I really, truly doubt that the Soviet drill bits were melting at 570*F or anything nearly so low. The melting point of carbon steel (a.k.a. mild steel -- NOT what they would use for a deep-earth drill bit) is 1425 - 1540*C or 2600 - 2800*F -- temperatures much higher than your 570*F.
The Wikipedia article you've cited only says that the drill bit "would no longer work" at such temperatures, not that it actually melted. Do you have some other authoritative source for your statement?
A few years ago I contacted my son's high school math teacher because a homework question that I had helped my son to understand came back marked as incorrect. Although the result was unassailable, he hadn't precisely followed the extended step-by-step procedure the teacher demanded.
When I called the school to discuss this with the math teacher, the arrogant reply I got was, "Are you a math teacher? I won't discuss math questions with anyone but a math teacher." And then he hung up on me.
It's not a government document you tool...it's legal tender. It's PERMITTED by the government to be used to settle a debt. The government doesn't know that you have any particular bill, and they don't know with whom you will trade it.
If you ever want to do a tax-free off-the-books transaction again in your life, you'll actually STOP using electronic methods of payment.
Find my other post in this thread about how you'll lose far more than just that and you'll see how myopic your perspective is on the matter.
And yet, from TFS,
"Modern banknotes contain up to 50 anti-counterfeiting features, but adding electronic circuits programmed to confirm the note's authenticity is perhaps the ultimate deterrent, and would also help to simplify banknote tracking." [emphasis mine]
The day is perhaps not so far off when the federal government can know that you have any particular bill and with whom you have traded it.
However, for mcrbids to pontificate (no, to BS) on petroleum reservoirs as if he understood what he was talking about was the height of arrogance too.
No reservoir engineer would ever say "fluid seeps from the surrounding soil" in regard to a conventional subsurface oil or gas accumulation (as opposed to a surficial heavy oil deposits such as the Athabaska tar sands in Canada or the Orinoco tar sands in Venezuela) because the reservoir rock in which hydrocarbon accumulations are trapped is either (a) completely surrounded by an impermeable shale layer (in the case of a stratigraphic trap) or (b) capped by such a layer and bounded beneath by an aquifer (in the case of a structural trap). There simply is no such thing as "surrounding soil" for fluid (i.e. hydrocarbons) to seep from. Reservoir rock is just that: rock.
Furthermore, OP made a statement -- whether verifiable or not -- regarding the refilling or restocking of depleted reservoirs and mcrbids waved this away as mere intra-reservoir pressure equilibration... an unrelated phenomenon.
So mcrbids shouldn't pretend to be a reservoir engineer because he isn't one. I am.
I've found your stolen car, which I know was yours because I read the VIN -- but I can't tell you where it is because that would breach the privacy of the new owners.
Whichever way you put it, someone gets screwed, in other words, but with property sales like this...there's really no other way you can do it. If you let the title/deed go to the purchaser, yeah, the person whose property was sold is out of a dwelling; but if you kick the purchaser out and return title to the rightful owner, well, what happens if the purchaser sold their old dwelling at the same time? They're out of a dwelling as well. It's a no-win situation as long as the system can be engineered.
The difference being, of course, that the purchasers were willing to give up their former dwelling for consideration, but the original homeowner -- the rightful owner who was defrauded -- was not. Ergo, title should rightfully be reverted to the original owner and the purchasers compensated for their loss where such fraud can be clearly demonstrated.
Where were the real estate agents in all of this? We pay huge commissions to these people, in part to ensure that offers are legitimate and deals are as problem-free as possible. What's it for if not to avoid situations like this? Why isn't the purchasers' real estate agent on the hook for the money transferred if they didn't exercise due diligence to ensure that the title was valid? A "block letters" signature? I mean, come on!
I have no idea how many people will show up at a Colbert rally, but I can tell you one very significant difference between the rally that Glen Beck held and one that Colbert holds. After the Glen Beck rally, it looked like the grounds crew had just finished getting the place ready for an event, everything picked up and put away, no trash on the ground. After a Colbert rally, I am quite confident that there will be trash all over the place.
It's really just a question of temporal shift, isn't it?
During the Colbert rally there'll be no trash in evidence anywhere, whereas during the Beck rally there's trash all over the place!
