Regular WUWT commenter Jimmy Haigh, a geologist by trade, sends along a PDF that is a compilation of on the scene photos taken right after the explosion and in the following two days. I’ve converted it to web format. These were taken by people on the scene during the rescue and firefighting operation. There’s also a narrative, done by a person “in the know”. You won’t find this at AP or Reuters.
You may have heard the news in the last week about the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig which caught fire, burned for two days, then sank in 5,000 ft of water in the Gulf of Mexico. There are still 11 men missing, and they are not expected to be found.
The rig belongs to Transocean, the world’s biggest offshore drilling contractor. The rig was originally contracted through the year 2013 to BP and was working on BP’s Macondo exploration well when the fire broke out. The rig costs about $500,000 per day to contract. The full drilling spread, with helicopters and support vessels and other services, will cost closer to $1,000,000 per day to operate in the course of drilling for oil and gas. The rig cost about $350,000,000 to build in 2001 and would cost at least double that to replace today.
The rig represents the cutting edge of drilling technology. It is a floating rig, capable of working in up to 10,000 ft water depth. The rig is not moored; It does not use anchors because it would be too costly and too heavy to suspend this mooring load from the floating structure. Rather, a triply-redundant computer system uses satellite positioning to control powerful thrusters that keep the rig on station within a few feet of its intended location, at all times. This is called Dynamic Positioning.
The rig had apparently just finished cementing steel casing in place at depths exceeding 18,000 ft. The next operation was to suspend the well so that the rig could move to its next drilling location, the idea being that a rig would return to this well later in order to complete the work necessary to bring the well into production.
It is thought that somehow formation fluids – oil /gas – got into the wellbore and were undetected until it was too late to take action. With a floating drilling rig setup, because it moves with the waves, currents, and winds, all of the main pressure control equipment sits on the seabed – the uppermost unmoving point in the well. This pressure control equipment – the Blowout Preventers, or ‘BOP’s” as they’re called, are controlled with redundant systems from the rig. In the event of a serious emergency, there are multiple Panic Buttons to hit, and even fail-safe Deadman systems that should be automatically engaged when something of this proportion breaks out. None of them were aparently activated, suggesting that the blowout was especially swift to escalate at the surface. The flames were visible up to about 35 miles away. Not the glow – the flames. They were 200 – 300 ft high.
All of this will be investigated and it will be some months before all of the particulars are known. For now, it is enough to say that this marvel of modern technology, which had been operating with an excellent safety record, has burned up and sunk taking souls with it.
The well still is apparently flowing oil, which is appearing at the surface as a slick. They have been working with remotely operated vehicles, or ROV’s which are essentially tethered miniature submarines with manipulator arms and other equipment that can perform work underwater while the operator sits on a vessel. These are what were used to explore the Titanic, among other things. Every floating rig has one on board and they are in constant use. In this case, they are deploying ROV’s from dedicated service vessels. They have been trying to close the well in using a specialized port on the BOP’s and a pumping arrangement on their ROV’s. They have been unsuccessful so far. Specialized pollution control vessels have been scrambled to start working the spill, skimming the oil up.
In the coming weeks they will move in at least one other rig to drill a fresh well that will intersect the blowing one at its pay zone. They will use technology that is capable of drilling from a floating rig, over 3 miles deep to an exact specific point in the earth – with a target radius of just a few feet plus or minus. Once they intersect their target, a heavy fluid will be pumped that exceeds the formation’s pressure, thus causing the flow to cease and rendering the well safe at last. It will take at least a couple of months to get this done, bringing all available technology to bear. It will be an ecological disaster if the well flows all of the while; Optimistically, it could bridge off downhole.
It’s a sad day when something like this happens to any rig, but even more so when it happens to something on the cutting edge of our capabilities.
The photos that follow show the progression of events over the 36 hours from catching fire to sinking.
First, what the rig looked like.
The drilling mast has toppled over here – they usually melt pretty fast when fire breaks out.
