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BP Claims Gulf Well Has Been Stopped
An anonymous reader writes with word that BP has announced the Gulf oil spill has been stopped.
Another reader adds more detail: "The last valve on the new cap has been closed, and the flow of oil and gas into the sea has stopped. That doesn't mean it's over. It is unclear whether the steel casing deep in the well can contain the pressure. The risk is that it could burst, which would eventually cause a rupture on the sea floor that would make things much messier to deal with. However, they're monitoring the pressure buildup carefully and if the pressure holds over the next 48 hours (indicating there is no leak below the sea floor), they'll assess what to do next. If it doesn't hold at the expected readings, then they'll re-attach the pipe used for producing to the surface and start collecting again. Regardless of what happens the relief well still has to be completed to permanently plug the well with cement, which could take a couple more weeks."
Let's hope the fix holds.
Actually, this isn't meant as a permanent fix at all. This cap is a temporary solution to prevent excessive leakage in the event that a hurricane prevents them from collecting the oil that does escape. They are still going ahead with the relief valves which are intended to be the permanent solution. That said, I do hope the cap holds the oil for as long as necessary.
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
Link to multiple video feeds.. Looks good to me!
If they could have just stopped the leak, they would have one the first day. In fact, they tried that, but the BOP was broken... That is what this whole issue is about.
The collection of oil was to prevent that oil from going into the water, and also gave them something positive to report on.
In addition, the collection effort required some stops that made the capping of the well possible at all. As part of the capping process the cut the riser of the well (and eventually removed the riser cap) which is where this cap is installed.
I'm sure that no one wanted to stop this well leak more than BP.
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Seeing is believing: http://mfile.akamai.com/97892/live/reflector:45683.asx?bkup=45684 Odds are the feed will cut out after a few seconds with how swamped it is now. Oh and if you're really interested here's one of the bottom of the BOP which is being watched so it doesn't explode. http://mfile.akamai.com/97892/live/reflector:31499.asx?bkup=31500
They weren't abandoning it, no producer in their right mind would abandon a well that can pump out 60,000+ barrels a day, that's a fucking gusher!
The accident actually occurred while they were capping it with cement - which is done when the exploratory drilling is finished and they want to bring in a production rig.
Granted, it's the exact same procedure to permanently abandon a well (because they never really abandon them permanently), but a well like that they definitely would produce. The average well in the gulf produces something like 1,800 barrels of oil a day, for a comparison.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
The well was a write off from the moment the thing started leaking. Everyone knew that. I mean seriously, they can barely cap the thing, how in god's name do you expect them to repair all the damage that was done to it?
It's orders of magnitude cheaper and easier to just drill another well, they're not some magical things that suddenly shows up in the middle of the ocean, we can make more of them.
Before I did that though, I did a little digging to find out how many other projects BP has in the Gulf of Mexico just to see if maybe they have a high percentage rate of success and this is just one of hundreds or something,
It turns out BP has only 9 (admittedly huge) projects in the Gulf of Mexico. Source
(count the number of projects in the ride hand column)
I had to find that in the way back machine because BP took down the page listing their Gulf of Mexico projects. They even still link
to it (again, look at the column on the right "Gulf of Mexico Facilities) but they broke the link. It's funny, when I peruse that page (via the way back machine) BP brags about their "new and untested" tech that they use to go to "unprecedented depths". It looks like their a little ashamed of it now.
Anyway, after seeing that they only have 9 facilities in the Gulf maybe this well is better sealed off. I went looking for a reason to trust BP with reopening this well and getting the oil and gas they went there for but a 1 in 9 failure rate is not impressive. Seal that sucker off.
Here's the direct feed link from BP - http://www.bp.com/liveROVFeed
It starts all feeds on load, click on the videos themselves to get a decent fullscreen res look at each..
That's not really how it works. Yes, the well was 'exploratory' in that they were not sure they could get oil out of that particular place. But what they were doing before they fucked up big time was 'closing' the well: Sealing it off until they could bring out the production crews who would place pipelines to the feeder system (they have to collect it somehow and just spilling it into the ocean appears to have a bunch of problems associated with it) and the various bits and pieces that make up a production well.
But if the relief wells go as planned, they will pump mud down to stop the flow and then cement the thing closed. Theoretically, there isn't anything that would prevent BP (or somebody else) from drilling another well into the same formation and starting the process over, but that seems politically unwise.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
And they'll still charge us $3 a gallon for it.
Haha I wish.
Signed,
The rest of the world
They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it's not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance. - Terry Pratchett
For better or worse the Federal Government doesn't have the experience or the resources to deal with a problem of this nature.
