A Drop of Rain

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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