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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While you people are “putting” this here, and putting that there; and blowing up balloons (tough ones) did you happen to miss that little footnote somewhere; you know the one that said this well goes 18,000 feet below the seafloor, and the oil pressure is around 40,000 PSI
Y’alls be very careful now when you are “putting” anything near that place.
The best source of technical info on the kill procedures:
http://bp.concerts.com/gom/kentwells_update24052010.htm
Tilo Reber said May 26, 2010 at 11:30 am:
It would require a shift in a bureaucratic paradigm. You want offshore oil, then you will be drilling for it. You will need a permit to do so. You would have to complete extensive paperwork indefinitely, comply with numerous environmental and safety regulations, and guard against any oil leaking from the site. Etc etc etc. Plus it would have to be far offshore in deep water, they don’t allow shallow water drilling near the shore.
Basic logical arguments such as you will not be drilling and there will be less oil in the water regardless, thus less ecological damage, are too logical for government. Thus “cover and recover” for natural oil seeps is bureaucratically impossible.
Has anybody asked Sarah Palin? She seems to know a lot about oil.
From The Resident Of the United States:
Dear Anthony,
I’d love to help but I’ll be enjoying some of the $1,000,000 dollars BP donated to me, while I’m golfing and vacationing in Chicago over the next week. That will of course force me to blow off the traditional President’s Memorial Day honors to our Veterans and fallen defenders of freedom in Arlington National Park, but I will be returning in time to attend a more important Paul McCartney concert. Michelle just loves the Beatles, dontcha know!!!
Yours in Hope and Change!
Barackward Oilbama
Soon oil drilling will be banned and cars will be powered by the hot air generated in Washington DC
For Jimmy Haigh……. you say
“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”
I know you are a geologist. I am a reservoir engineer and I agree with you that 70,000 bopd is an impressive rate but I don’t think you can assume it will go to water eventually. This reservoir may not have an aquifer. It could be a depletion drive reservoir with little or no movable water. It could have a gas cap and maybe go to gas. That would be good, no more oil pollution. Who knows what the combination of oil, gas and water might exist. Only BP and its partners may know since they have the seismic and have an idea of how the faulting is laid out and whether this well is in a closed block or not. I was hoping that if the well was producing at a very high rate that the flow velocity between the pipe and the well bore would eventually cause it to bridge off and plug itself up. Lord knows that this happens all the time when you don’t want it to happen. This well was not perforated so it is flowing from the back side of the bottom liner and is coming out in the annular space where the riser is seated at the end of the casing so there is all kind of backside flow going on. We don’t even know if it is one or multiple producing horizons flowing behind the liner. We all in this business know if there is no cement behind pipe anything that can flow will flow.
For the well to water out it would have to be located close to a water contact that wants to move, as in an active aquifer, and the withdrawal would have to be sufficient to cause enough pressure drop in the reservoir to make things move (is all about fluid expansion and compressibility). Lets say this is a 1 billion bbl oil reservoir. If this well has produced 50,000 bopd for say the last 30 days that makes 1.5 million bbls produced. That is 0.15% of the oil in place so far after a month. Depending on the oil type and many other things maybe this reservoir could produce 30% of the oil in place so that is 300 million bbls to produce with a normal development plan. So with no decline in rate (usually not the case but assumed here), producing a flat 50,000 bopd that gives 6,000 days of producing life (that’s 16.4 years). We’ll have a relief well long before that. Lets hope the top kill works or it bridges off on its own.
light a match.
Brad says:
May 26, 2010 at 10:27 am
Glenn-
“Do you have real data showing they are “not being allowed to use standard procedures”? From everything I can find the standard procedures are more likely to fail than even the weak attempt we will see later today.”
Procedures for recovery of a blowout are well known and have been established throughout the many experiences of the past. There is nothing new here, except that the bop is in deep water and everyone is screaming to stop the oil immediately. But these tried and tested procedures have not prioritized stopping the flow, although that has always been the ultimate goal. Drill pipe has been known to completely blow out of wells, and that could still happen. I don’t believe this attempt to pump mud thru the damaged riser (and possibly a damaged bop and surface casing/cement) to temporarily stop the flow at best, is BP’s idea. I think the people that believe BP would act irresponsibly out of a desire to have the well in production at some time in the future is like cutting off their head to spite their face. Let them, since that is the only way they know how to stop the flow.
From BP’s website:
“Being progressed in parallel with plans for the top kill is development of a lower marine riser package (or LMRP) cap containment option. This would first involve removing the damaged riser from the top of the BOP, leaving a cleanly-cut pipe at the top of the BOP’s LMRP. The LMRP cap, an engineered containment device with a sealing grommet, would be connected to a riser from the Discoverer Enterprise drillship and then placed over the LMRP with the intention of capturing most of the oil and gas flowing from the well and transporting it to the drillship on the surface. The LMRP cap is already on site and it is anticipated that this option will be available for deployment by the end of May.”
Hopefully they are better engineers than they are writers (Being progressed in parallel with plans for the top kill…!!!), but any kind of operation will be a lot easier when they have pipe which is oriented vertically. If they can cut the existing riser and stab into it or grab the drill pipe if it’s there, they can get control of the well again. Top killing may be impossible while there is so much pipe lying flat, and kinks in it preclude getting any tubing very deep into the well.
BP in a stunning revelation yesterday:
Doug Suttles commented on Tuesday-
Flow from the Macondo well is not travelling up the main well bore, BP operations boss Doug Suttles said Tuesday, a revelation that would support theories that a cement failure played a part in the blowout.
“We actually believe the flow path is between two strings of the casing and not up the main wellbore,” Suttles said.