Support vessels using their fire fighting gear to cool the rig.
From about 10 miles away – dawn of Day 1
Support vessels using their fire fighting gear to cool the rig – note the list developing
About noon Day 1 – List is pronounced now
Early morning Day 2 – Note the hole burned through the aluminum helideck
Day 2, morning – settling quite low in the water now – fuel and oil slick forming
See also satellite images of the oil slick here
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A rig pig says:
May 4, 2010 at 1:32 pm
I may not have read all your entries… I was curious about what you mean by “coffer dams”. I assume these are the “dome”-shaped caps BP proposes to settle over the leaks. Sounds like you know about this stuff, so… the various media from which I’ve caught reports about the remediation efforts suggest that these caps, described as steel, 4-story-tall, dome-shaped structures, were rapidly being cobbled together (pics of welders hurriedly sticking pieces of plate together) after some official somewhere had gathered his wits and thought about what to do. From what I can gather the caps are still under construction today, a week after the event. How come? Aren’t there some prefabricated, emergency-use “coffer dams” sitting around in warehouses for a well blow-out, even if, as David Middleton, above, says: May 1, 2010 at 11:08 am, the chances of a blowout are minuscule? Is this idea a first?
The drill rig operator who survived and was interviewed on the radio show cited above, describes the likelihood that the collapsed pipe is now a twisted, kinked “wad” lying over the well head. Makes me wonder what exactly they are going to be trying to cap with this thing? Do they now have submersible images of where the leaks have sprung – from the well-head? from somewhere along the length of twisted, kinked pipe? and if so, how will they cap these areas?
Anyhow, thanks for your thoughts, or any others’ still reading this far down.
As a retired Civil Engineer, still muddy from years in the construction industry I would like to express my appreciation for the inititial artical and the many comments. I now have a faint mental picture of the complex events before and during the incident. Time permitting I will return and follow some of the many links posted. It is unfortunate that our media gives us soundbites of incomplete or inaccurate information. It would be ‘nice’ if there was a section of links to worthwhile web postings.
“Unfortunately we now live in a risk averse society where there must always be someone to blame. There is no acceptance that completely unforeseen circumstances can lead to catastrophe as appears to have happened in this instance.”
Pardon, but there aint nothing unforeseen about a kick in a well
Hi Bill,
I’m not intimately familiar with them, but it’s been all over the industry news. They’re actually tall rectangular tubes rather than domes, the funnel or dome is at the top and tapers the rectangular tube into a threaded hole into which a drill pipe string will be screwed. The oil/water/gas mix can then flow up the pipe for processing at surface (dewatering the oil for disposal or shipment/storage). These are actually exisiting fabrications used to temporarily cap shallow water wellheads damaged by Hurricane Katrina; the time being spent is in modifying them to suit the softer sediments in the deep water they’ll be used in now (they will sink into the sediment so if allowances aren’t engineered into the existing structures, they’d possibly sever or at least crimp the riser) and to ensure the structures are capable of withstanding the hydrostatic pressure at the depth they will now be deployed. Evidently one is already embarked aboard a supply boat.
It isn’t a normal contingency to have such structures sitting around just in case because (at the risk of sounding like another scratched record) in the event of a blowout, one expects the BOP to close as it is designed to and shut in the well, without needing to prepare for contingenies like having to cap the ends of severed riser in order to catch flowing reservoir fluid. This incident really is on the rude side of ‘unexpected’.
I suspect that from now on there will be a requirement to have such equipment standing by – probably not one for each well being drilled, but a small fleet stacked at each major supply port for use for all operators ‘just in case’.
The site I linked (Bud’s Energy) previously has some ROV pictures of the main leaks and of the Coffer Dams. The deepwaterhorizonresponse.com site has a good schematic of the riser and wellhead as it currently lies on the seafloor, as does at least one news release from the BBC world news website – a mess, but not quite a tightly knotted wad of steel spaghetti.
