Latest update:

Optimization of the dual system, LMRP Cap and the Q4000 Direct Connect, will continue over the next few days.

• For the first 12 hours on June 17 (midnight to noon), approximately 8000 barrels of oil were collected and approximately 4,500 barrels of oil and 25.8 million cubic feet of natural gas were flared.

• On June 16, a total of approximately 14,750 barrels of oil were collected and approximately 3,850 barrels of oil and 40 million cubic feet of natural gas were flared.

• The Overseas Cascade continues lightering from the Enterprise.

• The next update will be provided at 9:00am CDT / 3:00pm BST on June 18, 2010.

So they collected 18,600 bbls on 16 June - but looking at the Skandi ROV1 images I can't really see any change - it still seems to be gushing as much as before.

http://www.bp.com/liveassets/bp_internet/globalbp/globalbp_uk_english/in...

Isn't all that only pertinent to those admitted to the proffesional practice of exchanging or brokering the exchange of commercial securities? If one is not acting in a strict client/consultant capacity, the application of such standards would be intractable. For instance, if your neighbor tells you that, in his opinion, Pepsi is better than Coca Cola. If you subsequently bet the ranch on his tout and find yourself homeless, it does not necessarily negate his opinion, he still prefers Pepsi, even if he relishes the opoortunity to pick up your house in a distress sale! Caveat Emptor!

The Constitution guarantees free speech, especially for publications.

If the statements that are made are believed to be true by those who speak it, and is not specifically made with the express intent to influence another person(s) purchase and sale of securities, it is pretty hard to trump the first amendment.

By the standards you are using, 99% of what is talked about every day cannot be said.

cud: 10-5b is a variety of fraud. Without going too far into the weeds, the two biggest hurdles the plaintiff would face in using 10-5b are proving the statement maker intended to deceive and the provable, specific damages from the statement. How do you prove that the statement in fact caused the stock to go down and, if so, by how much? Speculative damages are not allowed. [Waring: This explanation is neither complete nor accurate in all situations.]

Edited for typos.

First time poster--long time reader; some input on legal aspects of the spill.

The governing standard here is NY Times v Sullivan, where a plaintiff who is a "public person" has to show 1)actual malice and that 2)the defendant knew he was saying something false. This standard is almost impossible to meet. Any lawsuit by BP against its critics would be covered by this Supreme Court case.

I am a retired lawyer from La., whose family has been involved with oil cases since Standard Oil was actually called Standard Oil. It seems to me that a great deal of both the effort to seal the well and to protect the coastline has been dictated by laws, not by physics or chemistry.

For instance, every petrochemical state has a long line of cases about ownership of oil and gas which is "spilled" or "lost" by the driller. At least some of BP's cleanup behavior seems to be an effort to maintain a claim of ownership on the spilled crude. After all, there's billions of dollars of it floating around, available to the first person on the site with good cleanup equipment.

Similarly, it's my impression that a great deal of the undersea efforts have been directed, not at capping the well, but at proving that BP is not abandoning the well.

To me, the tragedy of BP's continued oversight of the whole thing lies in their basic aims; retain ownership of the well, retain ownership of the spilled oil, limit legal liability. They honestly could care less about anything else at this point.

Regarding the cleanup, procurement policies, labor and safety laws (such as the Jones Act), and intergovernmental squabbles over authority are a real damper on any serious effort at cleanup and collection. These are what are determining speed of response, not the will to prevent damage or clean up what has already happened.

"Nonchemical oxidation process" is an oxymoron. Oxygen is a chemical; hydrocarbons are chemicals, and oxidation is invariably a chemical transformation. So is "break up of hydrocarbons" whatever that means.
If it's not chemical it must be spiritual, and I don't think the power of prayer is going to get the job done.

These machines literally are trying to clean a drop in the ocean.

I agree that there needs to be much more attention devoted to what is being done to clean up the mess. There is already a lot of oil in the water and it keeps coming. So far all we have heard that is being done is that there are a bunch of fishing boats laying ineffective booms, and people with shovels and brooms on the beaches. This is woefully inadequate and there is no excuse for not doing far more NOW! Skimmers, maybe Costner's deal sound promising. I suggested putting aerators in marshes and other contaminated waters. We are fighting a house fire with a squirt gun while the firetruck is apparently stuck in traffic.

