BP MC252 well gushing oil – environmental disaster video courtesy of British Petroleum
Later today, BP is expected to try to reduce the flow of oil from their MC252 well by pumping heavy drilling fluids into the pipe.
Throughout the extended top kill procedure – which may take up to two days to complete – very significant changes in the appearance of the flows at the seabed may be expected. These will not provide a reliable indicator of the overall progress, or success or failure, of the top kill operation as a whole. BP will report on the progress of the operation as appropriate and on its outcome when complete.
You can watch the procedure live on the BP web site:
click here for live video. This is what it looked like earlier this morning:
WUWT has some very smart readers. How would you close the pipe? Hopefully you can do better than this :
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2200 psi makes most any direct stopper difficult.
I wonder what is more damaging to the fish, the spill or a shockwave from a small nuke?
By the way, I don’t blame BP for not just blowing the pipe up to close it. They are a company which answers to shareholders, there is no insentive for them to close the hole NO MATTER WHAT.
And let’s face it, we are so fickle that Brad Pit only has to fart and the oil spill will no longer be the most important news item.
For Tilo Reber
See – http://www.nola.com/news/gulf-oil-spill/index.ssf/2010/05/graphic_shows_how_leaking_oil.html
Good graphic. Obviously there has to be some sort of “back pressure” created to allow for the kill fluid to gain pressure. Most likely BP will use some sort of fluid loss control material (there are so many types including plastics, paper, polymers, to name a few) initially to help control the leak and allow for the kill fluid to be directed downhole. I would guess it might take several attempts.
Here’s a good article describing the top kill attempt with color diagrams, photos and videos etc. It also describes the next plan if the top kill doesn’t work.
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6505#more
Dermot O’Logical says:
May 26, 2010 at 9:41 am
Demonstrating my ignorance, but do oil leaks EVER occur naturally? Perhaps some seismic shock opening up a crack in the ground?
Yes, they do. Off Catalina Island there’s been about a 6000 gallon a day ‘seep’. And it’s been going for centuries.
http://www.whoi.edu/oceanus/viewArticle.do?id=57272
This site has a lot of good info on what is going on down there.
http://www.theoildrum.com/
The relief wells will be the best and surest way of stopping this.
If it’s leaking 70,000 barrels a day that is a very impressive flow rate and there must be one heck of a reservoir down there. It will start to produce formation water eventually…
Why stop it? Just lower the biggest concrete or steel dome that can be practically handled over the whole area and siphon oil from the top of the dome. Since oil is less dense than seawater, I’d expect seawater to be forced out of the bottom, creating a giant, undersea oil tank. Then it becomes a question of whether oil can be pumped out of the dome fast enough to prevent it from spilling out around the base.
Dermot O’Logical says:
May 26, 2010 at 9:41 am
“Demonstrating my ignorance, but do oil leaks EVER occur naturally? Perhaps some seismic shock opening up a crack in the ground?”
There are many natural oil seeps all over the world. I’ve seen a few in Venezuela and Trinidad. One of the biggest is called ‘Mene Grande’ which is Spanish for ‘big oil seep’.
Xi Chin said on May 26, 2010 at 10:30 am
But they are drilling. Read this. They started drilling a relief well, and have also started a second “if needed” relief well. So you are saying they are avoiding having to drill again, for financial reasons, as they are drilling two wells simultaneously to permanently seal the leaking one.
Does that make sense to you?
Kitty Litter… It’s what we use in our shop!
“do oil leaks EVER occur naturally?”
Yes. Google “California Oil Seeps”.
” Xi Chin says:
May 26, 2010 at 10:30 am
They could easily stop the leak by blowing up the area around the pipe. They don’t want to do that, however, because it would mean they would have to start drilling again rather than use the current bore to extract oil in the future. Do the sums.
Cost of clean up << Cost of drilling new bore"
I did. Cleanup costs 3-5 billion USD, analysts said, i would think probably even higher as the spill goes on. Cost of a deep sea bore according to Jimbo Wales' cohorts:
"With deepwater drilling rig rates in 2010 of around $420,000/day[9], and similar additional spread costs, a deep water well of duration of 100 days can cost around US$100 million."