As I understand things, the plan is to deploy two coffer dams, one for the open end of the riser and one over the leak in the riser near the BOP. The strategy for dealing with open end of the drill pipe appears to be to insert a plug.
H1N5 is correct a normal kick certainly isn’t unforeseen and there are signs which develope well in advance of a catastrophic loss of well control. This blowout is hardly normal though; after TD, with a cased and cemented hole no one would expect any sort of well control incident, let alone one which developed so rapidly as to cause a blowout of this magnitude. As I understand it from the reports released, the cement had been pressure tested from above and demonstrated the required integrity – so there should really be no means of ingress into the well.
It’s like turning off the water mains to your house and then opening the lid of your toilet and having the contents of the bowl blast out in your face. Not what one would expect?
Speculation this early is unhelpful – we’ll really have to wait and see what the investigation determines to be the causes and then see how regulatory bodies around the world react with amended planning and contingency requirements.
Hi,
A couple of BBC news videos regarding the coffer dam/funnel/dome:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8659964.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8661936.stm
Update from Upstream live on progress with the drill pipe plug and coffer dam:
http://www.upstreamonline.com/live/article214055.ece
or via Bud’s offshore energy page:
http://budsoffshoreenergy.wordpress.com/2010/05/05/macondo-5-may-update/
May 1st article in the EUTimes details the news out about a Korean sub torpedoing the rig, official sources are quoted. Swat teams? Wonder if our subs were deployed? A South Korean company is involved with the oil business coming from blown up oil rig.
The media reference to ‘SWAT’ teams isn’t literally referring to hard men in Kevlar body armour, packing heat and abseiling onto rigs yelling “hut-hut-hut…”
The ‘SWAT’ teams referred to are teams of MMS inspectors mass-auditing all rig’s well control equipment; evidently every available qualified inspector was mobilised for this inspection.
http://www.upstreamonline.com/live/article213497.ece
Such inspections are routine, but it’s unheard off for a blitz covering every rig in a region more or less at once. Now shall I await this turn of phrase to be mis-quoted as meaning that anonymous sources report North Korean stealth bombers marauding overhead?
Deepwater Horizon and her crew have suffered a sadly fatal blow out, nothing more sinister than that.
A rig pig says:
May 5, 2010 at 10:46 am
Very interesting video, but the explanations are all pretty sketchy. You suggested they had had looks at the well head area with their cameras, so they must know that they have soft sand surrounding the well head, as in the tin can demonstration. If there’s an obstruction lying up against one side of the head, the containment device won’t settle properly.
Also, of interest from the first video (I’ve got a very low-res monitor): are those penetrations or just markings along the corners of the concrete structure? If markings, what happens to air as the container is lowered? Is to just evacuated through the pipe? Thanks for the additional links.
Updated photos from Deep Horizon Unified Command, they have a really great website going:
https://www.piersystem.com/go/doc/2931/540115/
This shows the improvised “cofferdam” that will be lowered onto one of the leaks. Some brave folks working in dangerous conditions, we owe them much!
A rig pig says:
May 5, 2010 at 3:50 pm
The media reference to ‘SWAT’ teams isn’t literally referring to hard men in Kevlar body armour, packing heat and abseiling onto rigs yelling “hut-hut-hut…”
The ‘SWAT’ teams referred to are teams of MMS inspectors mass-auditing all rig’s well control equipment; evidently every available qualified inspector was mobilised for this inspection.
http://www.upstreamonline.com/live/article213497.ece
Such inspections are routine, but it’s unheard off for a blitz covering every rig in a region more or less at once. Now shall I await this turn of phrase to be mis-quoted as meaning that anonymous sources report North Korean stealth bombers marauding overhead?
Deepwater Horizon and her crew have suffered a sadly fatal blow out, nothing more sinister than that.
—–
REPLY:
RarePig, I do work in Homeland Security and nearly blew a gasket when I started hearing all the buzz about “SWAT” teams being mobilized!! SWAT, of course, is “Special Weapons and Tactics,” and the last thing you need on a floating gas-can called a drilling/production rig is a firearm!! I was sure they meant “SWOT” for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats analysis (standard after disasters).