Suttles said BP could not be certain of the flow path but diagnostic tests on the well seem to indicate the flow is not coming up main bore.
This means that the primary cement isolation system catastrophically failed!
This is real bad because BP had been using a very good, but very expensive Latex based cement system on the Horizon platform that was specificlly designed to prevent gas entry. Then a couple of years ago BP stopped using this system and started using a foamed cement because it was cheaper!
Very bad
Sure would be nice if they’d post a video feed of the actual wellhead leak rather than this secondary pipe leak that’s bent over.I’m sure they don’t want to scare us with video of the main leak.I suspect watching the provided feed won’t reveal anything from the top kill procedure since it isn’t happening there.
BP tried to recover the leaking oil with a structure that looks like an inverted funnel, but as I understand it, ice crystals blocked the pipe through which they were going to recover the oil. Why not instead force pressured cement through that same pipe but downward into the inverted funnel until that structure fills up? The weight of the cement would probably overcome the pressure of the leaking oil and the pressure of the cement flowing down the pipe would probably keep the ice crystals from blocking the flow.
An explosion would be detonated under the ocean floor a few hundred feet down and away from the well pipe. The idea would be that the sideways shock wave would crimp and perhaps seal the well pipe. I don’t see how the result could be worse than what is there already, since the pipe can only get smaller or interrupted below the ocean floor, fill with mud, etc.
Why wouldn’t a load of ball bearings work? They’re heavy enough and (unlike those domes they are fiddling with) easy to manipulate. Just bury the leaks and then add gunk to complete the seal at leisure.
M.A.DeLuca II: “Why stop it? Just lower the biggest concrete or steel dome that can be practically handled over the whole area…”
That was the first thing they tried. It failed because as soon as the gas hit the water in the dome, it caused hydrates to form. They, in turn, plugged up the exit pipe.
GSBono says:
May 26, 2010 at 12:23 pm
Good points!
Dermot O’Logical, yes, there are natural petroleum leaks (seeps) in all oceans (and dry land too). I am old enough to remember tar balls from seeps on Galveston Island beaches in the mid 1940’s, before there were any offshore wells. FYI drilling “mud” isn’t mud in the same sense as you find in your back yard after a rain. It just looks somewhat like natural mud. It is a compound whose weight per volume can be adjusted. It is used to bring rock chips back to the surface while drilling where it is screened (filtered) and reused. It is also used to keep the drill bit cool and lubricated, and finally its columnar weight is adjusted to balance the pressure expected in the producung formation. Too heavy a mud weight and the mud will flow down the hole into the producing formation. Too little weight and the mud will not hold in the pressure and you will get a “blow out” as the pressure rushes to the surface. BOP’s (blow out preventers) are supposed to automatically sense when this is about to happen and activate rams on the outside of the pipe and crimp it shut. Obviously this didn’t happen as it is supposed to in the current situation (perhaps it did but even that measure wasn’t enough). There is the possibility that what happened in the gulf exceeded all the oil industry’s previous experience and knowledge, when previous experience told them they way they did things was perfectly safe. In that case it would be hard to say that BP (or anyone else) did anything wrong. It is a certainty that if any of the companies involved had even the remotest thought that this could happen they would have done things differently. BTW, the governments first response, after over a week of doing nothing, included sending lawyers to the Gulf Coast so that tells you where their interests lie.
Why not get a larger diameter pipe with an open funnel at the end and fit it over the pipe spewing the oil. Then, start pumping from the surface and capture the oil flow.
An expert on MSNBC explained that he saw a fish happily swim through the ‘plume’ that is on the television – confirming the notion that the TV pictures are not exactly the complete story.
This same expert indicated that the ‘kill shot’ was likely to make matters worse – and much more aggressive (explosive) action would likely be required. Coupled with serious vacuuming of the ocean to remove the large volume of already released oil.
I didn’t read all the way to the bottom, so pardons if this has been covered already.
The objective isn’t to “pressurize” the hole with drilling mud to stop the oil. The way it works is that the mud is (significantly) heavier than oil. Even as the oil is flowing out, the mud will flow to the bottom of the hole, some 15,000 feet down. Eventually the hole fills up, although the pressurized oil will still flow out of the bearing rock and up the pipe. As the hole fills, the weight of 15,000 feet of mud will become sufficient to apply enough pressure to the surface of the oil bearing rock to hold the oil in the rock. Then you flood the hole with cement, which is even more dense than the mud. It, too sinks to the bottom and permanently seals the bearing rock face.
This is the same process that is used to control the well while drilling. It WILL work IF you can get enough mud in the hole (all the while the outflowing oil is trying to push some back out). This is the big IF. Can the BOP withstand the pressure as they attempt to push in the mud?
to continue:
you can’t just “stop up” the hole with “junk.” Think about it. The oil flows to the hole through tiny pores in the bearing rock that are measured in microns. The oil will continue to seep through whatever you put in the hole. Likewise, plugging the hole some hundreds of feet down may only force the oil, now under pressure from below, up through the seabed. It’ll find whatever natural fractures exist in the seabed – a path of least resistance kind of thing.
You’ve got to seal the oil in the rock at the rock face. This means cement down hole. You can’t cement until the well is under control. This means mud down hole.
“Burial at sea” for the remains of countless prehistoric organisms.
Personally I prefer to cremate ’em in my Corolla’s engine.
Raman noodles. (They sure plug me up….)
Did you see the NYT piece today. Steve Koonin, former “chief scientist” for BP, now Undersecretary of Energy, funnels $400+M to UC Berkeley (Chu). More info here. http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/10146/1060827-84.stm.
Just another version of crony capitalism. Now for that spill….