I think it was officially "seized" before it was even removed from the well. What I want to know now is, who will tear it down for analysis? That takes experts, and all the experts work for one or the other of the interested parties, no? How to get a non-interested set of 3rd party examiners could be a real problem.

TO owns the BOP it comes with the Rig.

HOLDING OUT
Confused by your statement above. The picture above is the DWH BOP with the LMRP on top of it. The lower picture is the LMRP that has disconnected from the new DD2 BOP. They are to take out the perforated riser section and put the normal riser and LMRP back on the new DD2 BOP??? I think.

So who is officially the owner of the BOP? TO? BP?

Need you ask? Just look at the picture of the BOP above. Notice the orangish crane to the right of the BOP; follow the crane up to its arm and then follow the arm back to the BOP. Notice the face wearing sunglasses? Right there in the center of the BOP.

If that's not a fed...

In short, TO owns it, BP leased it and the government siezed it.

From the Thadmiral from http://www.deepwaterhorizonresponse.com/go/doc/2931/892479/

Once secured on deck, the Blow Out Preventer Lower Marine Riser Package will then be transported by the Q4000 closer to shore where both Lower Marine Riser Package and Blow Out Preventer will be transferred to other vessels for transfer to the area where the Blow Out Preventer will be taken into custody and at that point will be part of the evidence material that’s been required by the joint investigative team, and this whole thing has been done under the supervision of the Department of Justice.

There are law enforcement personnel onboard the vessel supervising each step and has it documented as well as documented with ROV coverage.

Per the federal court order of late August: http://www.laed.uscourts.gov/OilSpill/Orders/08262010_Order.pdf

The court ordered it taken:

IT IS HEREBY ORDERED that to preclude delay in the bottom kill of Macondo Well 252, and to the extent necessary to amend and modify Paragraph 14 of the Court’s Pretrial Order No. 1 to permit the removal, transportation, and immediate storage of the Deepwater Horizon’s BOP and related appurtenances in accordance with the foregoing “Physical Evidence Collection” protocol, and in accordance with such final technical procedures approved by the Unified Command, Paragraph 14 of the Court’s Pretrial Order No. 1 shall be, and the same is, so amended and modified;

Same court order said:

WHEREFORE, the Court has been further advised that once the Deepwater Horizon’s BOP has been unlatched, the Unified Command has determined that it shall be brought aboard the Q-4000, thereafter transferred via another vessel to a dock at the NASA facility at Port Michoud for temporary storage;

I assume this to be NASA's Michoud Assembly Facility, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michoud_Assembly_Facility and http://maf.msfc.nasa.gov/index.html

I can't find any more information about specifically what happens after it lands at Michoud.

According to channel 8 news tonight (in New Orleans) there were two FBI agents among the 137 people on board the ship the BOP was loaded onto. There was no mention of it being wrestled to the deck. It was also reported that the BOP would be inspected at the Michoud facility.

Since the BOP is owned by Transocean and I am a TO shareholder - I "own" 0.000313% of that BOP.

Should I check for scratches when the feds return it?

Hi HardCoder,

Sorry, I'm not quite sure what you mean. Which controls are you referring to that are rotary?

On our ROVs, the only rotary controls the pilot has on the console are for the light dimmers.
There are a couple of 3rd party sonars used, they have some rotary controls too, but they do their job quite nicely.

(Edited to supply extra info)

95 - The annulus will be intersected first. It may be filled with cmt or mud (prob cmt). It may be in communication with the reservoir and be around 11,000 psi or it may be dead with no flow capability (prob dead). If it's filled with cmt and dead my bet would be that they DON'T cut into the csg. Don't see much need for it at that point.

The mud loggers will be watching all the returns from the interesect like a hawk looking for cmt, oil and NG. But if they are overbalanced as they should be there probably won't me much to see.

If they annulus is dead they might start with the top cmt plugs. But if it were me I would still perforate the production csg up shallow and pump more cmt into the annulus. Just can't be too safe wtith a well like this IMHO.

the weight challenged lady sing

Oh, jeez. I love Aretha, but this was, how shall I say, ill advised.

For those who may feel in need of an earwash, here's the real deal.

In light of all the other replies, I would submit a better outfit to provide the pièce de résistance for the BOP Opera would be D'Oyly Carte in the manner of Gilbert and Sullivan.

;^)

You know what? When I got my BS in geology, I minored in analytic chemistry. Give me a sample of Corexit and a decent lab, and I'll find out exactly what's in the sample. So the whole idea of not being able to test for it because of the proprietary ingredients doesn't hold much water. I think the real problem is simply that a whole lot of other things also contain those ingredients. Thus, a sample that tests positive for one compound doesn't really prove the origin. You need a test that looks for a suite of compounds that are specific to Corexit.

