Just lawyers earning their keep.

However, once that oil slick hits Galveston Island, the trial climate is Houston isn't going to be any better than New Orleans.

Somehow even a company as large as BP is unlikely to have enough folk to be doing all this work themselves, The comment was based on the assumption that they have hired that out to local contractors (the sort of folk Alan writes about) who had dropped the ball. But because BP is in charge, overall, they get the blame.

Coast Guard officer admits to being "Dumb and Slow"

But promises to do better.

http://www.wwl.com/Coast-guard-is--slow-and-dumb--as-boom-sits-on-doc/71...

Jefferson Parish commandeered 40 boats already chartered by BP to lay boom and fight spill as it came ashore.

Under law, when the gov't commandeers any property, they compensate for it's use. Local TV reports that JP may be "slow" in this case.

Alan

PS: It was actually refreshing to hear an officer admit it. And I believed his promise to do better.

Crimping the well would require putting another blow-out preventer (BOP) on the well and using the rams from it to squeeze the pipe shut. A "hot tap" is where they drill into the side of the well, and inject mud to stop the well flowing and then cement to seal it.

It appears to me that if there was,even for a short time, 5,000 BPD through the inserted 4" pipe, all you would need to know would the gas fraction at the surface to do some reasonable estimates. For that matter I would think visually observing the change in the plume when the inserted pipe flow is known would get you +/- 25%.

I suppose you expect Obama to wave his magic Obama Wand and fix things. I suggest you don't understand the scale of what we (globally, collectively) face.

Obama is just a fly on the nose of the proverbial "bull in the china shop". Hard as he may try to lead, he has little ability to prevent the inevitable damage. But swat at the fly if you must.

Don't worry though. The flies eventually fly away, to be replaced by a new fly.

Perhaps you should reference this:

http://www.deepwater.com/fw/main/Listing_by_Location-17.html#bra

http://www.deepwater.com/_filelib/FileCabinet/fleetupdate/Fleet_Director...

Most of Brazil's deep water drilling tech resides with Trans-ocean.

We voted for him in large numbers. Were we duped, or are we all really corporatist imperialist warmongers at heart?

Rhetorical question, of course. Not everyone was duped -- Alexander Cockburn, http://www.counterpunch.org/ for one,had his number early on.

But really, we are still driving all over the place -- Hwy 101 to the beach is crowded, and people still keep telling me about all the neat places they are flying to. If we really cared about reducing the demand for oil that puts such pressure on companies to play Sorcerer's Apprentice, wouldn't we start with our own behavior? Rhetorical question, of course. Disclaimer -- I went to the beach, and it was way fun.

I can't see a real agent of real change in the line of succession, so a series of mysterious disappearances is unlikely to bring a strong people's leader like Uncle Joe Stalin or Smilin' Mao to Amerikka.

The best hopes lie in a military takeover with a closet real people's guy/gal/gay from the lower ranks leading the overthrow of the bourgeois banker's regime. Of course, once the people have recognized the error of their previous ways and have inhaled the wisdom of the revolutionary vanguard's consciousness of the true nature of the objective conditions, then a people's election can be held.

The people, united, can never, ever, ever ever, ever ever ever, be defeated.

That's all folks.

Hi Cynthia, I do not doubt that you are a true lady , and congratulate you on your restraint, but you must realize that the words you do use are just cussing in Sunday clothes.;)

Perhaps it would be revealing to read commentary about the Tripartite agreement from some folks who are rather knowledgeable about arms control matters:

http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/2731/zombie-fuel-swap-back-from-the-dead-...

http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/2732/cbms-gone-wild

http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/2733/confidence-demolition-measure

http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/2735/the-tripartite-agreement

http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/2739/an-alternative-view-of-the-zfs

My career has intersection with these folks' area of expertise...as per usual, the actual situation in many matters is far more complex and nuanced than lay people realize.

BTW, FWIW, I have been disappointed that President Obama has not done more to throttle back our MIC and done more to regulate the FIRE sector, etc, but what exactly was our alternative choice? McCain and Palin?

We need a new term, maybe "conspiracy salad" derived from "word salad" where people just throw togther, a la Palin, a melange of ideas, none of which are supported by evidence or any sense of looking at the situation from the viewpoint and circumstances of the person being accused.

Yes, Obama is president. We agree on that. We may not agree that he's free to act as dictator, outside the law, every time a bad circumstance happens. We criticized Bush for his assumption of royal powers, Cheney likewise, while they were dismantling regulatory agencies. Now that the corporations are much more powerful, and the regulatory agencies are staffed with Bush cronies, Obama's appointees have to first clean up the agencies while they're trying to use the agencies to regulate the corporations the bureaucrats are loyal to.

This takes time, which you interpret as willful stalling. We don't agree on that. And so on and so forth. I think you really need to show the evidence for your claims, or at least tell us why you can read peoples' minds.

Pete -- Not arguing how well BP takes care of business, there are some blatant errors in that report. Above all else running a continuous casing string from the bottom of the well all the way back up to well head is far more expensive than just running a liner part way up. Easy to understand: running 18,000' of casing is more expensive than running a 3,000' liner. It's also makes for a much safer well: the continuous casing covers all the previous exposed casing and casing cement jobs which could fail at some point.