I haven't found any more info about how many, but C-SPAN has a nice video interview with crew members from one of the ships here:

http://www.c-span.org/Watch/Media/2010/06/08/HP/A/34117/CSPAN+Visit+to+D...

It explains in some detail how the system works.

A problem has been the Merchant Marine Act of 1920, aka the Jones Act. It blocks foreign vessels from helping in the Gulf because of its requirement that ships transporting goods from state to state be built in the US, crewed by Americans, and owned by Americans.

The Act itself was waived after hurricane Katrina. Despite requests, President Obama has not yet granted a general waiver. I believe individual waivers have now allowed 15 foreign vessels to begin work.

I have no direct knowledge of the reason for this, but there is talk around that an unwillingness to offend certain groups has been standing in the way of the general waiver.

The Louisiana skimming barges were an innovative idea in small areas.

Clearly, boom is very limited and is designed to assist in immediate containment of spills on a one-time basis in favorable weather, not long term protection over a period of days, weeks, months.

Looking at the huge area involved, I cannot imagine that even thousands of skimming vessels would make much more of impact. Akin to to "pissing into the ocean". Skimming may offer some protection close in against the streamers of a spill approaching shore in light winds, but when the mass of several thousand square miles of oil in tropical force winds is headed north... well, I am not sure there is a solution for that.

edit: well, the gulf loop current, properly positioned, would be the type of force necessary to cleanse the GOM.

Thanks to all of the contributers here. My question and discussion point is what are the effects of BP spill cannot be capped? I would like to discuss what are the long term repercussions? I am an aeorspace engineer working on UAV's. It appears to me that a failure of the well casing and inability to cap or plug would probably bring on a depression. This is the worst case scenario but it is important to understand the possible repercussions.

Snakehead - thanks, I spent a lot of time trying to find this information a couple weeks ago with no success.

I thought it was important enough to try to extract the pertinent information from the document.

A couple points.

Time - One attempt was made 5 months after the blow out and it was unsuccessful. One is unknown, the others were blowing for 16 months, 23 months and 34 months before they were stopped with nuclear devices.

All required "relief" wells to be drilled to set the nuclear device, usually just above the producing formation. At the time the Russians only had the drilling expertise to get with in about 30 meters of the well bore, otherwise I'm sure they would have killed the wells with mud and cement.

One of the "successful" attempts took 7 days to actually stop flowing after the explosion.

The article quotes the Russians as saying there was no radiation but I have also read (on the internet so take it for what it is worth) that the last unsuccessful attempt with a 37.6 kt device left a wild well blowing out radioactive material. In any case the Russians never tried it again after that failure.

Excerpt from Science & Global Security, 1998, Volume7, pp. 1-117

Urtabulak

On December 1,1963, while drilling gas Well No. 11 in the Urtabulak gas field in Southern Uzbekistan about 80 km southeast of Bukhara, control of the well was lost at a depth of 2,450 m. This resulted in the loss of more than 12 million m3 of gas per day through an 8-inch casing, enough gas to supply the needs of a large city, such as St. Petersburg. Formation pressures were about 270-300 atmospheres.

Over the next three years, many attempts were made using a variety of techniques to cap the well at the surface or to reduce the flow and extinguish the flames. However, because the bottom 1,000 m of the casing had not yet been cemented, such attempts led to diversion of the gas into nearby wells and to serious personnel safety problems because of the high H2S content of the gas. Underground attempts were hampered by the fact that the location of the lower portion of the hole had not been logged at the time control was lost.