Isaacnd200,
I'm unsure if the following information I found on web will help.

“A March, 1994, report created by France’s Institut National de L’Enviroenment Industriel et des Risques indicated that COREXIT 9500 largely biodegraded in 28 days.”

Published disbursement totals are 1,730,00 gallons of which 1,072,514 gallons is surface and 771,272 gallons is subsea. The number of gallons of 9500 vs 9527 was not included, however, one article I read said the BP inventory of Corexit 9527 was 80,345 gallons.

The ingredient 2-butoxyethanol is contained only in 9527 and not 9500 per Nalco's published ingredient list:
http://www.nalco.com/news-and-events/4297.htm

Here's a study called "Effects of Surfactant Mixtures, Including Corexit 9527, on Bacterial Oxidation of Acetate and Alkanes in Crude Oil". This study is over my head, so I would need help to understand what it says. I just noticed it has the word anionic in the report.
http://aem.asm.org/cgi/reprint/65/4/1658

Agreed the GOM is filthy.... and these "tests" really have no baseline against which to perform true scientific analysis. Agreed it's doom-and-gloom reporting, playing to what the populous wants to hear to further fuel the BP pyre.
--------------------

..... but the scary thing is i really did see ninja-esque guys with big white tanks of chemicals mounted on yellow plastic platforms on Dauphin Island last week, parked behind the dunes. And just after I saw that, three sheriffs started cruising up and down the main drag. Why do they have three sheriffs on that tiny little sand spit of a ghost town of an island? It all made me nervous so I left. I didn't see what they were doing. Seriously, no CT in me. I wasn't there to look for this stuff. I was a tourist visiting the Civil War fortresses, just come across on the ferry from the LA-side fortress. We decided to drive along the island because it was in the news so much before heading to Mobile.

[I joined TOD today to tell this as I've been learning from your site the past few months, and have in fact found this board to be the most reliable source of unbiased information out there. Your technical commentary has served to dispel the sensationalist claims of the CT media and this experienced really freaked me out.]

Nalco released the proprietary claim on the composition of Corexit months ago and the EPA has released that information.

A more direct view is presented in Tom Bower's new book Oil: Money, Politics, and Power in the 21st Century. Starting around page 150 are interesting sections on strategic thinking and action at Exxon, BP, Shell and in post-Soviet Russia.

Some of his [Browne's] old colleagues and the new directors retained from Amoco were disturbed by his preoccupation with finance. Engineers were either retrained or displaced by accountants speaking about "portfolio management" rather than concrete [sic], drills, and metal in an attempt to win investors' confidence.
...
BP's purchase of Amoco was ... celebrated at a party in Britannic House, BP's London Headquarters... The Amoco executives were less exuberant. ... Mindful of Browne's scorn for engineers, some recalled Shell's complaint that BP had appeared uninterested in the quality of engineering when the two companies had collaborated on the Mars rig in the Gulf of Mexico. Financial engineering seemed to be Browne's priority.
...
[BP's] mantra "More for less," which demanded that 100 percent of a task be completed at a cost of only 90 percent of the previous resources, was embraced despite its Orwellian overtones. As Tony Hayward would later describe the penny-pinching philosophy, "We have a management style that has made a virtue out of doing more for less."
...
By contrast, BP's culture, with its mavericks shooting from the hip, was based on Browne's personal interaction with the business units. Unlike the managers of Exxon and Shell, where every decision was endlessly discussed and performance was minutely scrutinized, Browne gloried in the swift challenge: "Perform or you're out." While Exxon's and Shell's engineers constantly checked the technical performance and safety of each refinery, offshore platform and wellhead, Browne had dispensed with the layers of scrutiny as cumbersome and costly...

We have seen already that establishing the whole truth through testimony in relation to decisions and mistakes made is going to prove very difficult. I would guess a faulty BOP is going to be the most conspicuous evidence we will see in this case, so irrespective of whether it played a minor or major role in events, I think it is about to become the main villain. The fact that it belongs to Trans Ocean will certainly focus BP's lawyers on it's importance. The fact that it is called a Blow out Preventer, and it did not do what it says on the tin, will be something easy to understand for us non oil patch folk, rightly or wrongly.

Right off the top "honor the model" is nonsense if the model is defective. ChuckV and I have been able to find no evidence that the model accurately models the performance of "compressible" cement at 18,000 feet in a situation where it is asked to make a U-tube turn.

ZERO!

At that depth, the cement's ability to rebound is less than 0.4% of the volume of nitrogen in the cement foam, which is itself only a small fraction of the total slurry.

Note that the whole centralizer issue is "non-operative", since the well blew out downward from the formation, U-tubing up the production riser; not by the annular flow path implied by all those centralizers required by the model.

