I’m not counting a well as being offshore simply because it is in the water. Lakes, rivers, canals, marshes all have wells in them. The first well off the coast out of sight of land was drilled in 1947; that’s what I am calling the first offshore well.
Squink
June 10, 2010, 1:19pm
382
Nope:http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/business/deepwaterhorizon (/7045264.html) (Houston Chronicle, which darn well better get oil stories close ro right)
The Discoverer Enterprise, tethered to the containment cap by a pipe known as a riser, is not a production vessel, but is configured to load fluids onto barges. Minor modifications let it process the oil being siphoned up now, according to Transocean spokesman Guy Cantwell. There are few, if any, ships like it in the world, Cantwell said.
LSU’s Bourgoyne was doubtful that BP could earn any money from the sale of the oil being recovered because of the high cost of transporting it by barge, and that likely is why the company decided to burn off additional oil captured by the Q4000 direct connect.
BP’s Pack said the company plans to use a specialized burner made by Schlumberger called the EverGreen to do the job. In promotional materials, Schlumbeger says the burner performs fallout-free and smokeless combustion of oil and prevents spillage before and after burning, making it good for flaring in environmentally sensitive areas.
Here’s a page on Schlumberger’s EverGreen Burner .
Squink
June 10, 2010, 1:24pm
383
From same article, describing where the oil to be burned is coming from:
an untested collection method that would supplement current efforts could draw 10,000 more barrels of oil a day to the surface, in addition to the 15,000 barrels a day it’s capturing now .
The people who say that BP does nothing but lie ought to take a look at this .
An actual ad from 1999. Talk about follow-though!
LonghornDave:
I think journalists have a responsibility to try to get their story right. I think they have been abysmal in their reporting of this story. The mainstream press didn’t really pick up on this being a huge story for 1-2 weeks after the spill. I read about the explosion from Tudor Pickering by 7:00 the following morning. Tudor Pickering daily puts out better information on the spill then every news outlet combined. It was odd to me how little press the spill was getting for the first couple of weeks. It was also frustrating how many facts they were getting wrong, even simple things. For example, they didn’t even understand the difference between a gallon and a barrel. They also made big mistakes like claiming that the 11 people that died in the explosion had been found alive. Now the press has swung the pendulum the other way and is looking to make up stories and top each other all the while making even more mistakes in their reporting.
I don’t have any problem with you saying you don’t trust oil companies. BP has after all caused a pretty massive problem here. However, I thought it was simply incorrect to make a statement that the oil companies were trying to hide the story. Transocean (and BP) were out there with information essentially immediately. I don’t think there was anything in my original response that was mean. It was essentially just a timeline of stories showing you that your comment was incorrect. I think it is a little annoying when someone is shown to be wrong and they just dig their heals in rather than admit a mistake, so my second comment to you was certainly more harsh although not overly so in my opinion.
Further to compound things, you can see that the mistaken press reporting of the “second spill” that I was criticizing in my post gets not only brought up three posts after I bring it up (by Gonzomax) but has now become two additional spills not one. Further, Gonzomax also brings up the issue that those “spills” were probably being hidden by these evil oil companies again. Once again, easily proven to be false.
Everyone is quick to criticize BP for incorrectly estimating (or perhaps even lying) about the oil flow rate. This despite the absolute fact that it is an incredibly difficult thing to measure and that a team of government and academic experts formed solely for the purposes of performing such a measurement not only: 1) took a long time to make an estimate; 2) made their estimate as a wide range; but also 3) will likely soon be coming out with another estimate which exceeds even the high end of their previous estimate range. This seems to be clear proof that estimating the rate is an exceedingly difficult thing to do. Nevertheless, there are literally hundreds of posts on this board criticizing BP for being wrong on their estimate; however, those same people are perfectly fine with: 1) stating falsehoods that are easily proven wrong with just a couple minutes of fact checking; 2) spreading lies by quoting non-reputable sources without even bothering to determine if they are correct; and 3) attacking people that try to go out of their way to state the truth.
You may say you were trying to be civil. However, I see what is going on here as spreading of lies, fear mongering, populist outrage, and an aversion to the truth. There are legitimate things that should be discussed here including discussion about whether we should be drilling in the deepwater, what punishment BP deserves, what did they do incorrectly to cause this, and of course the one that is the title of this thread. I think that the spreading of lies should be actively discouraged by everyone here.
The flow rate was estimated poorly because BP did not release the high quality videos it had. Experts say if they had access to them early they could have nailed the flow rate . But BP just gave them poor quality picures to work from. They have covered up from the first day.
Well, I think you are lying, and that you can be proven wrong easily. In the initial report by the Flow Rate Technical Group, only one of the methodologies used to estimate the flow rate relied on videos, the Plume Team. Here’s what they have to say.
Flow Rate Technical Group Report:
The challenges this team faced in getting reliable results were many. First, they only had a limited window of data in time to choose from. They had to select data from before the RITT was inserted into the riser as that tool captured a variable amount of flow. They needed a time window when application of subsea dispersant was not perturbing the flow. They required footage from after the period when a trench was excavated at the end of the riser to better expose the end of the plume. Most challenging was getting good lighting and unobstructed views of the plumes from work-class ROV’s not intended to capture research-quality footage and occupied doing other tasks at the time.
