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Seepage from Nearby Well

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owg

Chemical
Sep 2, 2001
741
The press is going have a hay day with "There about 27,000 abandoned wells in the Gulf." and it seems one close to the BP well is seeping. Can anyone clarify the situation. Is this good news, bad news, or not news at all?

HAZOP at
 
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It really shouldn't be news at all. Several hundred years ago explorers were writing in their journals that they saw tar balls and oil slicks in the middle of the ocean. The oil has always leaked, seeped, and slopped to the surface.

Offshore wells are typically characterized by very high abandonment pressure (25% of OOIP was about all the industry ever got out of these wells) so with 27,000 abandoned wells drilled by hundreds of operators, operated by a different set of thousands of operators, and plugged by a third group (that was a subset of the second group) you can expect some botched handoffs and bad procedures.

My guess is that the daily "seepage" is on a par with what the BP well was spewing. The difference is that no one gets a Pulitzer for reporting on the seeps. There is another difference--the seeps are spread over a very wide area and natural biological processes take care of most of it. The spewing is too much, too fast for the bugs to deal with as quick as the armchair quarterbacks would like.

David
 
Don't you watch Anderson Cooper, now this natural seepage in the middle of the ocean is all bp's fault too.
 
the other thing is that an "abandoned" well doesn't mean it's just left there... in the UK there are strict rules about how an abandoned well is left- bascially two cement barriers between any formation that can flow anything (oil, gas or water) and the surface. That means shallow water bearing formations as well as the hydrocarbon reservoir. And then the wellhead is removed.

I'm sure there are similar rules in the GoM.
 
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