OK, so I called the Deepwater Horizon Response Unified Command and left a message for their Public Information Officer, called the WH and spoke with public affairs, AND emailed one of my chums in DHS!! Today, I see the WH blog was corrected (finally):
—
http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/04/30/response-oil-spill-so-far
DHS Secretary Napolitano announced that this incident is of national significance, the Department of Interior has announced that they will be sending SWOT* teams to the Gulf to inspect all platforms and rigs and the EPA is conducting air monitoring activities to gather information on the impact of the controlled burn on air quality.
* Ed. Note: Typo corrected, “SWOT” refers to Strength, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats teams.
—–
SCORE ONE FOR THE GOOD GUYS AT WUWT!! Thanks, Anthony, our fellow commentators (especially Pat Moffitt) got me going on this! Now, the folks who have been broadcasting scare-stories of SWAT teams being sent out to the Gulf can issue their own corrections.
Typical government FUBAR process….somebody misunderstood what was said, and it exploded across the airwaves and blogosphere. Well done, folks!
I am passing this on from someone who used to work for BP
This well had been giving some problems all the way down and was a big discovery. Big pressure, 16ppg+ mud weight. They ran a long string of 7″ production casing – not a liner, the confusion arising from the fact that all casing strings on a floating rig are run on drill pipe and hung off on the wellhead on the sea floor, like a “liner”. They cemented this casing with lightweight cement containing nitrogen because they were having lost circulation in between the well kicking all the way down. The calculations and the execution of this kind of a cement job are complex, in order that you neither let the well flow from too little hydrostatic pressure nor break it down and lose the fluid and cement from too much hydrostatic. But you gotta believe BP had 8 or 10 of their best double and triple checking everything. On the outside of the top joint of casing is a seal assembly – “packoff” – that sets inside the subsea wellhead and seals. This was set and tested to 10,000 psi, OK. Remember they are doing all this from the surface 5,000 feet away. The technology is fascinating, like going to the moon or fishing out the Russian sub, or killing all the fires in Kuwait in 14 months instead of 5 years. We never have had an accident like this before so hubris, the folie d’grandeur, sort of takes over. BP were the leaders in all this stretching the envelope all over the world in deep water. This was the end of the well until testing was to begin at a later time, so a temporary “bridge plug” was run in on drill pipe to set somewhere near the top of the well below 5,000 ft. This is the second barrier, you always have to have 2, and the casing was the first one. It is not know if this was actually set or not. At the same time they took the 16+ ppg mud out of the riser and replaced it with sea water so that they could pull the riser, lay it down, and move off. When they did this, they of course took away all the hydrostatic on the well. But this was OK, normal, since the well was plugged both on the inside with the casing and on the outside with the tested packoff. But something turned loose all of a sudden, and the conventional wisdom would be the packoff on the outside of the casing. Gas and oil rushed up the riser; there was little wind, and a gas cloud got all over the rig. When the main inductions of the engines got a whiff, they ran away and exploded. Blew them right off the rig. This set everything on fire. A similar explosion in the mud pit / mud pump room blew the mud pumps overboard. Another in the mud sack storage room, sited most unfortunately right next to the living quarters, took out all the interior walls where everyone was hanging out having – I am not making this up – a party to celebrate 7 years of accident free work on this rig. 7 BP bigwigs were there visiting from town. The ones lost were the 9 rig crew on the rig floor and 2 mud engineers down on the pits. The furniture and walls trapped some and broke some bones but they all managed to get in the lifeboats with assistance from the others. The safety shut ins on the BOP were tripped but it is not clear why they did not work. This system has 4 way redundancy; 2 separate hydraulic systems and 2 separate electric systems should be able to operate any of the functions on the stack. They are tested every 14 days, all of them. (there is also a stab on the stack so that an ROV can plug in and operate it, but now it is too late because things are damaged). The well is flowing through the BOP stack, probably around the outside of the 7″ casing. As reported elsewhere, none of the “rams”, those being the valves that are suppose to close around the drill pipe and / or shear it right in two and seal on the open hole, are sealing. Up the riser and out some holes in it where it is kinked. A little is coming out of the drill pipe too which is sticking out of the top of the riser and laid out on the ocean floor. The volumes as reported by the media are not correct but who knows exactly how much is coming? 