themselves. No one else died because they wanted to go into space. Catastrophic failure resulted in acceptable consequences.
With this oil situation we're talking about catastrophic failure causing absurdly huge consequences. Make sure you don't confuse "catastrophic failure" with "less than perfect success record".
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
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
"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.
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.
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
What a pointless truism that is. The worst atrocities in human history, combined, are "nothing on the geological time scale."
Mind the Gap
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?