I wish I had mod points right now. I believe your comment to be idiotic and I wish I could mod it down as overrated (even at 0) rather than merely commenting on it. I'm not certain that this exercise (my commenting) isn't a complete waste of time and energy with respect to influencing your thinking, but here's why I think your remarks are so stupid: there are many more possible reasons than merely "choosing to not be good at science" for women not to appear prominently in the annals of scientific history. Here are a few of them:
- in a patriarchal culture, women may not be given the same educational or career opportunities as their male counterparts
- in a patriarchy, women may not be fully credited with their accomplishments (Lise Meitner springs to mind; note that Otto Hahn appears on the map but she does not)
- in a patriarchal society, women may not even be allowed to work in fields which are considered to be in the male domain, such as science and mathematics
I don't think that anyone would rationally argue that what has existed in human society for the past two millenia -- whether we are talking about the ancient Greeks and Romans, the Arabs of the 10th century, or European societies through the Dark Ages, the Renaissance, and practically right up to the present -- is anything other than a patriarchy. Ergo, the strictures I've listed for you above do apply, and in applying go a long way explain why there have been so few notable scientific accomplishments credited to women through history.
Disclaimer: I am a male Ph.D. engineer who heartily wishes that more women were working in my field. This is changing now, but very slowly.
I doubt that the recording industry sold even a tiny fraction of 10 million more albums as a result of their lawsuits.
I personally reduced my downloading to a minimum after my initial burst of enthusiasm back in the Napster days, and right about then I increased my buying of CDs from indie artists and non-RIAA labels, which I have continued to do to this day. That's pretty much all I buy anymore. So the RIAA may have scared a few people off but it surely didn't gain them very much.
(1) the lady's name is Michaelle, not Michelle (and, to be perfectly pedantic, the first "e" even has an umlaut over it). Repetition says this wasn't just a typo on your part.
(2) Jean was an abject apologist for anything and everything Canadian. If there was the slightest possibility that Canada bore even minimal responsibility for something -- and sometimes even if there wasn't -- she was right there to apologize on our collective behalf. Example: the Rwandan civil war. We didn't start it. We didn't stop it. What the hell did that have to do with us?
(3) Jean didn't "handle" Harper; she was a toady and a stooly for him. When he said jump, she jumped.
(4) Jean arrogated powers to herself that aren't incumbent upon the holder of the office she holds. In October 2009 at a UNESCO meeting in Paris, she claimed to be the "head of state" of Canada. This is patently false! The Queen is the head of state of Canada; the Governor-General is but the viceregal representative of Her Majesty.
For these reasons, I will not be sorry to see her gone in a few weeks. Yes, I... am... Canadian! (Sorry I had to rain on your parade.)
That's an awesome idea. Four (or even eight) directions combined with variable vibration intensity could give you a good notion of both direction and proximity to an obstacle -- a cranial collision avoidance system. Very cool!
Combine that with some AI which could speak to you if it recognized an obstacle ("Table - 2 o'clock!" "Stairs - 12 o'clock!" "Mugger - 6 o'clock!") and you've got a real winner! I could use one myself, some days...
Engineers can take all the offense they like, but this is simply the truth. Engineers are not running BP or Transocean or Halliburton. Engineers matter only to the question 'how much more money can we dig out of the earth' and not 'how do we deal with a disaster we may cause'.
Engineers matter to the question 'what could go wrong and how do we keep it from happening?'
I doubt that engineers would design the BOP stack with a discharged battery, or with shear rams undersized for the weight of drill-pipe in the hole. I doubt that engineers designed the well-suspension program to proceed regardless of the results of the positive and negative pressure tests on the cement job or without a retrievable bridge plug set before pulling out of the hole.
Other people are often responsible for carrying out the plans of engineers, and the causes of accidents are often attributable to failure by others -- whether workers or management -- to follow the designs and recommendations of the engineers. Not always, of course, which is why engineers sit on boards of inquiry in an effort to ensure that the mistakes of the past are not repeated. The classic example is the Challenger accident, where management overruled the caution of the engineers with a well-known result.
So, in short, I think your excoriation of engineers' work generally is a bit misplaced.
So before you go jumping all over this story and dismissing things, do some digging. You just might find out that he is actually far ahead of the curve. He knows as much as most industry experts. The difference? He's not afraid to talk.