2 relief wells will be drilled but it will take at least 60 days to kill it that way. There is a “deep sea intervention vessel” on the way, I don’t know if that means a submarine or not, one would think this is too deep for subs, and it will have special cutting tools to try to cut off the very bottom of the riser on top of the BOP. The area is remarkably free from debris. The rig “Enterprise” is standing by with another BOP stack and a special connector to set down on top of the original one and then close. You saw this sort of thing in Red Adair movies and in Kuwait, a new stack dangling from a crane is just dropped down on the well after all the junk is removed. But that is not 5,000 ft underwater. One unknown is if they get a new stack on it and close it, will the bitch broach around the outside of all the casing?? In order for a disaster of this magnitude to happen, more than one thing has to go wrong, or fail. First, a shitty cement job. The wellhead packoff / seal assembly, while designed to hold the pressure, is just a backup. And finally, the ability to close the well in with the BOP somehow went away. A bad deal for the industry, for sure. Forget about California and Florida. Normal operations in the Gulf will be over regulated like the N. Sea. And so on.
Re: “SWAT” and “SWOT”. Now, I wonder how there could possibly be any confusion between those two organizations? If the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats analysis (SWOT) team did not want to be assosiated with the more militant SWAT, why did they create such a name or acronym. I have no dog in the sabotage argument, but if the “Threats analysis” part of this title doesn’t suggest looking at this potential aspect of the rig’s sinking, just what do they do? More to the point, if our government did not send a team to look for evidence of sabotage, in addition to the usual suspects of stupidity, malfeasance, kickbacks, political favors, contempt for safety rules and regs, dereliction, buck-passing, etc… then they are even more bumbling than the Bush administration.
Bill Parsons says:
May 6, 2010 at 8:07 am
Re: “SWAT” and “SWOT”. Now, I wonder how there could possibly be any confusion between those two organizations? If the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats analysis (SWOT) team did not want to be assosiated with the more militant SWAT, why did they create such a name or acronym. I have no dog in the sabotage argument, but if the “Threats analysis” part of this title doesn’t suggest looking at this potential aspect of the rig’s sinking, just what do they do? More to the point, if our government did not send a team to look for evidence of sabotage, in addition to the usual suspects of stupidity, malfeasance, kickbacks, political favors, contempt for safety rules and regs, dereliction, buck-passing, etc… then they are even more bumbling than the Bush administration.
——-
REPLY: Bill, here’s the Wikipedia explanation of SWOT analysis:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWOT_analysis
The coincidence of the two sounding exactly alike, but meaning something entirely else, has never been a big issue before to my knowledge. SWOT is a business analysis process, widely used in the failure business. SWOT guys go to the rigs with laptops, clipboards and pencils and not submachine guns!
However, some in the media took the original typo and went hyper with it, see Rush’s comments on SWAT deployment here:
http://content.usatoday.com/communities/greenhouse/post/2010/05/has-he-gone-too-far-rush-limbaugh-suggests-environmentalists-planned-oil-spill/1
We have far too much going on right now for incendiary journalism based upon some copy-writer’s misunderstanding of technical terms. There are rumors that this was a North Korean sub attack, US conspiracy etc.
BS, accidents happen in oil & gas. Robert Thompson’s comments above ring very true to me, this is a believable scenario. I hope the coffer dam solution works for BP’s sake! This will surely lead to more rigorous government regulation & oversight of offshore production, but I’m okay with that at this point.
We have far too much going on right now for incendiary journalism based upon some copy-writer’s misunderstanding of technical terms. There are rumors that this was a North Korean sub attack, US conspiracy etc.
