BP GOM oil spill

[Ron Lowe]

Hi, all.

We've had some discussion of some of the technical aspects of this in another thread, butI thought this video is a good overview of the ongoing sub-sea ops...

[Andy Burns]

I spent half an hour this morning looking at the video feeds, showing two ROVs picking up the funnel thing, passing it to each other and hooking it up to a big dangly hoist.

[Ron Lowe]

Yes.

The reason I posted the link here is:

1) The people on the DIY forum are in general people who can understand practical mechanical things, and oilfield stuff is deeply practical and mechanical.

2) The popular media coverage is woefully inadequate and non-technical;

3) Even if it was, the technicalities of oilfield drilling is generally only known to those in the industry.

I thought the video was a fairly decent attempt by BP to explain what they were doing.

Also, from a personal POV, since I am also someone with 20+ years experience in open-hole well-site ops, I thought I'd be able to offer some expertise to explain the situation.

There are no doubt lurkers out there also, and I ask them to join in.

The contribution (and link ) by Roger Morton is deeply appreciated. I strongly recommend reading it:

details may be obscure and technical, but please ask here for clarification. I'd be happy to explain ( as far as I can ) the details of what is being discussed.

I'll post some comments to this thread once I've fininshed reading. But I'm going climbing with my son to the Pass of Ballater tomorrow. The forecast is good, and the pass has a good aspect for sunny days.

Work to Live.

[Mike Barnard]

Link please?

[Andy Burns]

all the feeds are live all the time, they seem to work ok on linux, presumably windows too

[Mike Barnard]

Thanks for that. I had to install a small windows media player add on but all the cameras work. SKANDL ROV1 is the one to watch at this moment.

[Andy Burns]

Yep, having watched the video you linked to, the "funnel" I saw was the LMRP being prepared, I thought most of the cameras were dead when I looked just now, but Skandi ROV2 seems to show the LMRP in place

I don't know why the news is reporting that it has now been capped, but they need to wait 24hours to see if it's a success? Clearly it's not fully sealed, but from the BP video it seems they didn't expect a complete seal anyway.

Would the he plan to now try the top kill again, hoping that more of the "mud" goes down the well, rather then mostly spilling out the top of the BOP?

Is it likely that what can be seen spilling out is oil, or the kill mud?

Thanks for posting.

[Andy Burns]

Skandi ROV #2 surely?

[Roger Morton]

They've left 'vent' valves open in the sides of the cap, in case it started sucking too strongly. There'll be an enormous 'chimney' effect at the base of the new 5000 foot pipe/hose if/when it's full of oil weighing only 70-80% of the surrounding seawater. Sucking too strongly might re-introduce the hydrates problem they had with the orignal coffer-dam idea.

I think they're now trying a combination of tightening up the seal around the cap (to make it harder for water to get in) and progressively closing down the vent valves.

[Andy Burns]

Makes sense, I had come to the conclusion it was oil/gas rather than mud based on it not looking like it was mixing with the water, and it rising.

Fingers crossed ... I don't think I can stand much more of Obama sounding whiny, of course we're hearing what is intended for his domestic audience.

[cynic]

SNIP

Merikans will blame anybody they think is sue-worthy. Wasnt the "cause" of the problem an American contract drilling rig exploding? Thats being very conveniently overlooked by the media. Mind you as details are trickle fed to us it does seem that buggering about at the end of a damaged and bent pipe was simply wasting time. Someone should have said at the beginning cut the damaged piece off and work on a clean cut vertical end which is what I believe from our uk tv is now the case. A hollow "probe" with expandable clamps and seals with a valved discharge pipe connection through the middle could be forced down inside the clean cut pipe end effectively stopping the release of oil into the surrounding water. The valving would have to be open while the probe was introduced but once clamped and sealed the release could be stopped.

[Tim Streater]

As the Times points out today:

1) BP employs 22k Yanks and 10k Brits 2) Thousands more petrol stations in US compared to UK 3) 5 refineries in US, none in UK

and so on. UK company?

[Andy Burns]

It went for a bit of a roam around looking at debris on the seabed, now there are three ROVs congregating around the leaking well, I thought they were poking in a temperature probe or something similar, but it looks more like it's squirting some sort of dispersant or tracer into the leaking oil (which seems a bit less violent today).

[Bruce]

In order to satisfy the redneck American audience, Obama is going to have to get mad, shout a lot, make a lot of threats and stamp his foot very hard.

Somehow, I cannot see him doing that, so whining is about the best he can manage.

[Roger Morton]

They did - but it was the highest risk option (initially) because it meant unconstrained flow from the well between the cutting-off and the subsequent attachment of a cap. A week's worth (say) of full-bore leak while trying to attach the cap (never attempted before at 5000 feet) would have felt very unappealing in the first few days after this all started - it had to be the last resort before the relief wells.

I imagine they've had separate engineering teams working up all of these solutions since day one - and deployed them in some kind of optimal risk/reward sequence.

The riskiness of the cap is probably a lot lower now; they'll have learnt a lot about how the well behaves during the failed 'top-kill' attempt, and the leaks through the old riser have almost certainly been getting worse, to the point where cutting all the crap off may have made relatively little difference to the flow while they were getting the cap on - which seems to have turned out to be comparatively straighforward.

[The Natural Philosopher]

wait till they sue Halliburton.

[Bruce]

The real cause of the problem was a blow-out preventer that didn't prevent a blow-out. The resulting blow-out caused explosions on the drilling rig.

The drilling rig was hired from Transocean, a drilling contractor. The blow-out preventer was supplied by another organisation, which I believe was Halliburton, in which former vice-President Dick Cheney has or had an interest.

Transocean is Swiss-based. Halliburton is US-based. But the overall responsibility for the project is of course BP's. So British-based BP gets the blame, even though responsibility for the failure may lie with, or be shared with, BP's Swiss- and US-based subcontractors and/or suppliers:

feel sorry for BP's Tony Hayward, who seems to be a nice chap who is completely out of his depth. he has become an object of US ire and hatred so has wisely (if somewhat belatedly) given over responsibility for the clean-up to an American.

[Grimly Curmudgeon]

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember Andy Burns saying something like:

Nothing big or exciting, just odd.

[David WE Roberts]

[cynic]

of preference

No matter who loses the case the legal profession will get richer