A Drop of Rain

Before you say to yourself, oh, this will all be fine, consider the complexity of achieving success with relief wells. As this author has already noted, it can take many weeks to mill through the original well casing once the relief well intersects it at around 18k feet. And that itself is hardly guaranteed, these wells are hard to drill, and frequently fail.

This guy considers, if the first relief well succeeds, a target date of around September to be realistic, and August to be too best case to be considered as a real goal. And that’s IF and ONLY IF the first well A: intersects the existing well, and B: doesn’t fail in the process.

In the Ixtac blowout, it took 10 months and numerous relief well attempts before they succeeded.

Here we have another oildrummer drilling guy, aliilaal, explaining a bit about why Relief Wells (RW) are so complicated. Keep in mind that the relief wells are what will actually fix the problem, everything else is just a stop-gap measure.

aliilaali on June 1, 2010 – 12:36am Permalink | Subthread | Comments top

idle thoughts on problems in hitting the target with RW ….had said my 2 cents on wellbore surveys and now form the RW standpoint there are some things to consider with regards to RW target

1- like i’d said ….current technology’s theoretical limits can hit a 10ft radius ball with a confidence interval of 90%…this limit applies on RW with with a grain of salt since expected interception is 18000 rkb ….but really depth can be +- 50 ft on depth …the problem here is azimuth of RW (think 3d geographical grid) ….so essentially the target for the RW is not a circle but a rectangle (in cross sectional view of leaking well when looked at from right or left) of approx 75′ (length) x 2′ (width)

2- now there are two options to establish pressure communication b/w RW and LW (leaking well)…(1) mill into the LK csg or run a hot tap (pull along LK and run a perf gun)….high pressures will likely preclude a hot tap and most likely it will be the milling option
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Ok, so we’re reading up on the BP Deepwater Horizon oil blowout, we’re impressed by all the technology and resources being thrown at the problem. And it is in many ways very impressive, all those drill ships, and other deep ocean oil service vendors, ROV (remotely operated vehicles) control ships, pumping ships, etc, all lining up as they are requisitioned from other oil drilling activity in the Gulf of Mexico.

But the really scary thing is to contemplate this blowout up in the Arctic, where the next wave of deep water drilling is set to take place, and that’s what I suggest you start doing. Imagine having to move all these spill recovery and containment resources, drill ships, etc, up to the Arctic, it’s almost impossible to visualize, primarily because… well because it simply would not be possible to do this type of recovery effort up there.

On May 14th, I called Robert Thompson, the current board chair of Resisting Environmental Destruction on Indigenous Lands (REDOIL). “I’m very stressed right now,” he told me. “We’ve been watching the development of BP’s oil spill in the Gulf on television. We’re praying for the animals and people there. We don’t want Shell to be drilling in our Arctic waters this summer.”

As it happened, I was there when, in August 2006, Shell’s first small ship arrived in the Beaufort Sea. Robert’s wife Jane caught it in her binoculars from her living-room window and I photographed it as it was scoping out the sea bottom in a near-shore area just outside Kaktovik. Its job was to prepare the way for a larger seismic ship due later that month.

Since then, Robert has been asking one simple question: If there were a Gulf-like disaster, could spilled oil in the Arctic Ocean actually be cleaned up?
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You might have come across this ‘Fucking Booming’ by FishGrease, but in case you haven’t, here’s a snippet and a few pictures to give you the idea:

Generally, boom is long and bright bright orange or yellow. It is not bright bright orange or yellow so you can see it, dear fledgling boomer, but so Governors, Senators, Presidents and The Media can see it. It has a round floaty part that floats, and a flat “skirt” that sinks. A RULE: the floaty part never floats high enough and the skirt never rides low enough. Some oil will ALWAYS go over the boom and some will ALWAYS go under it. Our task is to MINIMIZE both! We do that by fucking proper fucking booming. Here. This picture teaches you almost 100% of what you’ll learn in DKos Booming School, about fucking proper fucking booming:

I lost my one copy of Photoshop, had to learn Gimp, and so the quality is sorta piece-of-shit-c*nt, but you get the idea. It’s fucking obvious. Boom is not meant to contain or catch oil. Boom is meant to divert oil. Boom must always be at an angle to the prevailing wind-wave action or surface current. Boom, at this angle, must always be layered in a fucking overlapped sort-of way with another string of boom. Boom must always divert oil to a catch basin or other container, from where it can be REMOVED FROM THE FUCKING AREA. Looks kinda involved, doesn’t it? It is. But if fucking proper fucking booming is done properly, you can remove most, by far most of the oil from a shoreline and you can do it day after day, week after week, month after month. You can prevent most, by far most of the shoreline from ever being touched by more than a few transient molecules of oil. Done fucking properly, a week after the oil stops coming ashore, no one, man nor beast, can ever tell there has been oil anywhere near that shoreline.
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Well, here’s two graphics that show the next step. You can get high resolution versions by clicking on the images. Source: BP riser cut/cap info page. (Update: see comments for updated progress on the shearing operation, which failed on the first attempt).

