Archive for May, 2010

BP Deepwater Horizon Relief Wells

Monday, May 31st, 2010

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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The Stages of Denial – Adjusting to Peak Oil

Monday, May 31st, 2010

Does your head begin to whir? What about that vast pool of oil spreading at hundreds of square miles per day as I type in the Gulf of Mexico? As Dmitri Orlov reminds us, again, the phases of denial go like this:

1. denial—”We are not lost! The ski lodge is just over the next ridge, or the next, or the next…”
2. anger—”We are wasting time! Shut up and keep trotting!”
3. bargaining—”The map must be wrong; either that or someone has dynamited the giant boulder that should be right there…”
4. depression—”We’ll never get there! We’re all going to die out here!” and
5. acceptance—”We are not lost; we are right here, wherever it is. We better find some shelter and start a campfire before it gets dark and cold.”

If you need this made explicit:

1. We’re not running out of oil, we can get plenty from Deepwater, Oil Sands, and assorted other strange sources that are riskier to use than anything we’ve developed before, in one way or another. If those pesky environmentalists would just let us produce all the energy that American ingenuity is capable of, then we’d have no problems at all. Damned liberals.

2. Drill baby Drill, teach those bad Arabs that we don’t need them (ignore that we can only produce, at our currently depressed US consumption of about 19 or 20 million barrels per day (bpd), roughly 50% of our current requirements.) Open Arctic sources to drilling, anything, just so we don’t have to change. Sure, we can vote for change, but forget about actual change, that’s too difficult. Damned neo-cons, damned liberals (pick which, or both).

3. We’re in this now: once we apply the right technologies, and fix the broken oil thing in the Gulf, well then, it will all be OK, and we can commence drilling, driving, and consuming cheap plastic garbage shipped in from China.
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Now Imagine Trying to Handle an Arctic Deep Water Oil Blowout…

Monday, May 31st, 2010

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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Improper Oil Booming on BP Deepwater Horizon Blowout?

Monday, May 31st, 2010

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:

proper 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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BP Deepwater Horizon – Phase 3 Riser Removal and Capping of BOP

Monday, May 31st, 2010

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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