This story is interesting because it shows just how dangerous this deep sea stuff really is. I’ll assume Statoil is a bit more safety focused than BP, given how Norwegians tend to be in general.

May 21 (Bloomberg) — Statoil ASA partially evacuated platform C at the Gullfaks field in the North Sea after pressure in a well destabilized, shutting production at the facility and the nearby Tordis field.

“We still have an unstable pressure situation,” Gisle Johanson, a company spokesman, said by phone today. The company is continuing to pump drilling mud into the well and is putting together a plan on how to proceed, Johanson said. Output was halted at Gullfaks C and Tordis, he said.

There were three different events starting on May 19 and continuing yesterday when workers were evacuated, he said. The chance of a blowout is “very small,” Johanson said, adding that there was no leak and no injuries.

The North Sea Gullfaks field produced about 78,500 barrels of crude oil a day in March. Platform C is one of three at the field and processes oil and gas from the Gullfaks Soer and Gimle fields and is also involved in production from the Tordis, Vigdis and Visund fields, according the Norwegian Petroleum Directorate. Tordis produced 15,500 barrels of oil a day in March, according to the directorate.

But of course, it was only last year that the West Atlas rig blows out in Timor Sea (2009).

An out-of-control rig fire off off the coast of Western Australia could prove a clarion call for the hazards of deep-sea drilling. Since Monday, a fire emanating from an oil and gas wellhead in the Montara Field has engulfed a drilling rig called West Atlas being used by Thai company PTTEP Australasia, according to industry publication Upstream Online. “The measures which we have been able to take so far can only mitigate the fire. They will not stop it,” said executive Jose Martin of PTTEP Australasia, which owns the actual well.
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Shelburn came up with another excellent overview/analysis article, buried in the comments section of the The Gulf Deepwater Oil Spill, sheen, other oil layers, and RIT flows thread.

Shelburn is an oil industry guy, ROV was/is his specialty if I remember right. Great stuff, with ROCKMAN, there’s a lot of good information coming out, and good interpretation of what’s going on now. Fairly objective I’d say too, not everything is 100% but the effort is clearly being made to be as clear as possible.

(Update: just published on theoildrum: What caused the Deepwater Horizon disaster? by aeberman)

shelburn on May 20, 2010 – 4:10pm Permalink | Subthread | Comments top

A POSSIBLE HISTORY OF THE LEAK:

The original survey, performed shortly after the rig sunk, did not locate any oil leaking – at that time.

Comments have been made that the bottom was obscured with mud and that is quite possible, the rig and riser reaching bottom would have stirred up a lot of the very soft mud.

But ROVs don’t depend on video for locating oil leaks, they use sector scan sonar which is standard equipment on any work class oilfield ROV. Even a small oil leak will show up like fireworks on a sonar screen, even if the optical visibility is zero.

I think it is a reasonable assumption that there was an initially a very small area of leakage, literally a pinhole, most likely inside the BOP. It is also possible that the kink in the riser, and presumably a kinked or broken piece of drill pipe inside the riser, was holding back some or most of the flow.
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New live footage of the live oil stream:

Live Broadcasting by Ustream

Also an ongoing excellent discussion blowout oil spill thread from the oildrum. As usual, much additional information and discussion contained in the very long comment thread. More oil industry guys are posting now, it’s getting interesting watching them exchange views and analysis.

Well, it looks from CNN live blowout video that the inserted tube seems to be helping a little bit.

Latest reports are that the insertion tube is getting about 5000 barrels a day. Given that the main leak was about 85% of the total flow, and that it looks like roughly 2/3’s of the previous video flow is being captured, that would put the pre insertion flow rate at about 10k barrels per day, give or take.

Today’s TheOilDrum.com Deepwater Horizon blowout thread.

This fits more or less with what people in the business were saying, although of course it’s very difficult to make estimates based on so little information.

At least it’s not the top possible 50k barrels per day, that an uninterupted blowout would have caused. Remember, the drilling and riser pipes crimped, and the BOP itself also had crimped the pipe partially, so there was never a question of a 100% flow.

The good news of course is that, given that USA now gets about 30% of its production from the Gulf of Mexico, and that it has to import about 50%+ of its daily oil supplies, this may, finally, help slow and then start reducing our daily oil consumption, for the simple reason there just isn’t any extra oil out there.
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Real quick, here’s a May 17 video of the blowout plume. this is from Senator Bill Nelson’s blowout page.

That doesn’t look very sealed to me, that’s all I can say.

Let’s hope the attempt to pump drilling mud at very high pressure behind the leaking BOP components is more successful than this particular attempt. Good ongoing discussion at theoildrum.com.

And also lets keep in mind, we are now strip mining Canada for its oil sands, Canadian standard liquid oil production is in decline, and apparently the oil sands oil is just about making up for the oil that is lost through decline. Can you say running faster and faster just to stay in place? Good, I thought you could.

Drilling off the coast of Nigeria, pirates invade, ripping apart the tundra and vast resources of the Canadian wilds, using vast amount of natural gas in the process to heat the oil. Drilling at more than five thousand feet, then down some 10-20,000 more feet, or even deeper, to get at the last available pools of oil.

And nobody is saying the obvious, umm, I think it’s over folks, it’s time to stop, our brilliant lack of planning isn’t working out very well.
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