Willingness to talk about a subject is usually inversely proportional to the true depth of knowledge on that subject.
(1) An undersaturated oil reservoir is one with no free gas (or gas cap; i.e. reservoir pressure is above the bubble pt); a saturated oil reservoir may or may not have a gas cap (reservoir pressure is at the bubble pt). The initial rush of gas at the outset of the blowout may actually indicate the presence of a gas cap. (I doubt you'd have that much solution gas liberated without a whole lot of oil coming right along with it at the velocities we're talking about; initial reports only talked about a tremendous "whoosh" of gas after the seawater in the drill string was blown out.)
(2) Reservoir pressure is probably closer to normal hydrostatic at 0.433 * 18369 = 7954 psia (if the reservoir wasn't overpressured), which gives us a pressure differential of about 1/3 of what you used.
So if I take 1/3 the pressure differential and plug it in with the rest of your numbers (plus assuming that flow is internal to the string, not annular), then we get about 8,000 bbl/d -- which doesn't compare too badly with BP's early estimates of 10,000 bbl/d.
Good job! (Best analysis I've seen in this discussion.)
(2) Reservoir pressure should be more like 18369 * 0.433 = 7954 psia with a normal hydrostatic gradient. It's possible they tapped into an overpressured reservoir -- but not by a factor of nearly 2 (or 20)
(3) The "pipe" you refer to would be the innermost production casing string that BP ran, the 7" x 9-7/8" string (7" at TD, swedged up at around 13000 ft). Details of the casing program are available, among other locations, at http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6462. ID for the string is dependent on the weight of the casing they ran (which I don't know), but it certainly isn't 18".
(4) We also don't know whether the flow is internal to the casing string or up the annulus. There have been suggestions from the circumstances of the blowout that the latter may be the case. Clearly, the flowpath chosen would affect the results of your flow calculations.
(5) Lastly, we know nothing about flow restrictions at the exit from the wellbore which may be "choking" the flow. I doubt that the pipe is simply cut cleanly off immediately above the BOP stack; although that may be the case today, it certainly wasn't for most of the blowout. The wellbore diagrams show riser from the wellhead to 1500 ft above it and then a sharp bend and a return to the seabed. Was that factored into your calculations as well?
I'm interested in your methodology and assumptions; would you care to elaborate?
(BTW, I'm a working professional chemical/petroleum engineer specializing in fluid flow and hydrodynamics in wellbores.)
Well, a polymer is nothing more than an aggregate of repeating units... much like a Buckywire, in fact. And polymer chains can be tailored to be of specific (average) length, to have a certain average side-chain frequency and length, to have a given frequency of cross-linking, etc. So there's no reason why the kinetics of the wire-building reaction (for a reaction it is, whether chemical or physical), once they're understood, can't be utilized to customize the end-product. We do that all the time.
I have a post-graduate degree in chemical engineering. I have worked in polymerization reaction engineering.
With date, time, time zone and IP address, we could uniquely identify the account that was purportedly used to share the file. The file name and description allowed us to believe that the complaint was for a legitimately copyrighted work.
There -- fixed that for you.
You see, just because someone -- whether individual or corporation -- alleges that something happened in the way they said it did, that does not constitute factual evidence. They should have to provide something a bit more substantial -- i.e. the actual file, rather than just a file name and description -- before something as dramatic as a cut-off of service takes place.
Just because they said I downloaded Britney Spears - Hit Me Baby (One More Time).mp3 -- when, in reality, I abhor BS music -- is not sufficient; they should have to demonstrate that they were able to download the file from me and it should be independently verified that the file's contents are indeed what they alleged they were. But, by removing the action from the courtroom, they neatly dance around requirements for substantive evidence and the means of procurement thereof.
Slashdot Mirror
Not to mention if the war went on much longer the Russians might have gotten into Japan too.
Then we might have ended up with a situation like Germany, with a split state.
They did. We did.
I really, truly doubt that the Soviet drill bits were melting at 570*F or anything nearly so low. The melting point of carbon steel (a.k.a. mild steel -- NOT what they would use for a deep-earth drill bit) is 1425 - 1540*C or 2600 - 2800*F -- temperatures much higher than your 570*F.
The Wikipedia article you've cited only says that the drill bit "would no longer work" at such temperatures, not that it actually melted. Do you have some other authoritative source for your statement?