Sticking drill pipe, losing drill pipe, taking a kick and having to shut the well in and kill the flow: all normal events when drilling in DW...happens to all operators. This is not a risk free effort by any stretch of the imagination despite what any spin doctor might pitch. OTOH, we know how to handle these problems. BP also knew but took chances that were not necessary and now they and the rest of us will pay the price. In general BP followed the same procedures the rest of the industry follows. They just did a very poor job of it.

Sounds like the wireline guys were having trouble getting tools all the way to TD in that article....

mud can quickly vanish into subterranean voids

(from the same Sentinel article). While I am perfectly ignorant about geology, it surprises me that there can be voids at such depths. How come? (I suppose it does not have to be literally voids, but regions of lower pressure and some kind of elasticity or compressibility, but still. Why are these regions not already compressed by the surrounding formations? Could it be water-filled regions that accept the mud and give water back to the well?

Thanks for your answers.

How about NOT to do overfishing, NOT to use the Gulf as personal amusement park or garbage dump, like for starters?

Chances are the tuna will tolerate the oil in the water column and then lay their eggs. The question then becomes how will the eggs and larvae do upon hatching.

Oil dispersants an environmental ‘crapshoot’: Chemicals used on Gulf spill carry unknown risks, scientists say

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/37282611/ns/gulf_oil_spill

While the dispersant may result in fewer oily egrets in the marsh, the bluefin is one of the creatures that may suffer greatly instead. The oil spill area overlaps with only known spawning area for one of two remaining bluefin populations. This bluefin population spends about 10 months of the year in the cold waters of the north Atlantic and then swims thousands of miles to reach an area near the Deepwater Horizon well to disseminate sperm and eggs in the warm Gulf waters between April and June. The larvae float about 10 to 15 feet below the surface in early stages of growth. No one is certain whether the oil will destroy the eggs or kill the larvae, but scientists fear that could happen.

“It is a critical habitat … and this is the most delicate life stage,” said Barbara Block, a professor at Stanford University studies bluefin tagged with sophisticated tracking devices. “The biodiversity of bluefin is at stake right now. … If we lose the year (of new bluefin) it will have a very large impact on a population of bluefin that is on the edge of extinction.”

This is the spawning ground for many other species, including marlin, swordfish and yellowfin tuna, which arrive in the summer.

Some of the chemical components distributed throughout the water will remain toxic for decades, and it's not clear what the impact could be on future generations of bluefin or other creatures — sperm whales, Bryde’s whales, offshore dolphin populations and seabirds — that fish far from shore.

Oil dispersants an environmental ‘crapshoot’: Chemicals used on Gulf spill carry unknown risks, scientists say

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/37282611/ns/gulf_oil_spill

While the dispersant may result in fewer oily egrets in the marsh, the bluefin is one of the creatures that may suffer greatly instead. The oil spill area overlaps with only known spawning area for one of two remaining bluefin populations. This bluefin population spends about 10 months of the year in the cold waters of the north Atlantic and then swims thousands of miles to reach an area near the Deepwater Horizon well to disseminate sperm and eggs in the warm Gulf waters between April and June. The larvae float about 10 to 15 feet below the surface in early stages of growth. No one is certain whether the oil will destroy the eggs or kill the larvae, but scientists fear that could happen.

“It is a critical habitat … and this is the most delicate life stage,” said Barbara Block, a professor at Stanford University studies bluefin tagged with sophisticated tracking devices. “The biodiversity of bluefin is at stake right now. … If we lose the year (of new bluefin) it will have a very large impact on a population of bluefin that is on the edge of extinction.”

This is the spawning ground for many other species, including marlin, swordfish and yellowfin tuna, which arrive in the summer.

Some of the chemical components distributed throughout the water will remain toxic for decades, and it's not clear what the impact could be on future generations of bluefin or other creatures — sperm whales, Bryde’s whales, offshore dolphin populations and seabirds — that fish far from shore.

Oil dispersants an environmental ‘crapshoot’: Chemicals used on Gulf spill carry unknown risks, scientists say

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/37282611/ns/gulf_oil_spill

While the dispersant may result in fewer oily egrets in the marsh, the bluefin is one of the creatures that may suffer greatly instead. The oil spill area overlaps with only known spawning area for one of two remaining bluefin populations. This bluefin population spends about 10 months of the year in the cold waters of the north Atlantic and then swims thousands of miles to reach an area near the Deepwater Horizon well to disseminate sperm and eggs in the warm Gulf waters between April and June. The larvae float about 10 to 15 feet below the surface in early stages of growth. No one is certain whether the oil will destroy the eggs or kill the larvae, but scientists fear that could happen.

“It is a critical habitat … and this is the most delicate life stage,” said Barbara Block, a professor at Stanford University studies bluefin tagged with sophisticated tracking devices. “The biodiversity of bluefin is at stake right now. … If we lose the year (of new bluefin) it will have a very large impact on a population of bluefin that is on the edge of extinction.”

