Day one of the accident? the riser would have to be cut off to do that and a “dart” isn’t going to do squat in an 8000 psi greased hole that has a partially clamped drill pipe in it.
what they need is a quick release flange that cleanly separates the riser and allows for another flange/valve to be mounted back on. Doesn’t help thinking of this now.
They already have one. It’s standard equipment on every rig. . When everything is bent to fuck, it doesn’t work. You can’t engineer something to work even when it’s bent to fuck.
Really. A big bullet shaped object, injected with force will plug up a hole. Any hole can be plugged.
I think you missed the thrust of my comment when I said BP is either lying or incompetent. The accusation of lying was in reference to BP’s relentless low-ball estimates of the size of the leak, plus their claims that ‘there is just no way to measure the spill’. In case you missed it, nearly 150 years ago Gauss did the math on plumes and point sources- point being that yes, the size of the leak can be determined by examining the plumes. I assumed a major oil company would Have To have heard of this, therefore they must be lying.
The next day I heard a report on the BBC about how BP had fired most or all of their engineers in favor of outsourcing everything- down to their own expertise. They don’t have the internal expertise they claim as they’re too cheap for even that. They have fancy robots because they bought them, and so on. So, it dawned on me that maybe these guys actually were not aware of Gauss’ equations. For a major oil company, I believe that amounts to incompetence.
As to whether BP or the Army Corps of Engineers could do a better job plugging the leak, who knows? I feel like BP is focused on extracting the oil where the ACOE would be focused on simply overwhelming the forces at work, but I don’t have enough information to really call it.
Really.
The well is DOA when it’s stopped. Nothing they’ve done to kill it would allow them to restart it.
No, I mean BP’s solutions tend to gravitate toward extracting oil to the surface for now. It doesn’t strike me as best solution, but I could be wrong.
Its looking like its one of the only things they can do, given the depths, pressures involved, lack of experience with this level of a disaster and its unique location, damage to existing infrastructure, etc.
Well, this is frightful, if true:
Sen. Bill Nelson: Reports of oil seeping up from seabed, well casing may be pierced.
transcript, snabbed from Oil Drum:
See also CBS:
Could Damaged Oil Well Casing Lead to Underwater Tar Pit?
We may actually have a situation developing where nuking the well is the only option with a reasonable chance of success.
The problem is that the well casing will likely burst if you do that.
This is the reason they use mud. The mud applies pressure that is balanced by the rock, etc. on the outside of the casing as the pressure increases with depth. It is the weight of the mud that contains the pressure, not high viscosity.
This is also the reason taking the mud out of the hole and replacing it with water was a really bad idea.
The BOP is supposed to choke off the well while it is still full of mud. Once you lose the mud, closing the opening will likely burst the pipe.
a 1" thick steel tube has been pierced? I find this dubious.
Which begs the question, are there any nuclear demolition experts on-call?
I’ve been on two wells where this happened. It’s a big (huge actually) deal normally, but in this case, it changes absolutely nothing. If the casing is going to burst, it will do so, it will do so at its weakest point. This is nowhere near the reservoir. Unless something truly bizarre has happened, the relief well will sort stuff out in +/-August or so.
Seems likely, but not certain.
Then we’ve got that Simmons character, peddling stories about a leak from the seafloor seven miles away from the well site.
That’s some reagent grade truly bizarre stuff, that story is. I wonder what the guy’s profit angle is there.
I apologize if I am rehashing stuff here, just don’t get the same posting/reading time I used to. That said…
Has anyone heard talk of nuking the leak anywhere else other than the internet, anywhere in the mainstream press? How was it presented? I have cut my cable news pretty much down to TRMS, but I haven’t heard it offered even as a far-off possibility.
Is there anyway that it is just plain unstoppable, even with nukes or relief wells? I mean, do we even know for sure what we tapped into? I imagine that if nothing were done, a well down there could be so massive that it could leak for a life time and not even be close to drained out.
The casing underground burst?
They are talking about underwater plumes, but they seem to be confused between dispersant-caused plumes and new plumes coming out of the seafloor. To me it isn’t clear what they’re saying.
I would think as suction is added to the riser then the pressure would equalize to the point that it wouldn’t leak out.
Trouble is, they don’t have a seal. If they don’t allow some to leak out at the bottom, they run the risk of having seawater move into the pipe (Bernoulli). If that happens, methane clathrate cloggage becomes a serious hazard.
In case anyone needed another reason to not trust the mainstream press on this story (or anything really), here was a CNBC story that was at one point listed on Yahoo Finance’s front page.
Talk of Second Oil Spill in Gulf Grows Louder
What’s the reality? The “second spill” is less than 1/3rd of a barrell a day that has been leaking since Hurricane Ivan (2004). LINK
I’ll tell you who I don’t trust in this. The oil companies. The entire oil business for that matter.
If not for the press we wouldn’t have heard about this at all.