The rumors can’t be as interesting as the real story, but feel free to share…
As for “some copy-writer’s misunderstanding”, it sounds to me like William Gibbs, Press Secretary to the President of the United States was disseminating the misinformation. I confess – I never heard of SWOT, but I wouldn’t want to lay huge odds that Gibbs, Napolitano or Obama knew the difference either.
Thanks for your remarks Robert – they’re the most detailed description of events I’ve heard so far.
It’s probably as well the crew were celebrating 7 years without Lost Time Incident – in normal circumstances there may well have been more crew members out on deck exposed to the explosion and resulting conflagration.
In the event that the blowout is occurring around the 7″ casing, one would hope the the next casing shoe up is where the failure has occurred and that the flow is subsequently up the annulus between the 7″ and the casings/liners outside it – if the blowout is up the annulus between all casings/liners and formation, then actually closing the second BOP once it is placed could lead to a blowout outside the wellhead (as you suggest) and that has potential to get very ugly indeed.
You’re quite right that BP are one of the leaders in deep water, deep drilling – the deepwater horizon was the rig BP employed to drill the Tiber well last year to 35050′:
http://www.bp.com/genericarticle.do?categoryId=2012968&contentId=7055818
An intervention vessel is a surface vessel one which performs well intervention – normally this means running a variety of tools into existing production wells in order to perform maintenance on control valves and such like down hole. In effect they act like a small rig but do not drill, they only work over existing completed wells.
A schematic here:
http://budsoffshoreenergy.wordpress.com/2010/05/06/macondo-6-may-update/
shows a well intervention vessel at centre, it’s purpose appears (in this schematic at least) to be in support the ongoing dispersant injection into the remains of the riser. The reference to coil tubing is like a garden hose reel but made of steel. Which suggests they’re aiming for a mega flowrate of dispersant.
Hi Bill – At the above reference, there is also a photograph of the completed and painted coffer dam being loaded onto a work boat.
The markings at the corners are to indicate the depth to which the fabrication has settled into the sea bottom sediment. the air in the coffer dam will vent through the hole at the top as it is submerged, as I understand it once the structure is in-situ over the leaking riser, the drill pipe is then stabbed into the hole at the top and screwed in place. The large hole at the side should be to accommodate the riser, it is rectangular so as to allow some leeway with respect to just how far into the sediment the coffer dam will settle – a site evaluation will have been performed by ROV before the rig arrived on location, so the likely behaviour of the sediment will be known to some degree (the wellhead, guidebase and BOP had to be placed safely on the seafloor based on such knowledge). The horizontal plates which maybe look like walkways are (I suspect) what were referred to in one description as ‘mudflaps’ which to me indicates where the boffins expect the seafloor (mudline) to be with respect to the structure once it has settled – if I read the markers correctly that means 15′ of the coffer dam settles into the sediment.
with respect to the BOP and obstructions close to it, I expect that the wreckage has by now been well surveyed by ROV, so the likelihood of debris on the seafloor in close proximity to the BOP should be known already.
No need to write off further exploration of US waters just yet, but the lessons learned from this accident will result in far stricter (and some well intentioned but nevertheless misguided) requirements for future US drilling operations.
It’s sad that 9 guys couldn’t make the flight home so that the rest of us could learn another lesson and listen to stupid conspiracy stories.
I’m a journalist and read each of your conjectures and gracious posts toward communal education. However, a very interesting thread was ignored. Please answer this man’s questions.
Richard W says:
May 2, 2010 at 2:22 pm
I worked as an insurance broker for many years with many offshore drilling companies. There are many anomalies about the circumstances in this terrible event. The one thing that bothers me most, however, is the picture showing the burn hole in the heliport. The heliport is located well away from the the burning side of the rig. The hole in the heliport is very symmetrical and looks like the result of an electrical discharge. heliports have fire suppression equipment. I do not see any fire damage to anything else nearby, including the underside of the heliport as shown in other pictures.