Finally, in the fall of 1966, a decision was made to attempt closing the well with the use of a nuclear explosive. It was believed that a nuclear explosion would squeeze close any hole located within 25-50 m of the explosion, depending on the yield. Two 44.5-cm (13.5 in) diameter slant wells, Holes No. 1c and 2c, were drilled simultaneously. They were aimed to come as close as possible to Hole No. 11 at a depth of about 1,500 m in the middle of a 200-m-thick clay zone. This depth was considered sufficient to contain the 300-atmosphere pressure in the gas formation below. A number of acoustic and electromagnetic techniques were used to estimate the distance between Hole No 11 and inclined explosive emplacement hole at 1,450 m. The final estimate for the closest distance between Hole No. 11 and Hole No. 1c was 35 +/- 10 m.

The location for the explosive in Hole 1c was cooled to bring it down to a temperature the explosive could withstand. A special 30-kt nuclear explosive developed by the Arzamas nuclear weapons laboratory for this event was emplaced in Hole 1c and stemmed. It was detonated on September 30, 1966. Twenty-three seconds later the flame went out, and the well was sealed.

Pamuk.

A few months after the closure of the Urtabulak No. 11 hole, control was lost of another high-pressure well in a similar nearby field, Hole No. 2-R in the Pamuk gas field. In this case, drilling had progressed to a depth of 2,748 m before the gas-containing horizon was encountered, and gas pressures were significantly higher than those at Urtabulak (580 atm). A month and a half after the runaway well started, it blocked itself at a depth of 800-1,000. Remedial work was done in the well and appeared to have resolved the problem when, four months later, gas started coming to the surface through other holes and through the ground itself.

After several unsuccessful attempts to seal the well by hydraulic fracturing from a slant-drilled well, it was decided to again use a nuclear explosive to pinch off the runaway well. A new inclined hole, No. 10-N, was drilled to intersect Hole 2-R in the middle of a salt formation that overlay the gas producing formation. Measurements after it had been drilled indicated that the minimum separation distance at a depth of 2,440 m was 30: +/- 5 m.

This time, a special explosive developed by the Chelyabinsk nuclear weapons laboratory was used, one that had been designed and tested to withstand the high pressures and temperatures in excess of 100°C expected in the emplacement hole. It also was designed to be only 24 cm in diameter and about 3 m long to facilitate its use in conventional gas and oil field holes. Its yield was 47 kt.

The explosive was inserted into Hole 10-N and detonated on May 21, 1968, at a depth of 2,440 m. Because of the large amount of gas that had infiltrated the overlying strata during the preceding two years, the flow continued for seven days before it finally died out and the seal was complete. The second "success" gave Soviet scientists great confidence in the use of this new technique for rapidly and effectively controlling runaway gas and oil wells.

Crater and Fakel

Some four years later, two more opportunities arose for the use of nuclear Explosions to extinguish runaway gas well fires. The first, code-named "Crater," was in the Mayskii gas field about 30 km southeast of the city of Mary in Central Asia. Control of the gas well was lost on May 11, 1970, and about 700,000 m3 of gas was lost per day. The producing horizon in this field was at the 3,000-m level. No details have been made public about this application, except that on April 11, 1972, a 14-kt explosion at a depth of 1,720m in an argillite formation was used to successfully seal the runaway well.

On July 7, 1972, another runaway gas well in the Ukraine, about 20 km north of the city of Krasnograd and 65 km southwest of Karkov, was sealed with a nuclear explosion. The runaway well was in the Krestishche gas formation at a depth of over 3,000 m. No additional information has been made available except that for this event, named "Fakel," a 3.8-kt explosion at a depth of 2,483 m in a salt formation was used. The small yield would indicate that the location of the runaway well was well known, and the explosive emplacement hole was drilled to be very close to it at shot depth.

Pyrit

The last attempt to use this application occurred in 1981 on a runaway well in the Kumzhinskiy gas deposit in the northern coast of European Russia near the mouth of the Pechora River, 50 km north of the city of Nar'yan Mar. Control of the well was lost on November 28, 1980, resulting in a loss of about 2,600,000 m3 of gas per day. On May 5, 1981, a 37.6-kt nuclear explosion, code-named "Pyrite," was detonated at a depth of 1,511 m in a sandstone-clay formation near the runaway well. However, the nuclear explosion did not seal the well, perhaps because of poor data on the position of the runaway well. No additional details have been published on the results of the nuclear attempt or of subsequent efforts to close the well by other means.