Newspaper engineering could kill you!

Edit - I should add that the prevailing engineering judgement was that if the cement failed the testing, all you had to do was a squeeze job.

If it fails the test, you obviously don't know enough about what was wrong to have designed it to succeed in the first place!

Challenger's eroding o-rings redux.

at least a few misses

Spotted in §6 "Blowout Preventer Failed"

--- under "Two annular valves": subject-verb disagreement between header and text

--- under "Yellow Control Pod": misspelled "receives"

Tsk. Emmett Mayer III, ainchew shamed. (I hope not after all this fine work!)

TFHG,

I can see a couple things that aren't exactly correct in the illustration labeling.

In the rightmost graphic in section 1, the shoe (green triangle) of the 9-7/8" x 7" production casing is labeled "18,360 feet". The shoe (bottom of casing) itself is at 18,304 ft.--it's the bottom of the borehole that's at 18,360 ft.

In section 6, the two rams that are labeled "Blind rams" are actually variable bore rams (VBR). These are designed to close and seal against drill pipe with diameters between 3-1/2" and 6-5/8". No drill pipe, no seal. Blind rams are designed to close the bore of the BOP and seal it against flow through it. There was only one blind ram function in the BOP stack: the top shear ram, which is a blind shear ram. That is, it is designed to both shear drill pipe and seal the bore. It can be used in non-shearing mode to just seal the bore. The shear ram below it is a casing shear ram, designed to shear casing but not to seal the bore.

I noted one thing in the accompanying article that's not quite correct. In part No. 1, in discussing the production casing used versus the liner-with-tieback option, and whether the flow came up through annular space or through the casing from the bottom, it says "Either way, the industry-endorsed method would have given the drillers one more barrier to slow or halt the gas's attack." Kill the "Either way" and append "via the annulus" and I'd have no issue with the claim. The liner-with-tieback, in and of itself. provides no extra barrier to flow from the casing foot upward.

The next sentence says "A BP document shows that it [the industry-endorsed liner-with-tieback method] was also once the company's preferred method, though it would have cost as much as $10 million more." That may well be, but the only option to the long string (the method they used) that I've seen among the publicly available BP documents shows the alternative installation as a liner (no tieback to the wellhead); specifically, a 9-7/8" x 7" string hung inside the 11-7/8" liner.

CV

Item number 6 points out something very interesting in that the shears are not designed to cut multiple pipes at one time which has been discussed earlier as a possibility, they aer also not designed to be able to cut through the especially hardened areas at the joints themselves.

What I have not seen speculated about is item 6's statement that the shears are also not designed to cut the specially hardened areas where one pipe connects to another.

What happens when the shears are closed if a joint area in in the area of the shears and the shears can't cut through the joint.

I must say up front that I have no connection to the oil industry at all and my only interest is in learning what was happening with this blowup and this site is an excellent source of very good material. My own skill set is in computer systems analysis, design and trouble shooting. Before my retirement due to injury, I owned my own consulting company.

It should be obvious that the pipe joints have to be very strong to withstand the torque experienced when tightening one length against another. The joints also have to be very solid to avoid unscrewing when they are lifting heavy loads such as a long string with a BOP and other equipment attached.

During my quest for knowledge of what was happening and how oil wells are drilled, I came across an ad for replacement drill pipe joints so that lengths of DP could be salvaged when the joint areas become excessively worn or damaged. The ad I read did allude to this extra hardening and strength of the replacement joint areas which would be welded on to the ends of the drill pipe after the old defective joints are cut off.

My point is that if the especially hardened pipe joint was at the shears when the shears were closed, then the failure by the BOP becomes one of inadequate design rather than failure to perform as designed.

I suppose that under conditions less than ourtight panic, the operators might have some idea of where the joints are in relation to the shears and yet when everything is hitting the fan at the same time the operators are required due to necessity to immediately close the shears and might not be aware of where the joints are currently located. If there is no way of knowing or guessing where the pipe joints are, then avery time a BOP's shears are activated there can be no reasonable expectation that they could possibly be 100% effecdtive in cutting the pipe.

Another thought is that if the location where a joint is welded onto a pipe is at the shears, the weld area which is usually stronger than the material being welded would impose an extra degree of resistance to being cut.

Sub-contractors suing BP for non-payment.

Here is more evidence of BP corner-cutting, very likely the same sort of corner-cutting contributing to the blowout if not outright causing it.

It sounds more like BP and the sub are having dispute on the billing and the dock get caught in between and not getting pay in the mean time.. The dock has every right to sue to get their money, but I don't think there is any sinister motive on BP's part.. In most business, you have 30 to 90 days billing cycle to start with. And if you throw in some kind of dispute, the bill won't be paid for a long time.. It is nothing unusal about BP's position here...