Very true. But they refused the help of those who did (the Dutch). Their boats could only get out something like 98% of the oil and EPA regulations say you can't discharge water back into the Gulf that's less than 99.998% pure or whatever, so they've been trying to pump the Gulf of Mexico into ships and bring it on shore into storage containers for later processing.
It's so asinine I can't go to 'incompetence' on this one.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
More than that. Blow out preventers have something like a 40% failure rate according to recent statistics released.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/csm/20100713/ts_csm/313442
(I honestly don't know if it has the 40% figure, but dig for it, it was all over the news if you need a citation that badly)
Common practice is to have a backup BOP to eliminate the single point of failure. The BOP is not nearly as reliable as oil companies would like to make it out to be.
zosxavius photography
Debunking requested? Sure! :)
Interesting link, albeit woefully flawed. The beginning, emphasis mine:
Here's a pic of the world's land masses around 255 mya, and another of around 237 mya. Here's a pic from close to the 55 million years later mentioned in the article above, around 195 mya.
In none of these scenarios is the current Gulf of Mexico a body of water. This would seem to rule out any sort of clathrate-based "sea fart", at least from that specific region.
Moreover, the two events the article mentions aren't quite right. The first is the Permian-Triassic extinction, indeed around 251 mya, but the cause is still debated, with one of the leading explanations being a combination of factors that include one or more impact events.
The second event is dated in the article at 55 million years after the Permian-Triassic extinction, or around 196 mya. However, the Paleocene didn't even begin until around 65 mya. What the article author was probably thinking about was the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, dated to around 55 mya. One of the theories for the cause of the PETM is indeed that methane clathrates may have destabilized, causing a runaway greenhouse effect, until the poles were warm enough for palm trees and sea turtles. However, the PETM isn't associated with any mass extinction -- the Cretaceous–Tertiary extinction happened 65 mya when the geologic K-T boundary was laid down in the rock, and is again theorized to be due mainly to one or more impact events. Note in the pic here that the Gulf of Mexico is indeed a body of water by this time, but rather than being the source of any clathrate fart, it is instead noted as the location of the Chicxulub crater, theorized to be the kicker that killed the dinosaurs.
So basically, as disruptive as any sustained "sea fart" might be, the article you linked is full of bunkum and misinformation. And that's just in the intro.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
"The reasons for why this failed" are not so unknown, since it's known that the welhead's blowout preventer had gone under repair and maintenance works that were identified as inadequate, exposing to the risk of BOP's failure, in a note that a BP's contractor sent to BP management.
There were also internal notes about the probable inadequacy of the wellhead cement casing, and various reports about dangerous shortcuts took in the operations of the drill in the days preceding the incident, which were protested by the drill workers.
:/
Corporations aren't the uncaring robot beasts you seem to be convinced they are. Corporations are still run by people. And there's no way that the people running BP would have allowed themselves to continue pumping unthinkable amounts of oil into the ocean without putting up a real effort to stop it, bad press and huge fines or none.
I'd hate to burst your bubble but oil companies don't give a rats ass. Here's an excerpt from this article. Take note that the article is a bit old though.
In fact, more oil is spilled from the delta's network of terminals, pipes, pumping stations and oil platforms every year than has been lost in the Gulf of Mexico, the site of a major ecological catastrophe caused by oil that has poured from a leak triggered by the explosion that wrecked BP's Deepwater Horizon rig last month
Dear USA,
high taxes on gas cause reduced consumption via more efficient cars and less driving. That leads to less pollution and less money for the a-holes of the world.
That's a good thing in my book.
Signed,
most of the rest of the world
thegodmovie.com - watch it
The acoustic dead-man's switch wouldn't have been any help, since it's linked to the same valve on the BOP that failed even when they sent robots to manually shut it down. And, that valve failed because of an accident that happened some weeks before that destroyed the annulus seals: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/05/16/60minutes/main6490197_page4.shtml. I agree that the relief wells should be required for this kind of eventuality, but if BP hadn't been criminally negligent in maintaining its equipment, this never would have happened.
I'm happy to be proven wrong with a credible link that deals with the actual events...
How about this? In that story, a survivor of the disaster is interviewed. He talks about how several components of the blowout preventer were damaged by accidents in the weeks preceding the explosion. Rather than stopping to repair the blowout preventer, though, British Petroleum chose to continue drilling. They did so because the rig was already behind schedule and over budget. If this witness' allegations are substantiated, it'd be a damning indictment of British Petroleum. They deliberately chose to sacrifice safety in the pursuit of profit. They did so over the warnings and objections of their own employees.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it