Second, perfecting the methodology for calculating multiphase flow (oil, water, gas, hydrate in poorly known ratios) under very high pressure is worthy of a research effort. This is not a turn-key project, and yet the team did not have the luxury of time to explore many alternative approaches or calibrate methods with deep-sea tests using known fluxes of fluids in prescribed ratios. A key parameter was the average ratio of gas to liquid. This term seemed to vary over the time period of the spill. Increasing gas increased the velocity of the plume but decreased the mass flow. Lacking independent estimates, the group took the average values provided by BP at face value. Analysis of the available short movies of the raiser flow shows the existence periods when the flow oscillates from pure gas to seemingly pure oil. This appears to be an indication of Slug Flow Regime. These periods of gas-oil flow fluctuation are in the range of minutes but could also be in the range of hours or even as long as days. In order to properly determine the effect of the intermittency of the gas/oil composition in the total estimate of the oil discharged from the riser leak, the analysis should be extended to long video records spanning several days.
Not all of the experts engaged in PIV analysis. Some simply reviewed the work of those that did, while still others provided additional verification by checking the PIV answers with their calculations using other techniques. Given the challenges in applying the methods in to this particular problem, team members concluded that formal statistical error bounds on upper and lower limits on flow volume derived from a rigorous estimation of the uncertainty in model parameters would fail to capture all possible sources of error in this approach to recovering the true flow rate. It would only account for the known unknowns, but not the unknown unknowns that might be revealed if one could actually calibrate these methods against a known flow rate given the complex multiphase and flow behaviors at high pressure. The experts concluded that the effect of the unknown unknowns made it more difficult to produce a reliable upper bound on the flow rate. Therefore, they chose to simply produce a range of lower bounds from their independent analyses, all of which they thought were defendable. A formal error analysis by one member of the plume team estimated that the uncertainty in any one estimate (e.g., from the “known unknowns”) would be 40%.
They say the problem with the videos is that the use of dispersants messed with the flow and that the ROVs aren’t designed to produce videos for this type of work. The only mention by this group of BP is that they had to rely on BP for estimates of the gas / oil ratio.
If you have any evidence to support your claim then produce it. If not, my question is why do you feel the need to lie? Isn’t causing the biggest environmental disaster in U.S. history a big enough complaint to have against BP? Why do you need to create other complaints?
Oil Spill Bounty
$10 billion to the party (other than BP) that can stop the leak. Monies deducted from BP’s Oil Pollution fines. Payable upon success.
Now in market for slightly used nuclear weapon, hardhat and pickaxe. Scuba gear desirable, but not necessary.For $10billion, I’ll damn well dive down there. Price negotiable.
Gukumatz:
Now in market for slightly used nuclear weapon, hardhat and pickaxe. Scuba gear desirable, but not necessary.For $10billion, I’ll damn well dive down there. Price negotiable.
Can a unprotected human body remain recognizable as such at that depth?
Ignore this. I took it to a better place , GQ.
adhay
June 12, 2010, 8:09pm
391
BP is in a funny spot. They want to stop the flow. They want to use the well since it is a terrific producer.They also want to limit their liability.
gonzomax:
BP is in a funny spot. They want to stop the flow. They want to use the well since it is a terrific producer.They also want to limit their liability.
The spill rate is irrelevant to any of this.
As has been explained numerous times, there is no using of the well. It will never be a commercially producing well. At some point they or another party might drill another well to tap into the same reserves, but it will not be this same well.
At some point, we will know how much has been spilled. When the reservoir engineers come out with their final numbers, which may take many months, they will come out with a very accurate number. Remember, they (the reservoir engineering team that is part of the Flow Rate Technical Group) have not even come out with their preliminary numbers yet.
ajb867
June 14, 2010, 8:48pm
395
In an e-mail on April 16, a BP official involved in the decision explained: “It will take 10 hours to install them. I do not like this.” Later that day, another official recognized the risks of proceeding with insufficient centralizers but commented:
"who cares, it’s done, end of story, will probably be fine."
Has this person received a termination letter yet? Good lord talk about foot in mouth.
Squink
June 15, 2010, 3:21am
396
The Power of Obama Compels BP to do More, Faster:
Under intense US pressure, energy giant BP presented a new plan to roughly triple the amount of oil it is capturing from a ruptured Gulf of Mexico well by the end of June, to more than 50,000 barrels a day.
“After being directed by the administration to move more quickly, BP is now stepping up its efforts to contain the leaking oil,” the official said Monday on condition of anonymity.
“They have now outlined a path to contain more than 50,000 barrels of oil per day by the end of June, two weeks earlier than they originally suggested,” the official said.
President Obama says “And in the end, I am confident that we’re going to be able to leave the Gulf Coast in better shape than it was before.”
Found in this article here: Oil estimate raised to 35,000-60,000 barrels a day - CNN.com
I mean, I’m all for dewy-eyed optimism and all, but seriously? “Better shape than before”? How is that even possible given the enormity of this spill?
FoieGrasIsEvil:
President Obama says “And in the end, I am confident that we’re going to be able to leave the Gulf Coast in better shape than it was before.”
Found in this article here: Oil estimate raised to 35,000-60,000 barrels a day - CNN.com
I mean, I’m all for dewy-eyed optimism and all, but seriously? “Better shape than before”? How is that even possible given the enormity of this spill?
I heard on a late night news program that he would restore the wetlands and the barrier islands that protected the south from storms.
FoieGrasIsEvil:
President Obama says “And in the end, I am confident that we’re going to be able to leave the Gulf Coast in better shape than it was before.”
Found in this article here: Oil estimate raised to 35,000-60,000 barrels a day - CNN.com
I mean, I’m all for dewy-eyed optimism and all, but seriously? “Better shape than before”? How is that even possible given the enormity of this spill?
Words of wisdom from a single guy;
The only realistic way of doing this would be raze (not raise) the levees on the Mississippi downstream from at least Baton Rouge. I’m pretty sure that’s not going to happen.