oil leak gulf of mexico 5

[CH5OH]

just some open topic...
being an engineer, how would you go about to seal off a leaking well @ 1500m depth.
try to get Redair to get into a divesuit, convincing him the depth is kinda exagerated ?
Any bright idea's ?

 

[ewh]

unclesyd makes a valid point (as usual).

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2010/06/evidence-points-to-destruction-beneath.html

"Good to know you got shoes to wear when you find the floor." - [small]Robert Hunter[/small]

 

[CH5OH]

appologies for drawing to fast a conclusion,probably a combination of lack of knowledge towards well engineering and spending working hours, amongst other things, with coverting plan 11 seals towards plan 53 in order to get the ppm leakage rates down....watching the leak rate on the video live streams and the clock ticking the time away...
so 11 people died,the drill rig went to deepwater,the BOP with triple shut off devices still partly intact but not usable, a damaged casing.So for the intercepting well to work, it needs to intercept below the fracture and above the well? 15000 ft of drilling to hit a 10 inch target is that feasable?
Hopefully 2012 isn't the year BP triggers the last attempt...

 

[unclesyd]

At present they are working to make a hard connection to the BOP to be able to get the 90% capture rate being battered about. They will still have to have some leakage to control the pressures. It would be very desirable to allow this oil to reach the surface in mass but there is still the problem with the natural gas being evolved.
The people that are going to do the drill driving have the greatest confidence in their ability to do the job. It may take two tries to center up on the casing so they can mill a hole in it to inject the mud. There has be some question by some of proper mud weight to use. the avery complicated question due to all the possible scenarios toward the surface. 18 lb/gal would be no problem and anything heavier has to have very special conditions. According to my information the RW people have various and sundry additives to help with the kill attempt.

I think congress ought to look in the mirror and ask where were the congressional and cabinet oversight committees prior to this event.

Congress is upset with Tony but they no idea how upset the people along the coast are upset with them.

I think the fact and one of the biggest problems, is that the US doesn't have one solitary person in a position who knows a damn thing about the mechanics of drilling an oil or gas well. We have no flag man.

 

[DrillerNic]

My understanding of a relief well kill is to use a dynamic kill- pump seawater at high enough rate that the friction pressure losses up the blowing well overcome the bottom hole pressure, then with a dynamic kill, pump kill weight mud to get a static kill. However, I've never done a well kill (never really had to deal with a well control incident, thank god), so I'm just going by what I remembr from my last IWCF course.

Intersecting the target well won't really be a problem- there's an awful lot of metal in all the casing of the target well for a well finder tool to look for- and intersection wells are becoming more and more common in CBM wells in North America, so I guess the DD on the relief wells will have had expereince of drilling intersection wells. I've drilled a intersection CBM well in the UK- we got it on the third try despite having a cheap & cheerful (and not very good) directional company, and having milled out too much casing on the target well by accident, making the well finder tool a littel inaccurate.

 

[CH5OH]

only after the last fish is consumed, it becomes clear monney can't be consumed.
I suppose GOM is considered to be a fuel tank with a high level of water content, while BP is struggling to get the leak fixed.I guess its part of American culture to first determine what´s right and what´s wrong, then determine how much it is wrong.According local news:
Valdez equivalent/every 4 days, 20 000 000 000 dollar total dammage.

 

[BigInch]

See thread "Short BP" for Valdez monetary damage figures.
Quick reference:
Total apx $8,500,000,000 Billion
$32,500.00 dollars/BBL spilled.

"We have a leadership style that is too directive and doesn't listen sufficiently well. The top of the organisation doesn't listen sufficiently to what the bottom is saying." Tony Hayward CEO BP
"Being GREEN isn't easy." Kermit

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpiIWMWWVco

http://virtualpipeline.spaces.liv

 

[Clumpweight]

Thankfully the well has now been plugged but how frightening it is how little we have learned in this industry. There's a price to pay for the 'cheaper 'n' deeper' ethos that has been adopted. Now the finger pointing can begin in earnest and I think the MMS is going to come into the firing line, as are the majors who have outsourced all their engineering expertise, for which Hayward's predecessor Lord Brown was responsible for at BP. Not to mention TransOcean who have kept below the parapet, especially regarding their rig annular BOP failures on the UKCS which resulted in the HSE turfing out two of their rigs several years back. The following article would point to some domestic housekeeping being a priority.
Click on the link to watch the video clip & then read the article

http://www.wimp.com/oilspills/

Lawrence Solomon, Financial Post · Saturday, Jun. 26, 2010. Some are attuned to the possibility of looming catastrophe and know how to head it off. Others are unprepared for risk and even unable to get their priorities straight when risk turns to reality.

