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DoE Posts Raw Data From Oil Spill, Coast Guard Asks For Tech Help
coondoggie writes "The US Department of Energy this week opened an online portal where the public can get all the technical details it can stomach about the BP oil disaster in the Gulf. The DoE site offers online access to schematics, pressure tests, diagnostic results and other data about the malfunctioning blowout preventer and other problems in the ongoing mess. This comes alongside news that the US Coast Guard has issued a call for better specialized technology to help it respond to the ever-widening spill. The Coast Guard is looking for all manner of technology, such as advanced wireless sensors to help it track the movement and amount of oil in the Gulf, or devices that could help to contain and control the underwater leak."
Reader freddled points out a story at the Guardian that illustrates how the location of an oil leak is frequently the primary factor in its perceived importance.
Has anyone seen the new "Visit Florida" ads?
They discuss the fact that potential tourists are worried about the Gulf spill, and then say something like ...
"Florida has 835 miles of coastline. Northeast Florida has 221 miles of crystal clean beaches..."
In other words, "Come to Florida! Only 3/4 of our coast is covered in oil!!!"
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
How does a reader point something out when there's 1 comment on this article and it's not that "Reader"?
-Malakai
A Dragon Lives in my Garage
The well goes through > 30,000 feet of rock, and is less than 2 ft wide.
Why hasn't anybody talked about forcing down some explosives to cause a cave-in and thus seal it off?
They gotta be shitting me? So if it's near my house or where I'm going on holiday I'll think it's more serious than if it's in some kind of bongo-bongo land that I couldn't even point to on a map - and a map of bongo-bongo land to boot!
Awesome.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Do you know what the amount of pressure was from the leak when BP's 3 failsafe's failed? 20k+ psi. The NOAA has that info; at least they did yesterday.
Crude is extracted at +/-1,500 psi, so they were drilling deep enough to hit magma pockets (I forget the proper nomenclature for those types of pockets).
Only Russia has successfully drilled that deep...but they weren't dumb enough to try that kind of depth under the pressure and weight of the freakin' ocean.
20,000+ psi will destroy anything man can make to "plug" the leak. Is our only option nuking it?
If so, even if they do angle drill and drop a nuke, what if it cracks the strata further?
IMHO this will help to shuttle in that BS carbon tax. The longer the leak remains, the more damage, the more "reason" for the aforementioned tax. ...But, of course, this is conspiracy stuff. :)
Because it isn't going through rock, it's going through mud. If you think it's hard to stop a gusher from a 2' diameter pipe, imagine how hard it would be to stop a 40,000 BBL/dy, methane propelled ooze from a 500 foot radius area with no containment.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
...is let the president know of our support for Clean Energy:
http://my.barackobama.com/CleanEnergy-auto
Rubber duckies with GPS tracking built-in. Wherever the oil is going, the ducks will go too.
Any chance to expose the pillaging of Africa is a good thing IMHO. Such a tragedy, does anyone care? Not many where I live. Now I know that not everyone can account for what happens on the other side of the world, but I mention the Niger Delta, the DRC, the current state of Somalia and their civil war, Sudan, Egypt's relationship with Israel, anything from Africa.. and watch the eyes glaze over. I usually just take it as a chance to tell someone, an opportunity. If we ever want to be a truly global community then we need to know what is going on in that community. Heads in the sand cause future conflict.
What's this government for, of, and by the people coming to? How dare they solicit our help... Tax us to death and hire the usual incompetent rubes to mismanage, misdirect and overpay the contractors like usual. Kennedy was just saying those things so he could distract us from the real problems of the time.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
He's always able to get things under control after an appropriate theatrical delay. Besides he drilled a well on an asteroid.
Seriously, this is of no use at all.
Things that would be useful:
mud log
wireline logs
rate of penetration data
leak off test results
formation tester pressures
gas oil ratio
BOP hydraulic system pressure readings
Let's call Chuck Norris, he'll roundhouse-kick the oil back into its hole.
the glad-to-know-you-guys-are-on-top-of-things dept.
Are they on top of this like oil on water?
Let q be a radix > 1. I am in ur base-q, killing 10 d00ds.
While they tried to block the flow of oil by shoving mud and other stuff down the tube, is there are a reason why they couldn't use some variant of expandable foam to seal the pipe?
By that I mean, shove a smaller diameter pipe down the main pipe, say to a depth of 500', then inject the expandable foam into the main pipe to seal it?
Yes, I am aware, as James Cameron remarked, one has to worry about the oil bursting out somewhere else, but is my above question even feasible?
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
I'm still wondering why can't they make a mile long plastic tube (tough nylon mesh fabric coated with oil proof material) that's wider than the BOP at the bottom end. Lower it down from a tanker to the BOP, use the robots to wrap it around the bottom of the BOP so it's encased and then the oil will be contained and it could be pumped out at the surface. Oil is less dense than water so it should rise up the tube to the tanker. You don't even have to care about a poor seal at the bottom where the end is wrapped around the casement pipe since there's no pressure difference involved (unlike the other attempts so far where they jam things right in the pipe. Also since the oil is moving out in the open in the tube there's no freezing problems.
yeah, i guess i can fire up the bluegene for this...but just this once!
and you so totally owe me a beer.