This is the spawning ground for many other species, including marlin, swordfish and yellowfin tuna, which arrive in the summer.

Some of the chemical components distributed throughout the water will remain toxic for decades, and it's not clear what the impact could be on future generations of bluefin or other creatures — sperm whales, Bryde’s whales, offshore dolphin populations and seabirds — that fish far from shore.

VIEWING ROV VIDEO

Apologies to those who already read this on a previous thread.

There should be a short course in viewing ROV videos to go along with this live streaming. There is always a learning curve when a new oil company man comes onboard until he understands the peculiarities of ROV video. A lot of this is not intuitive and no one should feel stupid because things in the pictures confuse them. I’ll try to hit just a few of the highlights.

Debris in the picture – This area of the Gulf of Mexico is covered with incredibly fine soft mud. If an ROV is working near the bottom and he has to move upwards his thruster wash will hit the bottom and stir up this mud and any other light debris (hydrates, tar balls, strings of heavier petroleum products, etc). The currents at this depth are usually slow and it can take a long time, as much as 15 minutes or more, before the visibility clears. And if the ROV is working anywhere near the bottom it is very difficult not to occasionally kick up some mud.

There are a number of other ROVs working in the area (any light you might see is another ROV vehicle or cage). So if any ROV upcurrent from the one feeding the live video stream kicks up some mud and debris that will drift over the area and cloud or obscure the picture.

It is also possible that another ROV is doing some excavating which will stir up LOTS of mud.

If there were any actual “eruptions” of gas coming from around the casing or elsewhere I doubt conditions would return to normal.

I would guess the “snowstorms” of white material are methane hydrates. They are near neutrally buoyant so chunks would float around just like the mud does. Methane hydrate at the surface melts at about the same temperature as water, 0 deg C (32 deg F), but at that depth the ambient pressure is over 2,000 psi and the melting point of methane hydrates is 18 deg C (64 deg F) and the surrounding water temperature is about 4 deg C (40 deg F) so they stay “frozen”.

Color – Be careful about making any judgments based on color. There is no ambient light at that depth so everything you see is being illuminated by the lights from the ROV. ROVs typically carry lights that may have different color temperatures and the angle of the light, the intensity and the distance between light and subject, the amount of turbidity (mud) will all have an effect on the apparent color your eyes see. I noticed that the leaks coming out of the kinked riser often seem to be different colors. I think that they are actually all the same and the visual differences are due to the factors I just listed.

Distortion – ROV cameras are usually ultra wide angle and have considerable distortion. A straight length of pipe can look like it has a very pronounced curved bend in it when viewed from one angle and then look straight or even bent the other way when viewed from different angles. This is one of the factors the task force measuring the flow will have to compensate for if they try to measure flow based on videos.

For some reason the human eye is comfortable with very high levels of distortion. For example how many people do you know who stretch a standard 4:3 TV picture to fit their 16:9 wide screen. They would rather view a picture with 33% distortion that to have the smaller but undistorted picture.

Also the apparent difference in the size of a leak between a video you saw earlier and one you are looking at now could be because the pilot has zoomed his camera in or out or has switched to a different camera with a different focal lens. ROVs typically carry several cameras. Or it could be because the volume of the leak has changed.

Holes in the Seabed – Originally the broken end of the riser was partially buried in the mud. Before the RITT was deployed the ROVs spent a lot of time excavating around the riser to get access to insert the RITT and probably to try to get the mud down some feet below so they wouldn’t stir it up and obscure their visibility. Typically these excavations are a series of large holes as the ROV often has problems seeing where he is working. When the ROV pans around and you see holes in the seabed that is most likely what you are seeing.

remember that the mud viscosity could be higher than the oil...

remember that the mud viscosity could be higher than the oil...

I think that once the Unified Command put out a number with the caveat that there was uncertainty, BP probably felt it was better to wait for the team of experts to give a number(that was going to happen anyway) then to revise, knowing a revised number could be off too, and undermine perceptions even more(if that is possible). They actually may be using a range around the 5000 with a lot of gas to plan for their design regarding the top kill and other solutions. It'll will be interesting to hear what the experts calculations are with assumptions and ranges and to hear what BP says, if anything, about that number.The gas thing really does make the whole thing tough. I think, given that it is now over a month and oil is reaching shore, trying to argue about any number is kind of beside the point. Even a very small spill for 30 days(or one day) is pretty bad. It's clear people will be arguing for many years about how much leaked and where it ended up. I'm pulling for the Gulf to surprise us and recover from this mess faster and better than we fear.

My guess, Joule, is that the assumption of 0.65 ft/sec is unrealistic. It’s fine based on an assumption of uniform flow along the entire riser. However, with a gas-oil ratio this high at exit and a pressure differential likely exceeding 3000 psi, I would assume sonic shocks are occurring at one or more points somewhere after the blowout preventer. That’s where most of the pressure loss would be.

That means that there’s no way to take the flow rate at one leak and extrapolate it to all of the others without knowing the geometry of the flow path in between. You can calculate a theoretical upper limit for unrestricted flow through a single orifice, but that’s not helpful in this case.