Sincerely, R. Stocker, Ph.D., P.Eng.
A few years ago I contacted my son's high school math teacher because a homework question that I had helped my son to understand came back marked as incorrect. Although the result was unassailable, he hadn't precisely followed the extended step-by-step procedure the teacher demanded.
When I called the school to discuss this with the math teacher, the arrogant reply I got was, "Are you a math teacher? I won't discuss math questions with anyone but a math teacher." And then he hung up on me.
I am not a math teacher.
I have a Ph.D. in chemical engineering.
It's not a government document you tool...it's legal tender. It's PERMITTED by the government to be used to settle a debt. The government doesn't know that you have any particular bill, and they don't know with whom you will trade it.
If you ever want to do a tax-free off-the-books transaction again in your life, you'll actually STOP using electronic methods of payment.
Find my other post in this thread about how you'll lose far more than just that and you'll see how myopic your perspective is on the matter.
And yet, from TFS,
"Modern banknotes contain up to 50 anti-counterfeiting features, but adding electronic circuits programmed to confirm the note's authenticity is perhaps the ultimate deterrent, and would also help to simplify banknote tracking." [emphasis mine]
The day is perhaps not so far off when the federal government can know that you have any particular bill and with whom you have traded it.
Chris, you make valid points regarding the OP.
... an unrelated phenomenon.
However, for mcrbids to pontificate (no, to BS) on petroleum reservoirs as if he understood what he was talking about was the height of arrogance too.
No reservoir engineer would ever say "fluid seeps from the surrounding soil" in regard to a conventional subsurface oil or gas accumulation (as opposed to a surficial heavy oil deposits such as the Athabaska tar sands in Canada or the Orinoco tar sands in Venezuela) because the reservoir rock in which hydrocarbon accumulations are trapped is either (a) completely surrounded by an impermeable shale layer (in the case of a stratigraphic trap) or (b) capped by such a layer and bounded beneath by an aquifer (in the case of a structural trap). There simply is no such thing as "surrounding soil" for fluid (i.e. hydrocarbons) to seep from. Reservoir rock is just that: rock.
Furthermore, OP made a statement -- whether verifiable or not -- regarding the refilling or restocking of depleted reservoirs and mcrbids waved this away as mere intra-reservoir pressure equilibration
So mcrbids shouldn't pretend to be a reservoir engineer because he isn't one. I am.
Amen to that -- and kudos to you for a good comment. I feel the same way.
I've found your stolen car, which I know was yours because I read the VIN -- but I can't tell you where it is because that would breach the privacy of the new owners.
R-i-i-i-g-h-t.
I mean, the place just rocks!
Whichever way you put it, someone gets screwed, in other words, but with property sales like this...there's really no other way you can do it. If you let the title/deed go to the purchaser, yeah, the person whose property was sold is out of a dwelling; but if you kick the purchaser out and return title to the rightful owner, well, what happens if the purchaser sold their old dwelling at the same time? They're out of a dwelling as well. It's a no-win situation as long as the system can be engineered.
The difference being, of course, that the purchasers were willing to give up their former dwelling for consideration, but the original homeowner -- the rightful owner who was defrauded -- was not. Ergo, title should rightfully be reverted to the original owner and the purchasers compensated for their loss where such fraud can be clearly demonstrated.
Where were the real estate agents in all of this? We pay huge commissions to these people, in part to ensure that offers are legitimate and deals are as problem-free as possible. What's it for if not to avoid situations like this? Why isn't the purchasers' real estate agent on the hook for the money transferred if they didn't exercise due diligence to ensure that the title was valid? A "block letters" signature? I mean, come on!
I have no idea how many people will show up at a Colbert rally, but I can tell you one very significant difference between the rally that Glen Beck held and one that Colbert holds. After the Glen Beck rally, it looked like the grounds crew had just finished getting the place ready for an event, everything picked up and put away, no trash on the ground. After a Colbert rally, I am quite confident that there will be trash all over the place.
It's really just a question of temporal shift, isn't it?
During the Colbert rally there'll be no trash in evidence anywhere, whereas during the Beck rally there's trash all over the place!
