Just an oildrum expert update on the inserted tube that is now successfully sucking up a percentage of the blowout’s oil.

shelburn on May 16, 2010 – 6:46pm Permalink | Subthread | Comments top

About the flow up the drill string to the Discoverer Enterprise:

I’m making some assumptions here but this is pretty close to my area of expertise.

BP will be extremely careful in ramping up this flow, I wouldn’t be surprised if they took 24 hours or more to bring it to maximum flow. Any misstep could cause problems and set back the operation.

They will gradually increase the flow until they reach some maximum. The maximum may be dictated by several constraints but here are the three I see as most likely, in no particular order.

1 – If the outflow is greater than 15,000 bpd they may be constrained by the processing capability onboard the Discoverer Enterprise.

2 – They may reach the maximum that will flow through the 4″ pipe, which I think will also be in the same 15,000 bpd range.

3 – This is the one that we all hope for – they are able to suck almost all the flow in the 21″ riser. I believe they will monitor the end of the riser and always insure that a small portion of the gas and oil is still leaking out the end. If they suck up more than the leak they will suck seawater into the system and that could cause hydrate formation which could clog the pipe and they are back to the full leak escaping to the ocean and probably a day to clean up the mess and get back to recovering oil again.
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[-] shelburn on May 16, 2010 – 6:48pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | [Parent subthread ] Comments top

When they reach maximum flow, maybe sometime tomorrow then I would expect BP to offer some flow figures.

These threads are very long and somewhat boring, and not all the posters have much of value to add, in fact, most don’t, so I’m editing out the useless stuff and adding the nuggets of information from oil industry insiders, such as shelburn.

Keep in mind this tube is only going to get part of the leaking oil, the next step, also never tried at that depth, is to inject ground up tires and golf balls, back up the BOP unit, from the under side of the shear valves that have partially cut the flow of oil, they are hoping to get the entire flow stopped or slowed significantly using the so called ‘junk shot’ to clog the upflowing oil under the shear values in the BOP unit.

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