Of the Soviet attempts to extinguish runaway gas wells, MinAtom reports that all were completely contained, and no radioactivity above background levels was detected at the surface of the ground during post-shot surveys.

WRT the Russians and their nuclear use in closing runaway wells - they were gas, not oil. Blowing a nuc on top of the formation would cause a hydraulic fracturing of massive proportions, as the oil doesn't compress as gas does. I could see a high explosive shaped charge - IF you could get it close to the existing borehole. 700 feet ain't close - 7 feet maybe.

Here is a photo from a park in town. No oil in the marsh yet.

Photobucket link, followed. Hooters girl and other shots of course) noted. Thank you.

I hope for the best because of many enjoyable trips to Gulf Shores, however, the area has received but a slight brush of the spill due to very fortunate wind direction changes.

The inevitable seasonal , if only tropical storm force winds, will send a mass of the spill into the area.

The timely shift back and forth of north and south winds have resulted in the spill meandering. These winds all change as the gulf erupts in the late summer and fall.

Keep taking those pics. Then put them on a jump drive and bury it deeply in a fire safe. They'll be precious someday.

My family used to vacation on the Gulf beach between Port St. Joe and Mobile; we'd pick a new location each year and visit. Seeing the Gulf Shores beach virtually empty is shocking, especially given the oil has barely reached there yet. Up here in NC we're seeing ads on TV for Fort Walton Beach, Gulf Shores and a couple other beach areas and they all specifically say no oil is there, trying to reassure vacationers.

I'm not an engineer but I think I followed that. Consider another post that spells out implications, please.

It's just wonderful to hear from someone who worked directly with Dr. Hubbert. I'm sure a lot of the readers here are very familiar with his work. Thanks for posting this.

Good to have you around petro. Prior to my current gig I was a contract PPA for Devon working DW GOM and Brazil (ran KNOWLEDGE s/w). Been waiting till the RW got closer before detailing pp, frac gradients, centroids, ecd, etc. Hopefully they'll feed us details of their kill sheet when we get there. Pretty smart crowd on TOD if you haven't noticed yet. Many have already picked up the basics and will be hungry for more when we get to the cut.

Here's a little excerpt from the Oil & Gas Journal on centroids and lateral transfer.

Lateral transfer-centroid

Lateral transfer is the focusing of fluids transferred from deep to shallow within a continuous, confined reservoir or other high permeability fluid pathway.4

The source of the pressure is likely to be overpressured shales surrounding the tilted reservoir. P-D plots assist in the recognition of lateral transfer, which represents a drilling challenge, since the reservoir and surrounding shales at the crest of the structure, where a well is most likely to be located, are not in pressure equilibration, except at the "centroid," the point of pressure equilibrium between the shale and the reservoir (Fig. 10).

The effect of lateral transfer is to create higher overpressure at the reservoir1 crest relative to its expected value at that depth. Pressure-depth plots can be used (as shown in Fig. 10) to calculate this effect, a process that involves identifying the position of the centroid and extending a fluid gradient to the structural crest.

From: Swarbrick, Richard; O'Connor, Stephen A; Lahann, Richard in

http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/285775/maximizing_geological_inform...

Dear Petrofizz,
Thanks for the post and your obvious passion...

You wrote, "The Macondo sands are obviously laterally hydraulically connected." Does that mean we are looking at a sort of bleed-over from adjacent sands and an essentially endless flow if not checked somehow?

You also noted:
Macondo pay sands may also be a "protected trap" so Al from Big Easy should probably look that up too given his comment about the well being drilled at the structural high. Maybe local stuctural high, but these sands are probably plumbed even higher somewhere.

What difference does it make if it's "plumbed higher somewhere?" What does that imply?

Does this data give you any indication of how hard this area is? Is it actually prone to landslides (sic) or known to be seismically fragile? How hard can I shake it before it breaks?

