The The Oil Drum, as expected, is doing a great job providing up to the minute coverage and analysis from their industry professionals.

Another oil field engineer, retired, shelburn, has appeared and is adding his views (his specialty is the remotely operated submersibles that are doing the actual work on the ocean floor, 5000 feet below the surface.)

Here’s the current Oil Spill Insights from a Retired Manager of an Offshore Underwater Service Company Deep Horizon Oil Blowout Information Thread with his analysis.

Unlike most blogs and news sites, the comments are definitely worth reading, and contain large amounts of real information, often from other oil field professionals, ie, not flakes who just google and read these things, like me, for example.

However, the disturbing piece of news that comes near the end of the comments as I posted this is:

The Dome hit a snag!

Oil catcher dome hits snag near leak site: BP exec

Two days to trouble shoot.

…..
shelburn on May 8, 2010 – 3:58pm Permalink | Subthread | Comments top

from AP – “Icelike crystals encrusting a 100-ton steel-and-concrete box meant to contain oil gushing from a broken well deep in the Gulf of Mexico forced crews Saturday to back off a long-shot plan to contain the leak. The buildup on the specially constructed containment box made it too buoyant and clogged it up”

Oops

The buoyancy problem should be an easy – but time consuming – fix. EVERYTHING at 5,000 feet is time consuming.

I don’t know much about hydrates but that much buildup doesn’t sound good.

Maybe they need to hook it up to the drill string, get their hot water and methanol running and use the drill ship to lower it. Which should be doable.

By the way I think they may be planning to use an ROV to inject the methanol.

Just as an overview of previous discussions, ROCKMAN prior to the dome being dropped, did not have much hope that the dome or other ideas would actually work. However, he’s not being dogmatic, that was merely his professional opinion.

We’ll see how this late breaking news on the success or failure of the dome containment vessel plays out over the coming days.

To BP’s credit, at no point have they stated this method would work, they have simply said they hope it will work but not to except success right away, it will involve some trial and error.

More on the container methane hydrate buildup from Bloomberg

Here’s a new analysis from RigZone – Deepwater Horizon: A Technical Analysis as well. Technical stuff if you’re interested in that engineering level information.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 8th, 2010 at 12:19 and is filed under Our World. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.