Unfortunately large British companies seem to regard 90 days as the time when they begin to think about payments and only if chased, even 30 day payments. They do not even begin the process of payment, which may be lengthy, until the 90 days are up. One company I worked for had this attitude and needed a piece of equipment from the USA. The USA Co only accepted orders if paid. Deadlock, it ended up that an irrevocable letter of credit was required to undo the jam.

NAOM

NASA should have sent José Hernández as one of their team. He has the background and experience that would help connect with those underground.

NAOM

The biggest mistake that BP made was exactly the same as every other foreign company has experienced buying into or taking over an American company. Total non-cooperation. UK; European and Asian companies have all thought they could crack the problem; most have failed and retired hurt.

From Banks to oil Companies, they have experienced the belligerence; antagonism and a total non-acceptance by US companies of being owned by foreigners.

My solar-powered calculator says this is 12.5 pounds of oily debris removed from the eastern side per million dollars.

The article also reports 700 barrels of oil removed from the western side. That's an additional 5.8 barrels of oil per million dollars.

I wonder if there has been another episode of loss from erosion in the recent heavy weather

'Magine so, and they'll be getting more slosh from the southwest now too.

Meanwhile, the Houston Chronicle visits subsiding south Louisiana:

"Here, we have a patient that's dying of cancer, you know, and now they have a sunburn, too," Paul Kemp, Louisiana coastal scientist and vice president of the National Audubon Society, told the Washington Post when asked this past month about the impact of the oil disaster on the state's coastal wetlands. "What will kill coastal Louisiana is what was killing it before this oil spill."

(Footnote: Rockman.)

The key here would be "re-use" and it's a legitimate question on its face. There were no indications I'm aware of of significant H2S associated with Macondo's output.

snakehead,
Yuck. I read the lawsuit was for $150K and requested closing of domain name. A similar suit was also filed against Democratic Party. I wonder if what was posted was entire article or just an excerpt.

Since I'm not interested in being caught in the troll, I'm not posting a link.

The problem is quoting. Providing a link isn't any more of a problem than giving the name of the publication, since if I know the name, I can go to the publication's Web site and find the article. Here it is:

http://www.lvrj.com/news/angle-faces-copyright-lawsuit-over-r-j-articles...

Angle's being sued because she reprinted an entire editorial and a news article from the Review-Journal on her Web site without permission (although she did credit the publication).

Righthaven Victims has the list that those bottom-feeders are targeting. Mostly they go after folks with little or no money, and coerce a 'settlement' that funds their activities for the deeper-pocketed targets.

Little known fact:
The only Right that is mentioned in the US Constitution, outside of the Bill of Rights Amendments, is a Property Right:

Section 8 - Powers of Congress:
Clause 8:

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;

"Limited Times" was intended to be limited to a generation - not the excessive machinations of the media industry and their bought-and-paid-for legislators in Congress. While I have some sympathy to the copyright laws in general, there was never any copyright attached to any political or governmentally-created reports or creations. That is why all of the photos and illustrations from NASA are fully open public record - use them with attribution.

Yeah - I know. Good luck with that!!

The well head isn't full of concrete (which is cement rather than concrete BTW). They will need to go back into the well to set cement plugs per regulations. That requires a working BOP.

Hate to pick up the monkey wrench again, but I think the first order of business will have to be finding that DP. If it's deep enough to be left there, fine. Otherwise it will have to be fished.

Currently, the cement is only in the bottom 5k-feet of the well. To P&A the well properly, even after any bottom kill operation, they will have to reenter the well with DP to set the require cement plugs at various depths. The regs say that a working BOP must be on the well if it is reentered.

Also, if there are problems with the bottom kill that would result in increaded pressure in the well, the new BOP can handle greater pressure if needed. The old damaged BOP was too uncertain.

Pure comedy gold.
Most people will never know the difference.

[That's some sad nonsense.]

Oh well, at least they had the correct captions on the rest of the photos. (Guess not everybody stared at cappy and the BOP as often as some of us did.)

btw, Here's a Coast Guard video of HD clips of last night's rising. It took a while to download for me.

http://cgvi.uscg.mil/media/main.php?g2_itemId=990613

going viral??? 312 views is viral? is counterexaggeration a word?

Couldn't open the link lotus. Did they ID the source of this oil: was it the BP well, another well or oil from some distant natural seep?

Yes, well.
There was an extremely high-volume discharge of crude oil 16 miles away. It was in the news.
No mystery there.
The heavier fractions settle out.

False earnest objectivity is incredibly annoying, even if it's unintentional.

[Link doesn't work as of 9:06 a.m.]