I have a better understanding of why the methane hydrates are a problem. They said they needed to circulate warm water over the capture device to keep it from freezing up (plugging) and it’s because water was getting in along with the oil/methane. Apparently they were trying what I was thinking of and that was a general dome over the well head to capture the material as it came out. The next attempt would be a cap that seals enough to keep water out but not act as a true seal against the pressure. This way they should be able to pump the discharge without water getting in and blocking the flow.
It seems a simple enough idea to build all future well heads with multiple collars (of increasing size) to attach emergency pumping heads.
Just wanted to mention that, although it hasn’t gotten much press outside the industry, the Administration has gone well beyond the initially directed moratorium on new drilling permits, to immediately halt all deepwater exploration in the Gulf, possibly for up to six months. This includes numerous wells currently being drilled: plug and abandon, as soon as the well can be stabilized. The order affects just over 30 exploratory rigs, drilling for at least ten companies.
This personally hits home as my employers’ current US business (which, ironically is in part is based around helping prevent blowouts) is almost exclusively focused on deepwater offshore. I don’t see much of a chance of maintaining our staff in the face of half a year of enforced inactiivity. Oh, well, guess I can go down to Louisiana and clean up oil-soaked beaches in the interim.
OK, so, bad planning on our part to be focused on too narrow a market. But there will be thousands of others thrown out of work as well, in an area where the non-oil economy is simultaneously taking a major hit from that bloody blowout. Also, whether or not the ban goes the full six months or not, stopping and starting these operations is no small matter. Even a cutoff of a month will likely mean six months or more before operations return to previous levels. If it goes the full six months, chances are many of the affected rigs will leave the Gulf and it will take several years to recover.
Anyway, I understand the the Administration is under enormous pressure from the public to Do Something. Well, they’ve done it. I hope it works out well for the rest of y’all.
What really pisses me off is that the accident comes down to a handful of people, possibly even down to one person’s decision. On top of that, we’ve been drilling offshore since the turn of the last century yet we don’t have a communal contingency set up.
AFAIK the following changes should be made:
a well head with 3 independent valves capable of shutting off the flow of oil.
a well head with a flange capable of mating up to an emergency riser.
an emergency capping/recovery system on regional standby to be shared by and paid for by the companies in the region.
a boom system designed to work in the ocean and capable of corralling oil so it can be pumped to waiting ships.
a separator system that can pump a mixture oil/water and separate out the oil for transport.
I laid out the wrong plan for my pulley-well-plug system.
There are still four 1000-ton pylons. A cable runs from a barge, to the bottom of a pylon, from there to the top of the dome. Winching on the cable produces downward pressure on the dome. The winching must be coordinated simultaneously between all the winching actors.
Maybe they could have set up some sort of “communal contingency” plan for deep water disaster, rather than partying, drugging and looking at porn.
I guess we’ll have to set something up now, as a contingency for a second disaster down the road. That’ll probably take a few months to start putting in place. In the meantime it’s too bad about all the drilling related jobs, such as El_Kabong’s.
Well, as Condi used to say, “I guess no one could ever have imagined something like this happening.”
The last one already exists; water/oil separation must be done for most producing wells. The Discoverer Enterprise, currently on station at the site, has an on-board production system (including separation) that can handle more than 15,000 bbl/day.
I still believe that the most cost-effective way of dealing with blowouts is to prevent their occurrence in the first place. Nevertheless, at this point one has to think that the costs of a research program into techniques and equipment with the aim of more or less reliably controlling blowouts within, say, two weeks of their occurrence, would not be money wasted.
If looking at porn is bad at work then getting a blow job must be…. What? Do you really want to fling political cow patties over this? Can you name any administration that ever had a contingency plan? Given the current public opinion polls on how Obama is handling this I don’t see anything positive about injecting politics into this.
This already exists as well. A BOP has upper and lower rams, a set of shear rams and a Hydril. To prevent fluid comong up the drill string their’s either an IBOP in the top drive, or a TIW valve if that isn’t available.
For reasons that have not been explained, nothing worked.
