Darwinian posted this one in TheOilDrum comment thread.

If you did not see 60 Minutes’ two segments on the Deepwater Horizon Blowout, then you should watch it now. Both segments are now available online.

According to this report there were several things that caused the disaster. The BOP had a hydraulic leak and a weak battery. Other than this there were three things that led to disaster.

1. The Annular, a rubber seal that is supposed to close off the well had been damaged. That problem was ignored.

2. One of the two control pods had lost some of its function. That problem was ignored.

3. Halliburton was to place three concrete plugs to seal the well. Traqnsocean wanted keep the mud in the column until all three plugs had been placed. But BP overruled them and ordered the mud pulled out before the third plug was in place. They ran a pressure test before pulling the mud but because the BOP was had a damaged gasket the results of the test was not accurate.

Anyway you must watch these two segments from 60 Minutes. It will make you mad as hell but I believe you will then know a whole lot more about what caused the blowout afterwards.

60 Minutes: Deepwater Horizon’s Blowout, Part 1

60 Minutes: Deepwater Horizon’s Blowout, Part 2

And, as if all this were not enough, the platform Atlantis may also be in danger of a catastrophic failure that would dwarf the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

Here’s a Ted Talk by Jeremy Jackson. Note the title, which is in past tense. I’m not sure when people are going to wake up and start comprehending what’s actually going on here….

In this bracing talk, coral reef ecologist Jeremy Jackson lays out the shocking state of the ocean today: overfished, overheated, polluted, with indicators that things will get much worse. Astonishing photos and stats make the case.

Read transcript.
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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.

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This may or may not be the story ROCKMAN referred to (read down a bit for the quotes I included towards the end of the posting) in the current oildrum Deep Horizon blowout thread.

AlanfromBigEasy on May 14, 2010 – 3:06pm Permalink | Subthread | Comments top

Story circulating in New Orleans

With appropriate caveats:

BP contracted Schlumberger (SLB) to run the Cement Bond Log (CBL) test that was the final test on the plug that was skipped. The people testifying have been very coy about mentioning this, and you’ll see why.

SLB is an extremely highly regarded (and incredibly expensive) service company. They place a high standard on safety and train their workers to shut down unsafe operations.

SLB gets out to the Deepwater Horizon to run the CBL, and they find the well still
kicking heavily, which it should not be that late in the operation. SLB orders the
“company man” (BP’s man on the scene that runs the operation) to dump kill fluid down the well and shut-in the well. The company man refuses. SLB in the very next sentence asks for a helo to take all SLB personel back to shore. The company man says there are no more helo’s scheduled for the rest of the week (translation: you’re here to do a job, now do it). SLB gets on the horn to shore, calls SLB’s corporate HQ, and gets a helo flown out there at SLB’s expense and takes all SLB personel to shore.

6 hours later, the platform explodes.

Pick your jaw up off the floor now. No CBL was run after the pressure tests because the
contractor high-tailed it out of there. If this story is true, the company man (who
survived) should go to jail for 11 counts of negligent homicide.

Alan
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AlanfromBigEasy on May 14, 2010 – 8:01pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | [Parent subthread ] Comments top

This story did come from within the industry. I agreed to keep the source(s) confidential.

Alan

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No real confirmations yet, but judging from the recently released video, one set of researchers puts the Deep Horizon blowout rate at between 60k and 100k barrels per day.

Steven Wereley, an associate professor at Purdue University, analyzed videotape of the sea-floor gusher using a technique called particle image velocimetry.

A computer program simply tracks particles, and calculates how fast they are moving. Wereley put the BP video of the gusher into his computer. He made a few simple calculations and came up with an astonishing value for the rate of the oil spill: 70,000 barrels a day — much higher than the official estimate of 5,000 barrels a day.

The method is accurate to a degree of plus or minus 20 percent.

Given that uncertainty, the amount of material spewing from the pipe could range from 56,000 barrels to 84,000 barrels a day. It is important to note that it’s not all oil. The short video BP released starts out with a shot of methane, but at the end it seems to be mostly oil.

Another earlier estimate, based on an analysis of the slick size, puts it at about 25k barrels per day.

But the media continues to report that oil is leaking into the Gulf at 5,000 barrels per day. At SkyTruth we estimate the spill rate is closer to 1.1 million gallons (26,500 barrels) per day, based on the size of the slick on satellite images and Coast Guard maps, and thickness estimates derived from visual descriptions of the slick. That puts us at a total spill of 21 million gallons so far.

To be fair, BP says we really can’t know, but there is something to the higher estimates when you watch the recently released videos of the oil/gas blowout. And in terms of public relations spin and damage control, stating it’s a smaller number sounds better on TV.
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