In theory that would be a way to estimate the flow and I expect the task force will look at it but what you may be missing is that I don't think they are able to get a pressure reading just downstream from the kink and that is a place that has an obvious restriction. Also there are a number of places the riser is bent or deformed and some of these may be buried in the mud so there may be more restrictions downstream.

As for BP's reluctance I think there are probably several possibilities the first two that spring to mind are:

Their legal department has put a muzzle on them, a strategy that may well backfire,

or, The know that any estimate they make will be imprecise and probably wrong so and they figure the PR a**kicking now is the same as later,

and, at the moment they have the government to hide behind as all the official estimates have come from the government and later, in court, BP can deny they made any estimates.

On May 14, an approximate pressure just downstream of the BOP was reported as 2600 psi (or so), about 400 psi higher than sea water pressure. I believe both exits are constricted...there may be a kink somewhere in the riser that we have not been shown.

Go up just a few posts to find what could be a possible explanation. The key is that after the visual disturbances things return to normal, if there was a blow out around the wellhead it would continue and probably worsen.

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6501/628318

wrb -- I can't tell if the flow is coming from the sea floor or not. If it is there are two possibilities that I would offer. First, some portion of the leaking drill pipe is buried under the sea floor and that's what they are seeing. No big change in the situation IMHO. OTOH, it might be the flow is now coming from some hole in the casing below the mud line. This is not unprecedented. Over 30 years ago I had a rig sink when NG came up the outside of the conductor pipe. The conductor or drive pipe is that first string of casing run below the well head. All the other csg strings are run inside of it. If this is the case than whatever little chance of the junk or top kill had is probably gone now. Otherwise it probably won't affect the mostly likely outcome: the relief well will kill the flow close to its source. But it could make the ultimate job of permanently plugging and abandoning the original hole that much more difficult.

Why is the oil coming in past the booms.....LOL. Its going over and under them, something I confirmed in a conversation with a Hopedale fisherman. Jefferson Parish officials are keeping press cameras away from the Grand Isle beaches under direction of BP. Breton Sound is full of oil, so is Barrataria Bay....its a massive coverup by BP.

Someone needs to get down there and tell BP what to do.......according to Billy Nungasser, BP and the Coast Guard are enforcing a no-fly zone over the spill, and according to local photographers, BP is forcing local parish police to keep photographers off the beach at Grand Isle. It appears that at every point BP is restricting access in whatever way that it can.

Who is giving them this power? Salazar talks about keeping his "boot" on BP.....but who is enforcing all of these bans, bans on the Parish officials.

I'm no oceanographer but there have always been natural oil and gas seeps. The best estimates that I know indicate that man's activities have doubled the amount of petroleum products going into the oceans from various types of spills, the largest portion coming from waste (a million cars each leak a tablespoon of oil that is washed into the river that goes to the ocean) and tanker accidents. And the long term effect of that doubling is unknown.

There have been some reductions in the natural seeps in areas like the Gulf of Mexico and especially Southern California due to oil production reducing the formation drive but I doubt it is a significant reduction on a worldwide basis.

It is my gut feel that the damage we are doing to the ocean is much greater from all the other chemicals and toxins we pour into our waters than purely petroleum spills. Mother Nature has had millions of years to develop systems (microbes) to take care of a certain level of oil pollution. Some of the toxins we let enter the ocean have no natural counterpart and no system to naturally remove them.

I'd like to see some oceanographers' opinions/research on human impact on the oceans.

There is a 20min version
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0VHC1-DO_8
and a 44min version
http://sackler.nasmediaonline.org/2007/ile/jeremy_jackson/jeremy_jackson...
of this extremely depressing presentation.

This would be the equivalent of sticking your finger in the middle of a pool and swirling it around.

There are a whole host of reasons but the primary one is scalability.

I doubt that the effect of a thousand ships tied together side by side and end to end and grouped into the smallest possible circle (we are talking theoretical here as no captain would ever let you put his ship at risk like that) would reach down more than about 100 to 200 feet, the thrust just dissipates, and would certainly not pass the first layer of opposing current.

Also to get real water movement you need to have the propeller or thruster stationary. The horsepower of a ship mostly goes into moving the ship forward, displacing the water away from the hull on both sides, not in moving the water itself as that is considered wasted power. And there is no place to anchor the ships so that the propeller thrust is primarily moving water.

Sorry to be so negative.

I had an idea of setting up a circle of powerful electromagnets just above the seabed to start a vortex from the bottom but it quickly fell apart for many of the same reasons. I think starting the vortex at the bottom is the only way it would have a chance of working.

If you could ever get a vortex to actually reach the surface it might possibly become self sustaining unless cross current layers ripped it apart. I spent quite a bit of time trying to figure out how it could be done but I don't think its possible under real world circumstances.

HOG -- I don't fault your imagination..keep it up. But as the Aggie implies below it's a matter of scale. Just assume your vortex can reach 100' below the sea level (rather optimistic IMHO). The oil is flowing out 5,000' below sea level. When you take the Aggie's idea of swirling your hand in a pool it's actually would have a better chance of affecting dirt on the bottom of the pool. Consider 6" vs. 10' (about a 20:1 ratio) and then 100' to 5,000' (50:1 ratio). And that doesn't take in account the currents.