You can also watch the BP LMRP capping project video that was just released. Personally, that guy who presents makes me sort of ill to watch, but you can get a sense of the project, with liberal doses of Corporate spin to reduce the impression of disaster (note especially the image of the oil coming out of the BOP stack, it’s a light gray haze, instead of an angry black cloud, which is what it really looks like).

Step 1: cut the pipes:

Step 2: lower the cover/LMRP cap onto the cleared BOP top:

And there you have it. Slice the main part of the drilling riser tube away from the BOP unit (blowout protector) with giant hydraulic clippers, then carefully slice the riser/drill pipe at the BOP with a diamond band saw.

That will in theory provide a reasonably flat surface to fit the device they will then lower down onto the top of the BOP.
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Here’s the latest summary of ROCKMAN’s best current understanding of the events that led up to the BP Deepwater Horizon blowout. As usual, this was embedded deep inside the current theOilDrum.com blowout comment thread, but it is clear and concise enough to give a good overview of the information we now have that seems reasonably solid.

ROCKMAN on May 31, 2010 – 9:11pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Parent subthread | Comments top

Winter — I’ll use your question to give a brief summary, with the permission of the editors, for the benefit of the newbies who seem to be showing up hourly.

Above all else this tales goes with a very BIG IF: if we have a accurate picture of how the incident began then here goes: they had run production casing from total depth back up to the well head/BOP. Cement was pumped down the drill pipe to the bottom of this casing and forced back up between the csg and the rock. The reason for this cmt job is to isolate the oil reservoir. This cement seal would be the only barrier preventing the well from “coming in “ (flowing oil/NG up the csg). Prior to pumping the cmt the weight of the drilling mud kept the reservoir from flowing up. The backpressure stopping the flow was a result of an 18,000’ column of heavy drilling mud.

Before temporarily abandoning the well BP was required for safety reasons to set a series of cement plugs in the production csg to ensure the reservoir would not leak to the surface until they were ready to produce the well. To make the eventual re-entry of the well easier BP “displaced” the riser (that 20” tube that connected the well head/BOP to the drilling rig on the surface of the GOM) with seawater and thus removing the heavy drill mud from the well. But they did this before setting the top cmt plug which would have kept any oil/NG from flowing up should the csg cmt fail. This is why testing the validity of the cmt job was extremely critical: the column of seawater could not produce a sufficient backpressure to prevent the oil/NG from rushing to the surface. If the cmt didn’t hold there was a 100% certainty of the well flowing oil/NG. There has been much discussion about the interpretation of the tests conducted on the cmt, the nature of the cmt, who has ultimate responsibility for certifying the cmt job. Likewise the reason for waiting to set the top cmt plug until after displacement has been speculated by others. I’ll leave those debates to others. But a good cmt job wasn’t the last safeguard.
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Wall Street Journal article BP Decisions Set Stage for Disaster. The Journal is digging up some pretty solid material, read the article and see for yourself.

And now a BP worker takes 5th, making prosecution a possibility.

What’s up with that? Taking the 5th? That’s got to be about the worst nightmare for BP, what do you think the US congress is going to think about that? And another says he can’t testify due to ‘health conditions’? like what? is BP threatening his family? (joke, just kidding, ok?). I guess something could make BP look worse at this particular time, but off the top of my head, I’m hard pressed to think of anything.

But maybe the damage that the guy taking the 5th will cause re PR damage is far less than what the testimony would have revealed. I can’t think of any other reason for BP to have allowed that, can you?

Not looking so good for BP and deep water drilling. Though why we focus on deep water is not clear to me, the Mexican blowout at Ixtac, which took 10 months or so to finally stop, was at ‘only’ 150 feet ocean depth, where divers could access the components directly.

By the way, very few people have much hope for the top kill, it’s considered highly unlikely to succeed, though of course, let’s hope it finds that unlikely point and does anyway.

Even the relief wells are pointed out to not be guarantees either, a very difficult procedure, that could at best take well into this September to be completed successfully (that’s assuming that poster, who yes, sounds like a near illiterate stupid 15 year old internet troll, but apparently is actually a deep sea driller with years of experience. Hopefully he’s more competent at drilling than at writing, but I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt. He’s new to the oil drum though, so it’s not guaranteed he is what he claims).

aliilaali on May 28, 2010 – 1:53am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | [Parent subthread ] Comments top

for the love of god

i am saying top kill is taking a piss into the wind …not worth attempting

relief well — you seem not to be able to to get the concept …this is the only solution here….what i have been saying is the procedure involved in establishing pressure communications into the leaking well is very very tough…on average it takes more than one try to get it done …..so let me dumb it down for you …..
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I’m going to continue the practice of mining theoildrum comment threads for understanding, and because most of you aren’t about to spend hours per day reading them, I’ll post some of the choicer nuggets here, the ones, that is, that actually explain in clear language things that the mainstream media is simply too sound bite oriented to explain properly.

