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."

Comments

Whew

[Kell Bengal]

Thank god they got it closed before it became an ecological disaster.

Oh wait...

Re:Whew

[kvezach]

It does seem that they were very focused on being able to extract the oil rather than just stopping the leak. Now, I'm not an engineer, but could their desire for continued extraction of oil have delayed their plans, made the stack more complex?

In any case, we'll see whether it works. Hopefully it'll at least buy them enough time to drill relief wells.

Re:Whew

[snowraver1]

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.

Re:Whew

[spun]

BP is a corporation. Corporations don't have empathy or remorse. They could give a rat's ass about the leak. They only wanted to stop the bad publicity and liability, and secondarily, to start producing oil. If they could somehow have all three on the cheap without stopping the leak, they would have.

Re:Whew

[countertrolling]

I'm sure that no one wanted to stop the news leaks more than BP.

You're welcome...

Re:Whew

[Monkeedude1212]

Try not to think of it as an ecological disaster. Think of it as unproactive redistribution of wealth by giving some of the worlds unwealthiest wildlife a large sum of one of the worlds most sought after resources. They should be able to increase their underwater infrastructure a great deal if they use it all wisely.

Re:Whew

[maxume]

The primary reason it took a long time is that they had no contingency plan for BOP failure. They had to invent the plan, invent the needed equipment and then build the equipment.

(They had a notion that they would build a relief well if it blew, but that isn't a short term containment plan, it is a hole in the ground plugging plan).

So if you want to be outraged, be outraged that they were drilling outside of their technical depth (they clearly did not have a reasonable contingency plan in place, nor a sufficient amount of equipment), there is no need to foment anger about their motivations since the blowout.

Re:Whew

[SleazyRidr]

The scary thing is that basically everyone out there is assuming that the BOP will never fail and they don't need any contingency plans. I've done one or two studies with these people (not BP) and whenever anyone raises the question, "What if the BOP fails?" the answer is always, "it won't."

Re:Whew

[RoFLKOPTr]

BP is a corporation. Corporations don't have empathy or remorse. They could give a rat's ass about the leak. They only wanted to stop the bad publicity and liability, and secondarily, to start producing oil. If they could somehow have all three on the cheap without stopping the leak, they would have.

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.

Re:Whew

[Rakishi]

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.

Re:Whew

[x_IamSpartacus_x]

You know, I was going to lament the waste that it seems it will be to pump the relief well and seal off this oil well because of the vastness of the reserve and how much oil and natural gas they could get from it since they can collect it now with the cap on it.

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.

Re:Whew

[Abstrackt]

And they'll still charge us $3 a gallon for it.

Haha I wish.

Signed,
The rest of the world

Re:Whew

[Bemopolis]

And giving them more oil just encourages them to lay about. Just look at those lazy bastards, floating sideways on the surface.

Re:Whew

[interkin3tic]

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.

Kind of reminds me of what I told myself about Pfizer when I was working for them: no way would they do unethical things like test their drugs in 3rd world countries without properly informing the test subjects. No way would they have done this just to save a buck or two, or get around stricter regulations in the US. After all, you'd have to be a monster to be okay with that, and additionally to be absolutely horrible at managing PR to risk the parallels to the Tuskegee experiments. And, I told myself, you go into medicine to help people, not hurt them.

I guess I could still tell myself those things, it's not as if anything conclusive has come out about it. Still, I think it's pretty clear that pfizer is not our friend, corporations are in general not our friends, and those individuals who work for large corporations are able to justify, ignore, or rationalize almost anything their company does. After all, I did it, and I was just a lab grunt who had no real stake in the company.

You should not be optimistic about good people being in places of power, since power tends to corrupt. That isn't just true for politicians or religious leaders, it's definitely true for corporations.

Re:Whew

[superdave80]

Isn't the main reason it is so expensive in most of the world is due to taxes, and not the oil companies themselves?

Re:Whew

[bit9]

Wow, how many ways can you be wrong in a single post???

First, you're wrong about this being the first ever BOP failure. As another poster has already noted, the IXTOC disaster in 1979 was also (at least partially) the result of a BOP failure. Furthermore, BOP failures are evidently not such a rare event. Apparently, they fail frequently enough during routine tests that at least a couple studies have been done on BOP failure. From this article:

Indeed, more than a year before Pleasant's frantic efforts to stop an inferno, a large study of BOP reliability in the Gulf of Mexico had warned industry experts and federal safety officials that balky control systems were by far the most common cause of BOP failure – and apparently getting worse. Altogether, 63 percent of blowout preventer test failures cited in that 2009 study, a joint effort by the industry and the regulatory US Minerals Management Service (MMS), involved control systems. By contrast, a similar study a decade earlier had found control systems were responsible for 51 percent of BOP failures.

And from this article:

Hard data about the reliability of blowout preventers is hard to come by. But back in 2002, West Engineering conducted a test of seven BOPs "at the most demanding conditions to be expected." Five were successful in sealing the pipes, but two failed.

So although BOP failures may indeed be rare events, and full-blown catastrophes resulting from BOP failures may be even rarer, they still do fail frequently enough to merit some serious consideration, especially given the possible consequences when one does fail.

