This is such a perfect little summation. Background: shelburn operates ROV vehicles, or works in that part of the oil drilling industry. With the Deepwater Horizon blowout, he started posting a lot more, along with ROCKMAN at theOilDrum.com

There’s some really major statements made here in a comment he made today, and I think you should really give them some thought.

I’ve added in links to the relevant sites he mentions here, and included some explanations to make it easier to understand if you are new to these concepts and groups.

shelburn on June 3, 2010 – 6:38pm Permalink | Subthread | Comments top

I have lurked around this site (theOilDrum.com) for about 4 years and finally signed up after I went to the APSO (sic, he means ASPO) (Assocation for the Study of Peak Oil) meeting last fall. Never really posted until this past month.

I have now advanced to the point of actually donating, something I never do in real life.

But this site is a beacon of reason and responsible discourse on energy matters that are either ignored, manipulated or totally misconstrued by the media and politicians and poorly understood by the general public.

Hopefully in some small way we can help spread the word about the end of cheap oil and prepare people for the coming transition.

My heartfelt thanks to Gail, Heading Out, Nate, Leanne, Prof Goose and all those listed on the right hand column, not to mention the posters who have provided me with a free education for the past few years.

I would encourage those who are just discovering TOD to help support this effort which is dependent on volunteers and your donations

The guys in the oil fields know peak oil is here now, the only ones who are still in denial are the American people as a group and a lot of politicians who cannot figure out a way to tell them this information without immediately ending their political careers.

shelburn joins an expanding line of petroleum industry insiders, geologists, and engineers, who understand that declining prodution rates are not some future event, they are here now, and are happening all over the world, and the race to maintain our present oil production levels globally is just not doing very well.

If you need a reminder, here’s one:

Less than four months ago, the United States Joint Forces Command (USJFCOM) issued a dramatic warning in its 2010 Joint Operating Environment[1] report about an event that is likely to change the world we live in:

By 2012, surplus oil production capacity could entirely disappear, and as early as 2015, the shortfall in output could reach nearly 10 million barrels per day.[2]

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In case you’re wondering where this is all at.

The riser pipe tube was cut at about 100 ft or so from the BOP unit, then they tried to saw with the diamond band saw device the riser tube from the top of the BOP, but it got stuck and the diamonds wore out, so then they cut the riser pipe a bit above the BOP, which makes creating the seal between the below device and the BOP device a bit harder.

The LMRP Cap preparation work and installation is proceeding as planned. Today the riser has been cut. The LMRP Cap will be in place later in the week. To help understand this process the following videos are available.
Lower Marine Riser Package (LMRP) Cap

I couldn’t get the video to load right on this page, sorry, so just click to watch the LRMP video

And that’s where it stands right now.

You can also watch all the live underwater cameras on one screen at mxl.fi/bpfeeds2. That’s pretty cool.

How the Top Hat method works

Here shelburn from theOilDrum.com explains how the top hat works

shelburn on June 4, 2010 – 4:07pm Permalink | Subthread | Comments top

Repost from previous thread

It is obvious that most people do not understand the basics of how the top hat is supposed to operate. And BP, per usual, has not thought it necessary to explain anything.

The Top Hat Seal

For a number of reasons the top hat seal is NOT a pressure seal. It is designed to try to keep seawater out, not to keep oil in.

Let me repeat – The top hat seal is NOT a pressure seal. It is designed to try to keep seawater out, not to keep oil in.
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You can check out what BP is putting out in video and other media a their Gulf of Mexico Response section of their site (see left navigation bar for various formats available, video, image, etc). For video feeds and other video, check out their Response in Video section.

Here’s a site with multiple live camera shots from different sources, deepwaterbp.com. Same site, their wall of ROV videos (takes a long time to load, click on any video to see it full size, esc to return).

Some of these are I think windows media, not sure, some are flash.

Before you say to yourself, oh, this will all be fine, consider the complexity of achieving success with relief wells. As this author has already noted, it can take many weeks to mill through the original well casing once the relief well intersects it at around 18k feet. And that itself is hardly guaranteed, these wells are hard to drill, and frequently fail.

This guy considers, if the first relief well succeeds, a target date of around September to be realistic, and August to be too best case to be considered as a real goal. And that’s IF and ONLY IF the first well A: intersects the existing well, and B: doesn’t fail in the process.

In the Ixtac blowout, it took 10 months and numerous relief well attempts before they succeeded.

Here we have another oildrummer drilling guy, aliilaal, explaining a bit about why Relief Wells (RW) are so complicated. Keep in mind that the relief wells are what will actually fix the problem, everything else is just a stop-gap measure.

aliilaali on June 1, 2010 – 12:36am Permalink | Subthread | Comments top

idle thoughts on problems in hitting the target with RW ….had said my 2 cents on wellbore surveys and now form the RW standpoint there are some things to consider with regards to RW target

1- like i’d said ….current technology’s theoretical limits can hit a 10ft radius ball with a confidence interval of 90%…this limit applies on RW with with a grain of salt since expected interception is 18000 rkb ….but really depth can be +- 50 ft on depth …the problem here is azimuth of RW (think 3d geographical grid) ….so essentially the target for the RW is not a circle but a rectangle (in cross sectional view of leaking well when looked at from right or left) of approx 75′ (length) x 2′ (width)

2- now there are two options to establish pressure communication b/w RW and LW (leaking well)…(1) mill into the LK csg or run a hot tap (pull along LK and run a perf gun)….high pressures will likely preclude a hot tap and most likely it will be the milling option
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Does your head begin to whir? What about that vast pool of oil spreading at hundreds of square miles per day as I type in the Gulf of Mexico? As Dmitri Orlov reminds us, again, the phases of denial go like this:

1. denial—”We are not lost! The ski lodge is just over the next ridge, or the next, or the next…”
2. anger—”We are wasting time! Shut up and keep trotting!”
3. bargaining—”The map must be wrong; either that or someone has dynamited the giant boulder that should be right there…”
4. depression—”We’ll never get there! We’re all going to die out here!” and
5. acceptance—”We are not lost; we are right here, wherever it is. We better find some shelter and start a campfire before it gets dark and cold.”

If you need this made explicit:

1. We’re not running out of oil, we can get plenty from Deepwater, Oil Sands, and assorted other strange sources that are riskier to use than anything we’ve developed before, in one way or another. If those pesky environmentalists would just let us produce all the energy that American ingenuity is capable of, then we’d have no problems at all. Damned liberals.

2. Drill baby Drill, teach those bad Arabs that we don’t need them (ignore that we can only produce, at our currently depressed US consumption of about 19 or 20 million barrels per day (bpd), roughly 50% of our current requirements.) Open Arctic sources to drilling, anything, just so we don’t have to change. Sure, we can vote for change, but forget about actual change, that’s too difficult. Damned neo-cons, damned liberals (pick which, or both).

3. We’re in this now: once we apply the right technologies, and fix the broken oil thing in the Gulf, well then, it will all be OK, and we can commence drilling, driving, and consuming cheap plastic garbage shipped in from China.
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