This makes no sense to me. Any ideas?
Several people (and one of the articles cited above) have suggested that the coffer dam mitigation has not been tried at this depth. One of these articles said that the main issue now has to do with ice blocking the new pipe. Water temperatures, it said, were around 41 degrees F.
Are temps – or pressures – any more of an issue than they were before the drill assembly collapsed?
Hi Barabra & Richard,
The heli-deck is a comparatively thin aluminium deck which is more easily ignited than the explosion and fire resistant steel superstructure surrounding it (which is the rig’s accomodation) – hence the apparent disparity in damage.
The ‘symetrical’ appearance of the hole is because the burn section is bounded below by steel girders which support the heli-deck. Helidecks generally aren’t perfectly flat and end up slightly sagged between each girder, so the fire on this deck may well have been oil ejected during the blow out which happened to pool in this slight depression and was then ignited, in turn burning through the aluminium deck and being checked by the girders (pure speculation on my part I shall admit).
The whole rig is equipped with a fire suppression system (deluge) not just the helideck, the additional fire fighting equipment on the helideck is typically comprises of two (or so) manned water/foam canons (which won’t have been manned or operated during the rig fire since this would have been futile – they’re design to point towards and extinguish a burning helicopter, not point inboard towards the derrick and combat an explosive blowout).
the only electrical equipment situated on or under the helideck are the marker lights.
I’m not sure I follow what sort of electrical discharge you’re envisaging as being resposible for the burned deck.
Hi Bill,
The concern for ice formation in the case of the coffer dam is real enough – formation fluid which exosts in liquid state at the elevated temperatures and pressures of a deep reservoir may well exist as solids at the lower pressure and temperature encountered a the seafloor or at surface.
It’s not uncommon for producing wells to require the injection of chemicals to inhibit the formation of hydrates (for want of a better term, hydrocarbon ice) in down-hole tubulars, control valves and sub-sea or surface pipelines. I gather that the concern here would be that hydrates may form in the drill pipe leading from the top of the dam to the surface and block it, in which case the oil, having no where else to go, will fill the coffer dam and begin spilling out around it’s base.
Having offered that explanation, I’ll point out that I’m not a reservoir engineer and so by no means an expert on such matters, my work is done once the well is drilled.
I just saw that bud’s offshore energy won’t be updating this weekend, so the will be one less intelligent commentry on the emplacement of the coffer dams, I have to agree with his view about the number of instant armchair experts waxing lyrical about every aspect of this accident and its response while clearly not having the faintest idea of what they’re talking about.
Thanks for your comments, Rig Pig. Very informative – and hardly any wax.
The media needs to review some of the comments already posted. So since there is already great information already posted I will restrain my comments to bashing the media and administration officials for their vast display of ignorance with absolutely no understanding of the history of drilling offshore and measures taken to avoid these situations and to minimize the affects on anything happening. As discussed already by others equipment is redundunt. It is function and pressure tested on a regular schedule dictated by MMS. BP and all oil companies are very stringent on seeing that these schedules are maintained and somtimes impose more stringent requirements. All personnell are briefed each time they come on the rig of all safety precautions and policies they must abide by to perform the function they are there for. Anyone that posses a problem living by these requirements are excused from the rig and their employer advised that they are not welcome to return. People that work offshore typically are very professional and cherish their jobs and the responsibilities that go along with them.
Yes the spill is disasterous, but the industry is responding to bring the well under control responsibly taking necessary precautions to be certain they are effective and don’t create a bigger problem to deal with.
It is sad that lives are lost. Best guess they never had a chance or being the professionals they are gave their utmost to bring control to the situation. What is remarkable is that weekly training and practice response sessions have paid off. Considering that 92% of the crew managed to get off the rig.
There is a verse in Proverbs the media would do good to learn. Paraphrased “It would be better to keep your mouth shut and thought a fool than open it to confirm it.”