Good people go to bed earlier.
"You do remember that the flaming oil fields in Iraq were successfully put out by explosives, right?"
Talk about a non sequitur. Explosives were used in Iraq to terminate combustion. Is that what we're dealing with in the Gulf?
The drill depth was never attempted before by BP, and now from what I have heard from inside sources, the drill depth has produced pressures beyond the technical resources of _any_ of our science at the well head to contain it. All three safety measures failed at the well head.
These pressures were not expected and where a surprise and unfortunately the equipment cannot handle it.
So, it isn't that anyone is stupid, it simply cannot be stopped using any known engineering science.
Interestingly enough, our Russian friends currently hold the record for drill depth. But Russian obsession with drill depth mainly have to do with politics, in that they do not want any sources of Oil influenced by western banking or US dollars. So, against current thinking about how Oil forms (it is a fossil fuel) most Russians believe it is formed through natural processes in the Earth's crust through some unknown geological chemical process. The Russians are also familiar with the consequences of drilling those sorts of depths (10 miles down or further) and would _never_ attempt to do something like that in the Gulf. Why? Because the well head pressures at the surface require specialized and very large structures to contain the pressure that is almost impossible to build at that ocean depth as BP did in the Gulf. So, they only do that on land.
But I digress, but this theory of natural geological process to create Oil is called Abiotic Oil.
If you have not heard of it, it is because only recently have depths been achievable to test it, so there hasn't been any evidence to support it.
Incidentally, when BP was contracted to create the well, the Russians were surprisingly silent and returned no comments on the project.
But over the past 5 years the Russians began projects to test this theory and now have very secretive wells, 5 of them and just 5 wells that have single handedly turned Russia from the number 5 Oil producer to number one in the past 5 years. Internally producing more Oil than Saudi Arabia.
So, if you here people proposing tactical Nukes to shut the well down, they aren't joking. It may be the only way to do it by fusing the crust....if it works.
My guess is, this Oil Well, due to the facts above, isn't going to be shut down any time soon and this could be going on for a while, perhaps even YEARS.
-Hackus
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
This is not "-1, Offtopic". It is "+5, sadly true". Please remoderate.
Does this "Raw-Data-From-Oil-Spill" come in a tar file?
No brain, no pain.
more info
Comment removed based on user account deletion
As a former member of the US Coast Guard, I can say they definitely need help with technology. When I was in (6 months ago), we were still using reel to reel tape drives, and teletypewriters (Yes teletypes, like they had in the 1950's) as THE major means of input / output into their fire control computer (A Unisys UYK-7 with a CPU made up of discreet components) I am sure many of you here could design a MUCH better system. However, institutional inertia being what it is they do not / can not. I can tell you many other hilarious stories about unauthorized overflights of Columbia and Counter Narcotic operations that were more Counter common sense then counter narcotics, but I won't. Needless, to say, I do not think these guys are the best people to be handling the crisis. It really bugs me that Admiral Thad is on the TV every night.
The first catagory 5 hurricane that plowes through the Gulf of Mexico this summer will put all the efforts back to day 1 and worse.
The worse will be 20,000 dead, floating bodies in the Gulf of Mexico (mostly BP and contractor employees).
BP PLC will argue, in the run-up, that "all is well and all ships must remain on station and working at full bore" ... i.e "damn the torpedoes".
NOAA will hem and haw (the model are diverging!) and the USGS will be silent (desperately hoping for a Fait Accompli ... the miracule deaths of both BP PLC CEO and USA XO).
Then, as the bodies (rotting) are washing onshore and the well is gushing at full bore, again, Obama will have to make a "Prime-Time", wearing sweater, address to the USA, about the Grand Failure in the Gulf (of Mexico), and that eveyone should wear warm clothes in the coming months and do whatever they can to conserve energy and food, and store heat where ever possible.
kiloseven.blogspot.com recalls two successful self-sealing subterrene nukes detonated in Mississippi only 187 miles from Leak Zero, Now, if we could onlytest it on BP headquarters first...
There is nothing wrong with yr Internet. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling the transmission - NSA
With the new riser in place, you can expect that most of the mud is still going to be pushed back out of the leaking top hat on the blowout preventer, but a bunch is also going to be pushed up the new riser. This will provide some back pressure and allow you to tighten the top hat, and, thus, get a higher percentage of mud in the new pipe. Eventually (if all goes well), you'll be able to almost entirely fill the new riser with mud (which will provide about 2000-10000PSI of back pressure, depending on how dense the mud is)., and hopefullly enough that they can completely seal the system nd stop the oil flow.....
In fact, if things get good enough, the oil should, at some point, back-flow back into the blowout preventer, and down into the well, itself -- possibly eventually providing enough back-pressure in the lower well, itself, to allow a proper capping process to take place.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
http://gulfspill.me/ has a nice embedable widget showing the ever increasing tally of oil spewing into the gulf.
AF-Design, web development.