So it looks to me like you should better exchange the "<>”.
Mandobob:
“Obviously there has to be some sort of “back pressure” created to allow for the kill fluid to gain pressure. ”
It seems to me that creating back pressure is the problem to begin with. If you can do that, you don’t need the rest of the solution. Also, if there is an accuracy to the scale of your drawing, it looks like they could plug the smaller choke line and the kill line before they plug the main line. This “mud” is going to have to be pretty thick to plug the main line – considering that the main line has flow that will try to clear the mud. So it may well plug the two smaller lines before it gets a chance to plug the main line.
For those people that are advocating a big explosion – I don’t understand. Looks like that will simply leave an opening further away from the current opening. The only way that an explosion would do any good is if it dumped enough junk on the leak point to seal it. But why would it do that? First of all, the explosion is in the water, so the settling of any junk would be gradual. Second of all, the pressure of escaping oil from wherever the explosion tore the pipe off would continue to clear any settling debris around it.
step 1: slowly saw off florida but not all the way through
step 2: when the end starts to sink push the tip over the hole with boats
step 3: when the tip of floriday is right over the hole, saw the rest so it falls in the hole
success! no more oil leak. bonus. no more florida!! everybody wins.
” Xi Chin says:
May 26, 2010 at 10:33 am
By the way, I don’t blame BP for not just blowing the pipe up to close it. They are a company which answers to shareholders, there is no insentive for them to close the hole NO MATTER WHAT. […]”
The incentive for BP to close the hole is to be able to stay in business in US waters and to limit the compensation they will have to pay; a company that shows obvious disregard for the environmental regulations of a host nation would be prohibited from doing business there. Your assumption that BP doesn’t do its best to stop the spill rests on flimsy reasoning.
More evidence of the mother of all oil seeps.
http://www.whoi.edu/page.do?pid=7545&tid=282&cid=73106&ct=162
On natural oil seeps:
What, no one has yet mentioned the Asphalt Volcano article right here on WUWT?
😉
On a side note – if a collector dome could work, then why haven’t we been using them over “natural” oil leaks in the oceans?
Tilo Reber
You should visit http://www.theoildrum.com/
Where you will find an extensive and very technical discussion of the top kill on the well (includes expected pressures, etc.) well beyond my limited knowledge.
The problems w/ using a nuke are:
1) might not work, then what do we do with a bigger leak from the crater?
2) would require political approval and no one in Wash DC has the b***s to do that.
Also re: closing it off permanently … I’ve read that this was just an exploratory well; never intended for production, which is not surprising.
Good news that this is apparently a very large discovery … just need to control it.
They have started the procedure, as of 1:30 ET (5:30 GMT). http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100526/ap_on_bi_ge/us_gulf_oil_spill
Fingers crossed that it will work.
I believe they are doing everything they humanly can to stop it.
Plenty of time to find out why it happened, who’s to blame, etc. later.
Having looked as some of the detailed descriptions at some of the sites for the “Top Kill”, one more question comes to mind. Let’s imagine a long test tube. First pour in a light liquid, then pour a very heavy liquid in at the top. Why wouldn’t the heavy liquid simply sink around the light liquid and go to the bottom of the tube. But in the case of the oil well, the “bottom” has a capacity of millions of gallons. Assuming all of their other assumptions are correct, I don’t see why the oil and the “mud” wouldn’t simply flow around each other as opposed to having the “mud” sit on top of the oil. And if you add in the pressure, flow, and turbulence that already exists in the pipe, the idea of having the “mud” sit nicely on top of the oil just doesn’t seem realistic.
… or better yet, hire Jack Bauer. He’s good at killing things and is currently unemployed.
When I look at the live feed, I get the same feeling I did when I was 3 years old watching the Apollo 11 moon landing.
The live feed is amazing for so many things.
First, that well is 5000 feet down a hundred miles out to sea and yet we watch it live.
Second, that BP is open enough to us to show us the feed.
Each of us feels we have a stake in this!!