From a Guardian article: “Deepwater team attempts to put 100-tonne box over blown-out oil well’Cofferdam’ has never been used in such deep waters but may be quickest way stop loss of 200,000 gallons of oil a day”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/may/07/deepwater-horizon-oil-spill-box
These undersea robots seem to be making a big difference in this situations. Wonder how long they’ve been in use on these drilling rigs.
I would like to thank the oil industry people for giving us “average folk” an insight into what might have happened. My question is, back in the mid-eighties off Canada’s coast, we had the “Ocean Ranger” rig, capsize and sink. There was no oil spill or fire. can the industry people explain, if there was any similarities between these two events.
Hi Bill,
When I first went offshore 15 years ago, ROVs were fairly common (not new or novel by any stretch – well to anyone except a green hand as I was).
They were performing basic subsea maintenance tasks once undertaken by divers at considerable risk to themselves in addition to drilling related tasks such as visually verifying the correct landing of BOP stacks and monitoring the seafloor while drilling top hole sections (which are drilled with out a riser connection to surface).
In this case of deep water of course, getting divers to do what the numerous ROVs have been doing would be out of the question – the Deepwater Horizon response team would still be groping in the dark without them.
They really are very useful and pretty much taken for granted in contemporary operations.
That article mentions a top kill – which is one reason the second BOP strategy is appealing; it would involve securing the second BOP atop the original one and then attempting to re-enter and run in hole to the reservoir and pump heavy kill mud down the affected well instead of having to drill the two relief wells to do the same thing.
To emplace the second BOP, the damaged riser will have to be cut and removed which would result in flowing reservoir fluids venting directly up, which would pose a risk to rig used to perform the top kill.
If you have a look at this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhZKUYVXM78 you can see the Actinia rig bobbing about on a shallow gas blowout (only a couple of hundred metres below seafloor, comparatively very low pressure and small volume (which is why it died after a few days), to get some idea of the discomforts involved in parking a rig over a flowing well.
While looking at a few other videos and news reports, the question ‘why wasn’t there a backup plan?’ is often repeated – the BOP that inexplicably didn’t work is the first back up, the relief well(s) are the second.
The Macondome and the 2nd BOP are improvised solutions that BP have devised expediently to reduce the flow while the relief wells are drilled.
Hi J Brenna,
Ocean Ranger was a semi-submersible rig (similar configuration but smaller than TO Deepwater Horizon) drilling in the Hibernia field offshore Newfoundland and was struck by storm conditions generated by a Hurricane.
A large wave broke a port light (port hole window) resulting in water ingress to the ballast control room.
Exactly what happened subsequently is uncertain, partly because there were no survivors, but the ballast control equipment either began operating of it’s own accord due to short circuit, or the crew upon receiving false indications to the affect began trimming the rig in response to what they believed was the control equipment operating of it’s own accord.
The rig began listing toward the bow and eventually capsized.
The crew did attempt to abandon the rig and somewhere between 20 and 50 odd crew members made it into the water but could not be rescued immediately due to the weather. All those eventually recovered had succumbed to hypothermia and drowned.
There was no subsequent oil spill from the well, which had been secured (BOP closed and the riser disconnected) in preparation for the approaching storm.
So the short answer to the question is that the circumstances were very different.
J. Brennan says:
May 7, 2010 at 5:38 pm
I would like to thank the oil industry people for giving us “average folk” an insight into what might have happened. My question is, back in the mid-eighties off Canada’s coast, we had the “Ocean Ranger” rig, capsize and sink. There was no oil spill or fire. can the industry people explain, if there was any similarities between these two events.
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REPLY: Thanks, Mr. Brennan, this is some of the most well-informed and insightful commentary I’ve seen on the Deep Water Horizon incident! There is a real brain-trust on this site, which is why I find it so valuable.
The Ocean Ranger rig sinking is covered in detail on this site:
http://www.oilrigdisasters.co.uk/
84 men died in the Ocean Ranger accident, a real tragedy. Cheers, CRS