The probability of a massive catastrophe caused by a BOP failure is dozens of orders of magnitude greater than the probability of North America sinking into the ocean. It's much more akin to the probability that your house will burn down, and although having one's house burn down is an extremely rare event, it happens frequently enough, and the consequences are severe enough, that it absolutely justifies taking preventative measures and having contingency plans. That's why most of us have smoke alarms and at least one fire extinguisher in our homes.

Anecdotally speaking, I'm 37 years old, and my house has never burned down (or even caught fire), but in that same time there have been TWO major catastrophic oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico caused by BOP failures.

Having a real contingency plan (complete with actual equipment, materials and personnel in place) when you're drilling 5000 ft. under the ocean is not like trying to plan for North America sinking into the ocean. It's a necessary and prudent safety measure.

When you're talking about contingency plans for an accident that has the potential to cause large-scale ecological AND economic disaster, it's not a question of whether or not it will be a "smooth operation". Your implication is that if we don't have a contingency plan that is guaranteed to go off without a hitch, then we shouldn't bother having one at all. That's the dumbest thing I've heard all day.

Re:Whew

[superdave80]

Yes, because the surest way to get oil prices to drop is to start a war in the middle east...

Great News

[gregrah]

All skepticism aside, this is f-ing great news.

Seriously.

Re:Picture or it didn't happen!

[impaledsunset]

Now that they stopped it, let's Slashdot it from the inside.

Re:Picture or it didn't happen!

[bhlowe]

Link to multiple video feeds.. Looks good to me!

Gratuitous conspiracy theory

[poly_pusher]

Pfffft.... Documentation means nothing. Just look at the amazing work done on the faked moon landing!

Re:Picture or it didn't happen!

[shacky003]

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..

People can be as bad as corportations.

[uncqual]

There are plenty of people who run small, unincorporated, business that show little empathy and even actively defraud people and shirk their responsibilities. Many of these individuals are far less responsible than "big corporations" -- mostly because they lack oversight by a BOD, by investors, by a multitude of people in the company, and by regulators.

I've known individuals who ran their own small, unincorporated, business that were the most amoral people I know.

If you've ever tried to collect money that you are legally owed, even with a judgment, you will probably know what I mean.

The notion that "corporations are bad" and that individuals are better (showing more empathy, morality, ethics etc.) is largely a fantasy IMHO.

Re:Unreadiness for Spills

[cj_nologic]

Any success that BP may or may not have in this endeavor does not change the fact that they should have had methods to cap a blowout ready before they started drilling. The fact that this well has been gushing for months is simply unacceptable. The keystone cops spectacle of Top-Hat, Hot-Tap, Junk Shot (tm) is strong evidence that BP didn't devote any significant resources to dealing with a deep water blowout. Strong regulation of these rogue corporations is needed. They should not be able to drill without having capping equipment and emergency tankers ready at dock.

sed 's/BP/the oil industry/g'

I didn't see any of the other large multinationals drilling in the area jumping in and offering their solutions. This gung-ho approach is not restricted to BP, it's endemic in the culture of the oil industry, and all the other companies are looking on grateful it wasn't them that got "unlucky".

Just wait until this happens in Alaska or somewhere where it's a trifle more difficult to get to with the relief equipment.

I'm off down to the local planetarium to put a down-payment on a new planet for my kids. They're going to need it.

Re:Not a permanent solution.

[blair1q]

here's what I heard:

1. they capped it.
2. they closed the cap
2a. if the pressure suddenly drops, they know the pipe is ruptured below and they are forcing oil into the sea floor, where it will seep up into the sea, meaning the cap is not preventing a leak, just shifting it to the rupture. they will open the cap immediately and work to start pumping oil to the surface.
2b. if the pressure is high and holding, they will monitor for up to 48 hours it to determine if it is dropping slowly.
2b(1). if it is, then there is likely a leak below and they will work to start pumping oil to the surface, to keep the pressure in the pipe low while they wait for the relief well to be completed.
2b(2). if it is not, then the pipe is stable and intact
2b(2)(i). they may keep the cap in place and wait for the relief well to be completed
2b(2)(ii). they may work to start pumping oil to the surface while they wait for the relief well to be completed.
3. when the relief well is completed, they will open the cap, or remove the pumps, and pump concrete into the pipe to cap this wellhead permanently. the relief well will in any case be the production wellhead for this shaft.

what's really shocking about the whole deal isn't that they had a faulty blowout preventer, it's that they always knew that the pipe and the rock surrounding it were at points not strong enough to contain the pressure in the well. they knew this either before they started drilling or shortly after, and still they drilled all the way to the oil. they knew that there was no way ever to completely cap this well. as soon as they hit the oil, they would have to allow it to flow to keep the pressure low, or it would eventually rupture the pipe and vent the entire oilfield into the seafloor and then to the sea. and, for some reason, they foresaw no reasonable circumstance under which that plan might fail. they believed it not possible that they wouldn't be able to complete the well and pump it continuously, without a problem, without ever having to stop the flow. and they apparently suppressed knowledge of the entire consideration, because anyone looking at the concept would immediately say they were not only courting disaster, but raising it to a high probability of occurring.

frankly, i think it makes the deaths of those 11 men nothing short of murder.

Re:Unreadiness for Spills

[abundance]

"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.

:/

Re:Unreadiness for Spills

[sectoidman]

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.