But it's still good to hear ideas from all corners. Sometime the "experts' can be too close to a problem to see something obvious.

To explain as briefly as I can: fluid mechanics doesn't work that way. Suction causes swirling vortexes, but swirling vortexes don't cause suction.

Here's an experiment to try. Fill up your bathtub. Take a hole punch and punch out a bazillion little paper dots, and scatter them so they float on the surface of the water. Now take a wooden spoon and try to stir the water in a way that makes the dots all clump up in the middle.

Go ahead, I'll wait.

... and this is ignoring GregTx's point, that the effect of a ship on the ocean as a whole is more like stirring with a toothpick than a spoon.

In the same way that wind shear can weaken or kill a hurricane, the various currents in the water column would kill the vortex, even if you had something theoretically capable of powering the vortex in the first place. Even the biggest hurricanes don't affect the seafloor in deep water.

In my previous life as a recreational diver I remember many times finding multiple currents at different depths, all going in different directions, in only ~100ft of water.

@Jetblast

I understand your frustration at the pace of which BP is mitigating this disaster. But which branch of the federal government would you nominate as the most experienced in closing in a well? I understand the Coast Guard is very experienced in the cleanup aspect but to my knowledge the only people who can get an out of control oil well under control is by nature an oil company or a company like Wild Well Inc.

For better or worse, BP will have the responsibility to close this well in either with the top kill or the relief well in a couple of months.

Great details Jet. And as i've mentioned before when any operator applies for a drilling permit the agree upfron't to allow the Feds to take over any spill emergency. All the Feds need to is deliver notice: no lawsuit or court orders: ipso facto. But does anyone think the gov't was looking forward to taking BP place at the daily news conferences?

All we can do is make corrollations and visual estimates unless they figure out some reliable way of measuring at the source. As shelburn has pointed out, its a sliding scale of probability, probably centered around 15-20k/day when Werely looked at it a week ago. Chances of it being greater than 5k/day, probably 95%, chances of it being greater than 70k/day, probably 5%. And then do you take the average flow (which could be changing daily, either increasing or having increased and decreasing now) and what does that come out to? I (and shelburn and others) keeping reiterating that it is not simple to calculate flow and all rates come with ranges of probability.

Estimates based on oil of the surface are very imprecise. You can probably download the USCG manual on oil spill estimation which talks about that quite a bit.

If someone says there is 25,000 bpd based on satellite photos I would interpret that to mean between 10,000 and 50,000 bpd. Then you take all the other factors that you can to modify that number.

We know from the underwater work and videos that the flow is over 5,000 bpd and most likely at least 10,000 bpd as a minimum. We know from the geology that the maximum well flow is probably about 50,000 to 60,000 bpd and that will be going down at some unknown rate. We know that there is a restriction or series of restrictions that is reducing the flow.

From all that it is probably pretty safe to say the leakage is over 10,000 and under 40,000 bpd. Anyone who tries to tell you that they can get an estimate that is better than about 40% plus or minus is either fooling themselves or trying to fool us. Unfortunately the media just grabs the highest number and reports it as if it was a fact.

just -- Not stupid at all. Doesn't change BP's repsonsibility at all. No different if you accidentally set your house on fire: the fire dept is responsible for saving the house. You are still responsible. And the lawsuits against BP will go on for decades. IMHO. Especially if the oil starts hitting other countries...like Cuba.

It does give their lawyers the opportunity to argue that some portion of the subsequent damage is the Feds' fault. They would argue that BP would have prevented much of the damage and the incompetent Feds screwed up- so BP shouldn't have to pay for everything.

It is not a stupid question and is likely an important reason why the Federal Government has not stepped in it to take over. The other reason, of course, is because there are no easy solutions to the leak.

Retsel

BP spokesman sounded very wary about "top-kill" it really feels like BP is just going through the motions on this.......

where would all the methane hydrates go that are currently floating away at near neutral buoyancy? That seems to be a large volumetric part of this leak.

Maybe they would be slowly pushed up to a depth where they would melt?

Not crazy...I just posted something above about this...not that far from the cold water intake pipe of a large OTC plant. One could capture the oil at the surface in a large "balloon" that vaguely resembles a dirigible filled with oil. The technology could be the same as tensioned membrane buildings.

Please re-post this in new threads when possible. Playing devil's advocate with it I can't think of anything that can't be fixed easily and cheaply to make it work. It got posted to this thread late, I'd like to see what others think.

p.s. Somebody needs to go to jail for allowing dispersant to be used on this.