I wish I had mod points right now. I believe your comment to be idiotic and I wish I could mod it down as overrated (even at 0) rather than merely commenting on it. I'm not certain that this exercise (my commenting) isn't a complete waste of time and energy with respect to influencing your thinking, but here's why I think your remarks are so stupid: there are many more possible reasons than merely "choosing to not be good at science" for women not to appear prominently in the annals of scientific history. Here are a few of them:
- in a patriarchal culture, women may not be given the same educational or career opportunities as their male counterparts
- in a patriarchy, women may not be fully credited with their accomplishments (Lise Meitner springs to mind; note that Otto Hahn appears on the map but she does not)
- in a patriarchal society, women may not even be allowed to work in fields which are considered to be in the male domain, such as science and mathematics
I don't think that anyone would rationally argue that what has existed in human society for the past two millenia -- whether we are talking about the ancient Greeks and Romans, the Arabs of the 10th century, or European societies through the Dark Ages, the Renaissance, and practically right up to the present -- is anything other than a patriarchy. Ergo, the strictures I've listed for you above do apply, and in applying go a long way explain why there have been so few notable scientific accomplishments credited to women through history.
Disclaimer: I am a male Ph.D. engineer who heartily wishes that more women were working in my field. This is changing now, but very slowly.
I doubt that the recording industry sold even a tiny fraction of 10 million more albums as a result of their lawsuits.
I personally reduced my downloading to a minimum after my initial burst of enthusiasm back in the Napster days, and right about then I increased my buying of CDs from indie artists and non-RIAA labels, which I have continued to do to this day. That's pretty much all I buy anymore. So the RIAA may have scared a few people off but it surely didn't gain them very much.
You are correct! Thanks!
... there doesn't seem to be a more specific term for "one who apologizes excessively and without cause".
I meant "apologizer"
(1) the lady's name is Michaelle, not Michelle (and, to be perfectly pedantic, the first "e" even has an umlaut over it). Repetition says this wasn't just a typo on your part.
... am ... Canadian! (Sorry I had to rain on your parade.)
(2) Jean was an abject apologist for anything and everything Canadian. If there was the slightest possibility that Canada bore even minimal responsibility for something -- and sometimes even if there wasn't -- she was right there to apologize on our collective behalf. Example: the Rwandan civil war. We didn't start it. We didn't stop it. What the hell did that have to do with us?
(3) Jean didn't "handle" Harper; she was a toady and a stooly for him. When he said jump, she jumped.
(4) Jean arrogated powers to herself that aren't incumbent upon the holder of the office she holds. In October 2009 at a UNESCO meeting in Paris, she claimed to be the "head of state" of Canada. This is patently false! The Queen is the head of state of Canada; the Governor-General is but the viceregal representative of Her Majesty.
For these reasons, I will not be sorry to see her gone in a few weeks. Yes, I
That's an awesome idea. Four (or even eight) directions combined with variable vibration intensity could give you a good notion of both direction and proximity to an obstacle -- a cranial collision avoidance system. Very cool!
...
Combine that with some AI which could speak to you if it recognized an obstacle ("Table - 2 o'clock!" "Stairs - 12 o'clock!" "Mugger - 6 o'clock!") and you've got a real winner! I could use one myself, some days
Engineers can take all the offense they like, but this is simply the truth. Engineers are not running BP or Transocean or Halliburton. Engineers matter only to the question 'how much more money can we dig out of the earth' and not 'how do we deal with a disaster we may cause'.
Engineers matter to the question 'what could go wrong and how do we keep it from happening?'
I doubt that engineers would design the BOP stack with a discharged battery, or with shear rams undersized for the weight of drill-pipe in the hole. I doubt that engineers designed the well-suspension program to proceed regardless of the results of the positive and negative pressure tests on the cement job or without a retrievable bridge plug set before pulling out of the hole.
Other people are often responsible for carrying out the plans of engineers, and the causes of accidents are often attributable to failure by others -- whether workers or management -- to follow the designs and recommendations of the engineers. Not always, of course, which is why engineers sit on boards of inquiry in an effort to ensure that the mistakes of the past are not repeated. The classic example is the Challenger accident, where management overruled the caution of the engineers with a well-known result.
So, in short, I think your excoriation of engineers' work generally is a bit misplaced.
DISCLAIMER: I am one.
Hmmm. What specifically do you base that conclusion on?