The Dutch fall into the first group. Three days after the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico began on April 20, the Netherlands offered the U.S. government ships equipped to handle a major spill, one much larger than the BP spill that then appeared to be underway. "Our system can handle 400 cubic meters per hour," Weird Koops, the chairman of Spill Response Group Holland, told Radio Netherlands Worldwide, giving each Dutch ship more cleanup capacity than all the ships that the U.S. was then employing in the Gulf to combat the spill.
To protect against the possibility that its equipment wouldn't capture all the oil gushing from the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, the Dutch also offered to prepare for the U.S. a contingency plan to protect Louisiana's marshlands with sand barriers. One Dutch research institute specializing in deltas, coastal areas and rivers, in fact, developed a strategy to begin building 60-mile-long sand dikes within three weeks.

The Dutch know how to handle maritime emergencies. In the event of an oil spill, The Netherlands government, which owns its own ships and high-tech skimmers, gives an oil company 12 hours to demonstrate it has the spill in hand. If the company shows signs of unpreparedness, the government dispatches its own ships at the oil company's expense. "If there's a country that's experienced with building dikes and managing water, it's the Netherlands," says Geert Visser, the Dutch consul general in Houston.

In sharp contrast to Dutch preparedness before the fact and the Dutch instinct to dive into action once an emergency becomes apparent, witness the American reaction to the Dutch offer of help. The U.S. government responded with "Thanks but no thanks," remarked Visser, despite BP's desire to bring in the Dutch equipment and despite the no-lose nature of the Dutch offer --the Dutch government offered the use of its equipment at no charge. Even after the U.S. refused, the Dutch kept their vessels on standby, hoping the Americans would come round. By May 5, the U.S. had not come round. To the contrary, the U.S. had also turned down offers of help from 12 other governments, most of them with superior expertise and equipment --unlike the U.S., Europe has robust fleets of Oil Spill Response Vessels that sail circles around their make-shift U.S. counterparts.

Why does neither the U.S. government nor U.S. energy companies have on hand the cleanup technology available in Europe? Ironically, the superior European technology runs afoul of U.S. environmental rules. The voracious Dutch vessels, for example, continuously suck up vast quantities of oily water, extract most of the oil and then spit overboard vast quantities of nearly oil-free water. Nearly oil-free isn't good enough for the U.S. regulators, who have a standard of 15 parts per million -- if water isn't at least 99.9985% pure, it may not be returned to the Gulf of Mexico.

When ships in U.S. waters take in oil-contaminated water, they are forced to store it. As U.S. Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen, the official in charge of the clean-up operation, explained in a press briefing on June 11, "We have skimmed, to date, about 18 million gallons of oily water--the oil has to be decanted from that [and] our yield is usually somewhere around 10% or 15% on that." In other words, U.S. ships have mostly been removing water from the Gulf, requiring them to make up to 10 times as many trips to storage facilities where they off-load their oil-water mixture, an approach Koops calls "crazy."

The Americans, overwhelmed by the catastrophic consequences of the BP spill, finally relented and took the Dutch up on their offer -- but only partly. Because the U.S. didn't want Dutch ships working the Gulf, the U.S. airlifted the Dutch equipment to the Gulf and then retrofitted it to U.S. vessels. And rather than have experienced Dutch crews immediately operate the oil-skimming equipment, to appease labour unions the U.S. postponed the clean-up operation to allow U.S. crews to be trained.

A catastrophe that could have been averted is now playing out. With oil increasingly reaching the Gulf coast, the emergency construction of sand berns to minimize the damage is imperative. Again, the U.S. government priority is on U.S. jobs, with the Dutch asked to train American workers rather than to build the berns. According to Floris Van Hovell, a spokesman for the Dutch embassy in Washington, Dutch dredging ships could complete the berms in Louisiana twice as fast as the U.S. companies awarded the work. "Given the fact that there is so much oil on a daily basis coming in, you do not have that much time to protect the marshlands," he says, perplexed that the U.S. government could be so focussed on side issues with the entire Gulf Coast hanging in the balance.

Then again, perhaps he should not be all that perplexed at the American tolerance for turning an accident into a catastrophe. When the Exxon Valdez oil tanker accident occurred off the coast of Alaska in 1989, a Dutch team with clean-up equipment flew in to Anchorage airport to offer their help. To their amazement, they were rebuffed and told to go home with their equipment. The Exxon Valdez became the biggest oil spill disaster in U.S. history--until the BP Gulf spill.

Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe and author of The Deniers.