Ok newbie...you caught me in a good mood so I won't verbally slap you around. This subject was covered in detail early on. In fact, for a newbie your intuition is pretty good. The casing was filled with heavy mud before they cemented it. In fact, that's how they controlled the reservoir when they drilled it originally. So the cost of the mud doesn't matter...it was there in the first place. It was after they ran and cemented the last string of casing in the well that they started pumping the oil based mud (OBM) out of the casing and riser with sea water. It appears that removing this back pressure off of the cement caused the cement to fail and allow the reservoir to flow up. But I think you might have hit the nail right on the head. As the unconfirmed story goes the BP company man didn't want o displace the mud before setting the top most cement plug but was overridden by another BP engineer. Why not leave the OBM below the top cement plug? Just a guess but back in January I re-entered a well that had OBM left in it. Instead of flushing it out in a few hours it took me the better part of 2 weeks and $500,000 to get it and all the debris it had glued to the casing wall out of the well. I don't know if that was the engineers motivation or not. But I can promise you I'll never leave OBM inside casing I plan to re-enter at a later date. But I would also make damn sure my bottom cement was holding before I took the back pressure off.

Its not high priority.....but you are absolutely right-- I don't think BP wants us to see the "kink" leak.

In the interest of objectivity...it might be because all of the ROV's over in that area are focusing cameras at the bottom of the BOP and trying to reconnect the choke/kill lines.

Somebody upthread posted a video of snippets taken over the last week or so showing what the ROV's have been up to.

ok,

when i get things right i saw the kink of the riser at the top of the BOP two times on CNN live view: 1. was about roughly a week ago when i started to follow this informative forum threads here.
The second i think was yesterday after several days only showing the end of the broken riser tube.

In the view roughly one week ago the angle was from behind the BOP in direction of the riser was kinked, with a somebit bad view on what was getting out. It was at the very top of the video, black and cloudy. But one could see in detail how the riser was bend with ist supporting tubes, and how the tube at the top of the BOP just where the riser looks connected was also bend a bit in the same direction. I just read in another post that this part of the BOP, the exiting tube with the connection part is somewhat flexible attached, so that might not be as dramatic as it looked first.

Now on to the 2nd view a day ago one could see the plumes getting out of the kink on three different locations, near to each other, when i remeber right which looked more like spraying out of the small i will not say holes, it looked more like narrow slits where the gas/oil ejected. Compared to the end of the riser where the oil/gas is emitting in a more slowly manner, those plumes at the kink were ejecting small amounts but very fast out of their slits, with the tubulence beginning much more later. The angle was from near along the riser over the kink with the BOP below, with good sight of the plumes.

At the moment, 1:30 am 25th of May here in europe one can see some kind of dashboard with a robot arm attached, like it is manipulating a valve or such. Sometimes a view to the sides, with at least two other ROV's around, according to the other light sources visible, scene at the end of riser. Maybe its the manifold for the dispersant regulation on it.

For me i am another concerned civilian about the health and future of our planet, and was real shocked about what happened out there in the gulf, half way around the globe. Nevertheless i hope it gets fixed at the end, as soon as possible. Let the fuel cost the double at least this oil spill stops. What brings cheap fuel when the eco-system wents down and we only have a living nature in our memories? We have to take care of our mother earth.

To this forum i want to say thank you to all you who are so kind to share your knowledge, insight and true words, especially ROCKMAN and shelburn. Todays media coverage is almost useless when someone wants to know what really is going on on our planet, as sad as that is.

A civilization able to spill video frames of an desatrous event from below sea at 1.5 km deep and 150 bars of pressure all around the world should even be possible to deal with such an event, i am sure.

It may take some time but they will fix it. Lets pray for it ..

ok. been an hour. how about this one! http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:ZhqGUowgfwkJ:www.mi...

You always bring in more MUD than you need in case you lose circulation to the wellbore like you're suggesting. If they do, they just have to lighten the MUD weight until balance is achieved again. Its a delicate balance, but atleast in the case of the Top Kill, they're not worried about destroying the formation, so they'll be aggressive with the heavy weights, only backing off if they lose too much MUD.

If "top of the well" means just below the BOP, then it seems like the restriction in the BOP is eroding allowing more oil and natural gas through.

Farther down in the thread tollertwins posted a link in which Doug Suttles, BP operations boss, believes the most likely flow path for the oil is between two casing strings. The article also indicates that the well contains obstructions that are restricting the flow. "Suttles said the obstructions in the well itself are the most significant restrictions to the flow rate, but that BP also believed that some rams on the BOP have closed but they are obviously not shutting off the flow." However, the article does not mention the actual pressure at the base of the BOP preventing anyone from verifying if obstruction in the well are bearing significant pressure.

k3 -- There is such a possibility but it would be difficult to prove at this point. It's called an "underground blow out". The reservoir is flowing oil/NG up the casing/drill pipe. But if the flow is coming up the csg annulus the pressure might have broken down the cmt shoe at the bottom of one of the shallower csg liners. Some of the oil/NG could be taking that route and flowing into a shallow reservoir. This could charge that reservoir which once contained only water with abnormally pressured oil/NG. If it pressures it up enough one of the relief wells could take a hard kick and even blow out when it hits that shallower zone on the way to its deeper target. A similar event occur many decades ago when I first started in the oil patch. Mobil Oil had been producing from deeper reservoirs at Point au Fer Field in S La for decades. They decided to drill a deeper well in the field. Since they had drilled dozens of wells in the field they knew there was no danger of a shallow drilling hazard. But over time at least one well had a casing leak and charged a shallow reservoir at 800'. When the new well drilled to that depth it took a hard kick no one was expecting. I had just left the rig about 12 hours early. The well blew out and killed 7 hands.