I had heard this document was out there, but hadn't seen it until now. Nice to finally have an actual electric log to look at. The sets of curves to the right of the depth track - these are the resistivity curves, and tell us things that the fancy curves put up elsewhere in the document try to quantify: The pore pressure of the shales is changing throughout the section. They were drilling from a high pressure zone to a slightly lower pressured zone. They've put some numbers on it, with a 14.1# sand at 17,700' and the main pays having a mud weight equivalent to 12.6#. This is totally believable.

In a previous response, I put up a cartoon that talks about this, looking at it a bit differently. The way that the old men look at it, is the shales are sealing off zones of lower pressure. The lower pressure zone in this case is the one that is flowing out all into the Gulf of Mexico. So, it's not as low pressure as you would think.

What it does mean, is that the higher pressure sands (and shales), combined with a lower pressure pay section, forced BP to try to get away with a lower amount of cement coverage. To properly protect the well with cement, the weight of the cement sufficient to isolate the pay properly would probably have screwed up the pay sands themselves -- they would have limited the productivity of the eventual completion. It was a gamble with horrible results we've all seen.

This is why BP and others think the oil/gas is coming up around the outside of the casing -- at least it was initially.

At least now I can guess where they'll try to intersect the wellbore.

I have the electric log. Now I want the deviation plan for the relief wells. Anybody got that?

The assumption you are making is that the formation is static and therefore predictable. If the zone is producing methane hydrate, is geologically unstable, or is of an unknown composition then no one knows the pore pressures.
I recently pulled out my sub sea telescope calibrated for the correct depth and pressure, and you know what, it didn't work. I suspect that is the real problem. We need more tools and less guesses.

I R confused.

So a kick from an overpressured pay, I understand.

How come kicking from overpressured shales? E.g. not just the 'final' kick - the well was supposedly kicking a LOT all the way down.

Or was it just that the final one 'leaked' up around casing?

Snakehead- Fascinating article. Thanks for the link. I noticed on page 37 that one time it failed, so it isn't a surefire precedent anyway.

Interesting idea and certainly each sieve would have a pressure drop across it decreasing the flow.

Have you considered how you would get the sieves into the well? It would probably require removing the BOP which would increase the flow and pressure while letting the well run wild into the water column during the sieve insertion.

The force needed to insert the sieve would be a bit more than the pressure drop across the sieve, and each sieve would have to be anchored to the wall of the casing (assuming the casing is intact which it may not be).

What sort of tool would push the sieve down the well? And how far down to have enough room for all the sieves?

If you tried to push all the sieves at once, say to move them, it would require over 1,000 tons of force, up to about 1,800 tons if you tried to stop the entire flow.

The casing sizes change as the well goes down so the sieves could only fit in the casing size they are designed for.

There is a liner which is a different size and if the sieve is in the liner and the leak is in the annular then it wouldn't have any affect.

There's a drill pipe in the way but that will probably blow out when you remove the BOP.

A few other problems but don't give up on ideas, just think them through a bit better.

Hmmm. Watching Skandi-2-ROV, the top "cap" is some degrees off angle, and there's a great deal of strong bubbling activity coming up in waves that are jerking the structure. This is about 1 AM Mountain Time, so 2 AM Central.

Lots of sand being thrown.

-- thanks,

David

LeMay! Now, *there's* a man who would have nuked this well.

I think there are many times when it would be most efficient to use nuclear weapons. However, the public opinion in this country and throughout the world throw up their hands in horror when you mention nuclear weapons, just because of the propaganda that's been fed to them.

~Curtis E. LeMay

Long low undulating whistle............

IF arresting any person or entity can reverse the course of events, I am all for it. But realistically, should not that energy be focused on solving the problem?

As to the balloons — I need to have another drink to process that properly.

so your solution is basically a giant condom? well, since the oil well isn't pulling out, your condom better be pretty strong. But really, we could keep capping the gusher with more and more condoms, and instead of taking that oil to a refinery, we could blast it into space.

more specifically, we could shoot it to mars and venus and jupiter and all the planets, and impregnate them with oil. eventually, this oil will have to start breeding and cover all the planets with oil.

and thus, we have a solution to the peak oil problem. we can create a solar system full of oil-based planets and drill oil wells through space to tap these endless reservoirs of oil. it really seems brilliant. i'm sure Stockholm has already called.