Yeah, I can see how some would like to cover the regulatory dysfunction that allowed this to happen in a swath of mystery. I just happen to think that when government regulatory agencies are programmed to be fuckups, someone should be held responsible. In this case, that person’d be Bush.
Go ahead and badmouth Obama all you like, he didn’t create the dysfunctional agency of 2000-2008, did he? People would do well not to forget that detail.
Meanwhile back on the OP front: Is BP Doing Enough To Clean Up The Oil Spill?
sigh… Your choice. It’s been a month and the Coast Guard is just now approving sand barriers. I guess that will keep the oil from washing back out to sea. Obama has been in office for a year and a half. How long does it take for a Democrat to be held to account for policy decisions?
BP’s diagram showed multiple valves(?) of some sort but no explanation. All I’ve heard about is the upper compression system (where the damaged rubber came from). According to this NOLA site there was a leak of the hydraulic system that operated the shear rams. I suppose if the drill pipe is still in the well all the emergency valves have to be shear rams.
Well, has Obama had time to dump all of Bush’s moles at the MMS, and restructure it along functional lines, while at the same time rescuing the economy from disaster?
Epic messes like the Bush presidency don’t clEan themselves up you know. It takes time. It’s too bad that the gulf is having to wait for government to start working efficiently again, but you know, they could’ve voted for competent leadership in 2000 and 2004 . They didn’t, so they probably ought to suck it up a bit and quit whining about how the nanny state hasn’t rescued their sorry asses yet.
The diagram shows 4 blind valves that only work if the drill is removed, 2 annular valves that squeeze against the drill or can close off if the drill is removed and 1 shear ram that won’t cut through a drill joint.
I wonder how hard it would be to make a mechanical shear that would cut through a drill joint and is not hydraulically operated.
The question asked has a simple answer: No, BP is not doing enough to deal with the spill.
The question that needs to be asked is: Is there anybody out there who can do more, ot better?
Unfortunately, I think the answer is the same – No. Though there are certainly people out there with more knowledge than me who might have a different answer.
We have opened a Pandora’s Box here, and no one knows what’s inside, or whether or when the lid can be slammed closed again.
While the drawing is mostly correct in general, the BOP configuration is not. Of the four (or five, depending on the stack) rams, at least two sets are always pipe rams: they have cutouts to close around the body of a drill pipe. Having four sets of blind rams would be pointless, because nearly all kicks occur while drill pipe is in the hole, which would make it impossible to shut in any of the rams.
Something else to point out is that drillers are taught to always close the annular first when shutting in on a kick, as the annular will close on any size or shape of drilling tubular in the hole. The trade off is that the annular cannot withstand anywhere near the pressures that the ram preventers can. Chances are the maximum pressure rating for the Deepwater Horizon’s stack was 15000psi, but that figure applies to the rams, choke/kill lines and associated fittings only; the annular can only withstand maybe 30% of that figure. Part of the reason for the complete loss of control is likely that the annular failed immediately upon closure; this probably had little to do with possible damage to the rubber packer, as has been widely claimed in the press, but simply that the pressure of the expanding gas in the kick exceeded the annular’s maximum pressure rating.
Next would have been to close the pipe rams; I have no info on whether this was attempted, but it appears that once the annular failed, the drilling crew had no time to act due to the violence of the blowout. Shearing the pipe (which apparently was at least attempted via a remote control panel) always is a last resort, as once this is done it is no longer possible to use conventional well control techniques to restore the well to balance. Conventional well control requires the ability to circulate mud down a drill string whose bottom end is at or below the point where the fluid influx entered the wellbore.
This is also standard equipment. Every riser is fitted with an emergency disconnect system, which is normally used if the rig has to skidaddle out of the path of a hurricane. Not much use if the rig explodes and sinks, however.
Of course, the question remains, how many other minor agencies that nobody notices, are this screwed up? I’m gonna guess more than zero. We’ll only find out when they explode. Isn’t that nice?
when you say pipe ram I’m assuming you mean the shear type? If this is the case, why can’t they activate them now? Is the pressure system that operates them on a common manifold? If that’s the case then redundancy is lost if they can’t separate out the leak in the system.