And yes, the hands on the relief wells know of such stories and should be looking over their shoulders for a similar problem.

GeoNola estimated the bht (I assume "bottom hole temperature") using:

Thermal gradients vary areally and with depth, but 1.2 degF/100' is probably close. Temperature at seafloor in deepwater about 40 degF.

(13000/100)*1.2 + 40 = 196 degF.

So, roughly 200 degrees Fahrenheit.

The depth of the reservoir should be 13,293 feet below the sea floor (he used 13,000 feet), but it does not change the estimation of 200 F. I do not know the actual temperature.

The acoustic onboard the ROVs is strictly used for positioning with acoustic transponders and I doubt it would be any use for this application.

The idea is an intriguing one, but above my pay grade. After all I was the guy on deck saying "it can't be working, I don't hear a thing".

Active acoustic is commonly used to measure wind velocity, it ought to be able to measure water velocity. (But with all the schmutz in the flow, velocity can be seen and could be measured in the videos.) The trick is that to measure the total flow you'd have to integrate the velocity (which varies from place to place in the flow) over the area of the flow. You'd also be wanting to estimate how much of the flow is oil, methane, or hydrate flakes. I think you'd need to build a sort of acoustic Simplified Computerized Tomography device with Doppler thrown in. Maybe some sort of split-ring thingy a few meters in diameter and a few meters long studded with hundreds of emitters and sensors, that can be closed around the flow region in the manner of one of those clamp-on ammeters. I dunno if that's ever been done, maybe Rockman or Shelburn knows. If it hasn't, it might be an interesting "science project" that could keep a professor or small consulting company or three supplied with grants and grad students or interns more or less indefinitely. You could build it small and dunk it in a convenient tank for testing and development; and scale it up once you understood the math. The overall cost of a few minutes of this debacle might cover it.

My guess is that passive acoustic would be exceedingly difficult to calibrate transferably. I'd expect it to be sensitive to geometry and to details of the orifice shape (maybe if you set it far enough from the main noise-generating orifice there would be enough spatial correlation to allow things to be sorted out?) With enough computing power you could probably calibrate it for one flow, but whether that same calibration would be of much use for the next flow ... who knows. (That's unlike a voltmeter, which I expect to work on the next voltage source, and the one after that, once I calibrate it.) Sort of a chicken-and-egg problem if you want to apply it to a new problem such as the one at hand.

EDIT: another thing you'd have to sort out when measuring a flow out in the open is how much of the flow is actually coming from the source (e.g. the leak in the riser) and how much is simply entrained seawater dragged along for the ride. This could contribute considerable uncertainty to a video-based or 'acoustic tomography' measurement.

I'd say no. Everybody doing business with Americans knows USA is a big lawyer minefield, to put it frankly. Before doing anything, hire a lawyer or better, a team of lawyers and make sure, your "homeland" funds are protected.

The part of the problem is exactly this over-lawyering of American society. More lawyers graduating than engineers, actually a world record on that. BP is doing this by the American law playbook because there is no other way. Telling the truth...yeah, sure.

I fully support the use of the most effective and safe dispersant. What troubles me a bit is what was not said in the EPA briefing. The EPA a few days ago gave BP just 24 hours to research and submit a report on alternative dispersants.

From the EPA website "The directive requires BP to identify a less toxic alternative – to be used both on the surface and under the water at the source of the oil leak – within 24 hours"

Now they are asking for another report. I've got no problem with that, and I hope BP does a better job this time around. But does anyone believe that the EPA can do their own testing in 24 hours? I'm looking forward to the results, and the TIMING, of the EPA report. My bull crap meter is pegging high on the EPA's spin on this.

I have a sneaking suspicion that the reason why BP is using dispersants even against the wishes of the government is to avoid having to clean up the oil by actually sucking up the contaminated water and separating the oil from it. This cleanup technique, while proven, and probably ultimately the only thing that will work, would be extremely expensive. If the oil is widely dispersed through a large volume of water, BP will be able to argue that cleanup by this method is impossible.

sigh...eventually i will figure out how to italicize the whole thing....

Don't italicize it if it's longer than a line or two; italics are harder to read. Use the "blockquote" tag instead (see list of tags under the message window). To close any tag at the end of the material you're tagging, use the same tag, but put a slash after the open angle bracket. If you don't properly close a tag, the software here will do it for you after the first tagged paragraph. I think you just repeated the italic tag at the end of your material without the slash; that's why only the first paragraph came out italic. But do use the blockquote tag for anything more than a few lines. (Nontecchie here; someone correct me if I'm wrong, please.)

A few days ago I was having a discussion with a couple of offshore engineers and was trying to communicate the difference between engineering and reality and how you must incorporate both in a good design. The example I used was using hot air balloons in the same manner you are suggesting.