So here’s the clearest explanation of the difference between reality and what you think reality should be.

bigtuna on May 26, 2010 – 10:48am Permalink | Subthread | Comments top

FF, Shelburn, and Rockman have posted some of the most insightful things, and some of the posts here should return to the strings, to understand better what is going on.

A few words about “why didn’t they do this sooner” and “why didn’ the government do mre” to implement the top kill. There is a good video [albeit only a few mins long, and that compresses what probably took hours] of the remachining of the control pod, valves, and connectors to the BOP to get the top kill devices to be connected properly. For various reasons, these original connectors – the choke and kill lines, that were originally on the BOP were either damaged, or do not match the connectors that come from the manifold that swings the mud into the two lines. There was some pretty amazing work done with ROVs that had to cut, machine, and polish connector sites so that the new system can connect and hold pressure. When you look at the video, remember that there are people at the surface who are controlling robots at 5000′ underwater, basically cutting metal, turning nuts, etc. THe people doing this are working their asses off, and wheter they get paid by BP or whoever, we need to realize that they are doing some amazing things.

As to why not sooner, etc. If I may step off the techno talk for a minute. I think this is a symptom of TV culture, where Jack Bauer or CSI or whoever, has infinite cool technotoys to do things in 41 mins… For those of us in industry, the reality is that drilling to depth is ALWAYS dangerous, and takes time, brute force, and at the same time, requires machines and people that have to integrate and work well. People somehow think we have insta ROV’s that can zip to the ocean bottom and magically cap leaks that have never occurred before. It ain’t like that. The laws of thermodynamics, newtonian mechanics, etc. still rule. Sorry kids. Life is still governed by fundamental rules

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Here’s an interesting view from Louisiana. This guy makes a lot of very good points, and I’m glad to see him mention the plume of dead zone that is the direct result of nitrate fertilizers creating vast algae blooms at the mouth of the Mississippi river, along with the current oil spill. He covers some pretty good material from the current best understanding of the process of oversights and errors that may have led to this blowout.

He also, quite correctly, notes both Democrats and Republcans (demadon’ts and republican’ts as he amusingly labels them) are about equal in their actions as far as reality is concerned re Louisiana. He doesn’t mention the corporatism that is creeping through our society like its own monster version of that spreading oil slick down there though, but then again, once normal regular people start talking about that, well, we might actually be getting ready for real, non-symbolic changes to come about.

I’m glad this guy connects some of the dots, noting that the Gulf provides about 30% of current US oil production, or 15% or so of current US consumption (we only produce about 50% of our oil. It was 40% prior to the 2008 collapse, now we consume about 2 million barrels a day less). In other words, if you don’t like this stuff, stop consuming the oil. And that is the ground of any real change, changing your behavior, changing the rules.

Also make sure to take a look at today’s Theoildrum.com top kill thread to see the progress of the hoped for top kill of the main blowout. Let’s keep our fingers crossed.

If you want to know what Louisianians are thinking right now, then listen to this Garland Robinette clip.
source

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Here’s another little gem of a comment posting, again at theoildrum.com, Deep Water Horizon Oil Spill Multiple Plumes. This is for those of you who are wondering how all this oil/water/pressure stuff actually works. If you’re not interested in the technical parts of the Deepwater Horizon spill, just move along, this is all meat.

roger_rethinker on May 24, 2010 – 9:56pm Permalink | Subthread | Comments top

Deep Water Horizon Oil Spill Multiple Plumes
By Roger Faulkner
Re-posted with edits May 24, 2010
(originally posted http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6499#comment-628572)

I have consulted with several experts, and I have modified this blog post somewhat from previous posts, but the essential ideas are intact. The Deepwater Horizon oil spill is different from all previous blow-outs because of four separate unusual or unique aspects of this particular blowout:

1. The gas: oil ratio (GOR) in this well is reported to be about 3000, which means about 150 pounds of gas per 285 pounds of oil (34% gas by weight, more than 70% by mole ratio methane + ethane). This well is between a typical gas well and a typical oil well. The high amount of gas at the high pressure of the reservoir means that the properties of the reservoir must be understood as a supercritical solution which I here term petrogas. It is possible that there is no fluid phase boundary within the reservoir, but the expert I spoke to (Dr. Robert M. Enick, Bayer Professor of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering, Swanson School of Engineering, University of Pittsburgh) thinks that is unlikely. On the other hand if two phases do coexist within the reservoir, it is very likely that more than 50% of the weight of the petroleum is in the supercritical phase, since at 12,000 psi Methane is a very strong solvent. We bet a beer on this; I still think the petrogas is a single supercritical phase in the reservoir. We both agree that by the time the petrogas rises to the wellhead, it is probably a two-phase flow.

a. According to information given to the team that is tasked to estimate the flow, the pressure in the reservoir is about 12,000 psi, but only 180 Fahrenheit, which surprised both of us (TOD bloggers: is this credible?). If this pressure is correct, and the 8500 psi estimated pressure behind the BOP is correct, then the average density of the petrogas in the drill pipe is 0.62 g/cc, which is reasonable for a supercritical solution of gas + oil.
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