So before you go jumping all over this story and dismissing things, do some digging. You just might find out that he is actually far ahead of the curve. He knows as much as most industry experts. The difference? He's not afraid to talk.
Willingness to talk about a subject is usually inversely proportional to the true depth of knowledge on that subject.
Couple of minor points:
(1) An undersaturated oil reservoir is one with no free gas (or gas cap; i.e. reservoir pressure is above the bubble pt); a saturated oil reservoir may or may not have a gas cap (reservoir pressure is at the bubble pt). The initial rush of gas at the outset of the blowout may actually indicate the presence of a gas cap. (I doubt you'd have that much solution gas liberated without a whole lot of oil coming right along with it at the velocities we're talking about; initial reports only talked about a tremendous "whoosh" of gas after the seawater in the drill string was blown out.)
(2) Reservoir pressure is probably closer to normal hydrostatic at 0.433 * 18369 = 7954 psia (if the reservoir wasn't overpressured), which gives us a pressure differential of about 1/3 of what you used.
So if I take 1/3 the pressure differential and plug it in with the rest of your numbers (plus assuming that flow is internal to the string, not annular), then we get about 8,000 bbl/d -- which doesn't compare too badly with BP's early estimates of 10,000 bbl/d.
Good job! (Best analysis I've seen in this discussion.)
Some comments on your analysis:
(1) TD for the well is at 18369 ft MSL.
(2) Reservoir pressure should be more like 18369 * 0.433 = 7954 psia with a normal hydrostatic gradient. It's possible they tapped into an overpressured reservoir -- but not by a factor of nearly 2 (or 20)
(3) The "pipe" you refer to would be the innermost production casing string that BP ran, the 7" x 9-7/8" string (7" at TD, swedged up at around 13000 ft). Details of the casing program are available, among other locations, at http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6462. ID for the string is dependent on the weight of the casing they ran (which I don't know), but it certainly isn't 18".
(4) We also don't know whether the flow is internal to the casing string or up the annulus. There have been suggestions from the circumstances of the blowout that the latter may be the case. Clearly, the flowpath chosen would affect the results of your flow calculations.
(5) Lastly, we know nothing about flow restrictions at the exit from the wellbore which may be "choking" the flow. I doubt that the pipe is simply cut cleanly off immediately above the BOP stack; although that may be the case today, it certainly wasn't for most of the blowout. The wellbore diagrams show riser from the wellhead to 1500 ft above it and then a sharp bend and a return to the seabed. Was that factored into your calculations as well?
I'm interested in your methodology and assumptions; would you care to elaborate?
(BTW, I'm a working professional chemical/petroleum engineer specializing in fluid flow and hydrodynamics in wellbores.)
Cheers,
Rudi
Second only to the Nissan Cube. Now THAT'S ugly!
Well, a polymer is nothing more than an aggregate of repeating units ... much like a Buckywire, in fact. And polymer chains can be tailored to be of specific (average) length, to have a certain average side-chain frequency and length, to have a given frequency of cross-linking, etc. So there's no reason why the kinetics of the wire-building reaction (for a reaction it is, whether chemical or physical), once they're understood, can't be utilized to customize the end-product. We do that all the time.
I have a post-graduate degree in chemical engineering. I have worked in polymerization reaction engineering.
Pest Controller in Australia has to rate right down there ...
American pilots in the Battle of Britain
There you go, cock! Google is your friend. They were there, and some even died for your sorry ass.
Now give it a rest!
With date, time, time zone and IP address, we could uniquely identify the account that was purportedly used to share the file. The file name and description allowed us to believe that the complaint was for a legitimately copyrighted work.
There -- fixed that for you.
You see, just because someone -- whether individual or corporation -- alleges that something happened in the way they said it did, that does not constitute factual evidence. They should have to provide something a bit more substantial -- i.e. the actual file, rather than just a file name and description -- before something as dramatic as a cut-off of service takes place.
Just because they said I downloaded Britney Spears - Hit Me Baby (One More Time).mp3 -- when, in reality, I abhor BS music -- is not sufficient; they should have to demonstrate that they were able to download the file from me and it should be independently verified that the file's contents are indeed what they alleged they were. But, by removing the action from the courtroom, they neatly dance around requirements for substantive evidence and the means of procurement thereof.