On paper, as an engineering exercise this could be made to work, at least if you have a large enough vent so the balloon doesn't blow up from the expanding gases. There would have to be a very large, probably 3 foot diameter vent near the top to release the gas - that's for a hot air balloon, not a 100 m dia balloon. Having a separator on the bottom would help eliminate this problem (but reintroduce the gas hydrate problem) but there is still a large amount of gas in solution which will expand 150 times on the way to the surface. The critical part is the last 100 feet where the gas expands 4 time in less than a minute and you have to be able to vent that expansion.

But assuming you could overcome the gas expansion problem then reality kicks in.

First you have to position the concrete weight (ours was circular) over the leak area using ROV, in reality a very difficult task, maybe impossible.

Then you may have problems with the lines between the weight and the balloon getting tangled, and an ROV can not untangle them and would most likely get tangled itself.

Assuming you could get the hot air balloon filled (we used 20% full, about 2,000 barrels) then in theory it should start gently floating up off the leak but again reality. There are some currents and a lot of debris from the sinking rig and all the pipe, machinery and everything that fell off. As the balloon will start very slowly the current could drift it into some of this stuff and tangle it up, spill the oil, etc.

On the way up if it get started it will run into a number of cross currents so there is no real way of predicting where it will go. It is not difficult to put on an acoustic beacon to track it but it could come up under one of the relief well rigs, another boat, etc.

As it nears the surface it will accelerate and if there is more gas than the gas vent can handle it will rip apart, dumping the oil and sinking. It could also hit a boat or something on the surface cutting the balloon.

If the oil left after the gas is vented doesn't have enough buoyancy to overcome the weight of the concrete it will sink.

If it sinks for any of these reasons then you have an out of control 50 ton concrete weight that with BP's luck will land right on the BOP stack.

There are a whole lot of other safety problems that would cause BP or the MMS to nix the idea.

By the way the buoyancy of 1 million barrels of oil is somewhere between 15,000 and 25,000 tons, without any gas - that's a pretty big concrete weight.

Regard it as an engineering task, to take into account the real properties of the stuff, "the humans". Or the "alphas".

Sentinels staring into the dark cannot possibly remain alert hour after hour.

errrr.... Guantanamo Bay? Or a memo from Dick Cheney's office?

Halliburton, anybody?

The apparent disturbances in the seabed have been discussed earlier in this thread and in others...

see http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6501/628318 for an informed explanation of what was likely observed.

gavacho, here's a brief summary of the construction of a typical well. First drill a 36" hole into the sea bed for some 100s of ft. Then run a 30" conductor to within a few ft of the bottom of this hole. Then cement is pumped down this to fill the annulus between the outside of the conductor and the 36" hole. When this has set typically a 26" hole is drilled into which a 20" string of casing is run and cemented. Then a 17 1/2" hole is drilled and cased with 13 3/8" casing. The 36" and 26" hole are normally drilled using seawater and high visc polymer sweeps to clean out/remove the drill cuttings to the seabed.

Once the 13 3/8" casing is run and cemented, the BOP will be run on 22" riser and landed on the well head/guide base. From now on "mud" will be used to clean the hole. Drilling "mud" is a fluid mixed from many ingredients. Often the fluid phase consists of an 80:20 emulsion of oil and water. This is to prevent the fluid reacting with the clay minerals being drilled. The main purposes of this "mud" is to remove cuttings from the bottom of the hole and carry them back to the surface. Also it's density is such that it will prevent any formation fluids from entering the borehole.

The next hole section will be 12 1/4" in diameter. This is cased with 9 5/8" casing. Finally an 8 1/2" hole will be drilled into which 7" liner is run and cemented. The depths to which these different casing strings are run depends on the pressure regime/profile in the area being drilled. The idea is that the casing strings isolate zones of different pressures.

So if a casing string is not cemented well, it is possible for fluid to travel from the casing shoe to the surface via the annulus. Normally after a casing job this is tested by pressuring up the fluid in the well.

I hope that gives you some basic idea of what is involved in constructing an oil well.

gav -- You got it pretty much right except the csg doesn't fit the bore hole snuggly. We actually try to avoid that by drilling the hole at least several inches in diameter greater than the csg you plan to run. That allows a better chance for the cement to adequately fill and seal the annular space between csg and rock. In the case of the BP blow out once they had reached total depth they ran a continuous string of csg from TD all the way back up to the well head.

All the csg strings end in the well head. The BOP sits on top of the well head and thus should control flow that might come up the final csg string or any of the annular spaces. IF it works properly. In the top kill process they do have to be careful about bursting any of the other casing strings that end in the well head. Csg has various rating grades and the shallow csg string would not have a rating sufficient to handle high pressures. If there is an annular leak to one of these weaker csgs BP could rupture that liner and create a flow much greater than what we see now. The top kill method is risky at several levels.

Regarding the use of activated carbon to adsorb the oil. That would work. It could be applied as either granular or as a slurry depending on the circumstances. If the oil-soaked carbon can be recovered, it can be regenerated in a kiln and reused.

It sounds like they are talking about the region near the sea floor. Down near the pay zone (Where presumably this problem started) it's far too warm for hydrates to form.

Personally I keep having flashbacks of scenes from Idiocracy. Specifically the shot of a broken, leaning building lashed to its neighbor with rope to stop it falling over. Hooray, today is the future!