Dear fritzie-borgwardt,
"Silliness?" I don't think so. Yet, it would be more expeditious to use materials that are readily available. How about those huge drag nets commercial fishing ships use, with a fine-mesh screen sewn-in. This would allow water to flow through, but not the oil. Then, the oil rising off the stack and the now distant plumes could be sequestered, prevented from rising into currents...???

I know it would be an engineering challenge and we'd still have to deal with getting it all out of the water.

I've already read where mortgage companies are being asked (and in some examples agreeing) to defer payments from people affected by this disaster. Don't know about other forms of debt, but at least for some people they won't have to worry about losing their homes.

Yeah, we talked about this one yesterday, I think, shelburn. We were focused on the the volume of 40% of the Gulf floor covered in 300-400 meters of "heavy oil," so we may have overlooked that little "burning" detail.

Not knowing this was a clip I'd already seen, I followed your link to the PO site. The opening advertisement when I watched the video was a 30-second spot by BP, touting their claims process and, while the clip was running, a Google screen overlay ad for plaintiff's lawyers hustling clients to sue BP popped up.

We are officially living in an altered state.

Will

I have 281 of them I downloaded, some are named by venue, but many are just numbered. They vary in size, most are under 5 meg.

Let me know what your pleasure might be.

jw

If Werely is supposed to be a well-informed expert how come he seems to be talking rubbish?

1. He should have corrected Blitzer on the likely reservoir size.

2. What's this about "lots of cement and drilling mud was pumped into the well and it didn't come shooting back out of the well" during the top kill? I understood that they only used mud and it did immediately come shooting out - the whole problem was that they couldn't get it down hole!

3. "I doubt that it's [the well structural integrity] degrading at this point". Ongoing erosion HAS to be an issue, at least in the flowpath through the BOP. We can't know where else thbe flowpath is being opened up down hole.

He should limit himself to flow rate estimation. :-(

U.S. Petroleum Consumption 19,498,000 barrels/day

So, essentially all this destruction is really over less than 3 days worth of oil at our (US) present rate of consumption. It sickens me.

At least now I know where the 2 billion number came from....somebody "translated" gallons into barrels - again!

I'm intrigued by the sea-floor "collapse" theory (or the variations of it). This has been mentioned several times on this site and a couple of looney-fringe sites, and here it has been commented on and debated by some intelligent and knowledgeable people. Yet the mainstream media still not to have cottoned on to the theory and thrown it out to the public.

Knowing the media, I'd have thought that someone somewhere would have come across this and released it to the public as a sensationalist story at the very least, or as a human concern item. But I can't find any references to it anywhere. Is there a reason for this ? Might there be a gagging order on this subject, to prevent mass panic ?

And we were worried about cow farts?

People sick from the high toxin concentrations.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NiLUrcA9kuU

Regardless of the actual flow rate, it took less than two months for that gunk to get in LA marshlands.
Tony Hayward says the field has 2bn barrels left.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5i5EhxgXVcvFV_UPF5sexPQ...

2 bn / flow rate = disaster

That's ~94000 gallons/day. Higher than most but not all current estimates, and certainly plausible. Yes, the flow has been increasing, to be expected from a well with a bad casing. I don't know what foreign press you're referring to but a lot of unsubstantiated claims have been coming from conspiracy websites, based on Russian sources that have the look and feel of agitprop.

The indisputable evidence that we are not hearing the whole truth is the quiet and silence on the subsidiary spills which Simmons said there is at least one 7 miles away.

We know the well casing is being abraded by sand from the uncontrolled release --- and even if it is not failed already (the evidence is that it has), it will eventually fail.

Are we at risk of this event setting off geological scale (vs. human scale) events?

There are no answers without questions, so no sincere question is silly. When Hayward points to 2 billion GALLONS does he know how much gas is in it? Or is he just counting the oil itself.