Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[RedKing]

So much for faith in BP's engineers:

Seepage detected in seabed near capped well. This was somewhat expected. Now to see if they have to unplug the well, or if they choose to deny there's a problem until the whole damn thing blows again and we're looking at like 100K barrels/day leakage. Given their track record, I'm putting my money on the latter. 

[Aqizzar]

And then if they unplug it for work, whether it'll take another eighty seven days to put the cap back on.

[RedKing]

And then if they unplug it for work, whether it'll take another eighty seven days to put the cap back on.

They may not have a choice. If the well's structural integrity has been compromised far enough, they might not be able to seal it without generating enough pressure elsewhere that it blows out a different section. It's like stuffing a fat guy into a pair of spandex pants.

[RAM]

Isn't that what the slant drilling^(tm) was for?

[RedKing]

Partially. The relief wells are supposed to lower the pressure, but their main purpose is to allow them to start pumping heavy drilling mud into the bottom of the well and basically plug it at its source. Doing so will more or less kill that well for all future use, which is a bigger economic hit to BP (although frankly dwarfed by what this is going to cost them overall).

You have to remember, when this all blew up, they were in the process of pumping mud into the top of the well to "cap" it for later use.

To use a DF analogy, they dug down till they hit cavern, just so they'd know where the platinum, gems and HFS metal are for later. Then they were going to build a microcline wall to seal it off and come back when they're ready. But instead, oil demons with [BUILDINGDESTROYER:1] poured forth. And then, they had two options:

1. Try to fight their way back in and build another wall, hoping that there wasn't a gap somewhere else they had missed.
2. Cave-in with semi-living rock. More likely to succeed, but then they'll never be able to dig back down to that deposit.

They've been opting for #1 for quite a while, partly because #2 was going to take a while to set up, and partly (IMHO) because they didn't want to lose the chance to extract that oil later. I think what changed the equation somewhat might be best illustrated with a DF analogy as well:

Barack Obama, President is throwing a tantrum!
Tony Hayward, CEO has been struck down.

[RAM]

Wow, that DF analogy was brilliant!

[smjjames]

So much for faith in BP's engineers:

Seepage detected in seabed near capped well. This was somewhat expected. Now to see if they have to unplug the well, or if they choose to deny there's a problem until the whole damn thing blows again and we're looking at like 100K barrels/day leakage. Given their track record, I'm putting my money on the latter. 

We don't know how big the seep is. It could be a naturally ouccuring one (extremely debateable given the circumstances) that got opened by the pressure. Still, just the fact that there is a seep right by the well is worrying in itself since that would mean that the oil has found an alternate way to the surface and we don't have a clue where that one is coming from, plus it will be far harder to stop that one.

If it settles down to the rate of a natural oil seep, okay, but this isn't exactly a normal oil seep either.

[Nivim]

 It's another bad sign, but don't forget that the seeping is about 1/30th of the main pipe's leak.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

The main pipe that dumped (Recalling from memory here) about 16,000,000 gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico? 1/30th of that output is still very bad.

[alway]

Oh, wow, just noticed this on the wikipedia page for the spill:

13 dead (11 killed on Deepwater Horizon, 2 additional oil-related deaths)[1][2]

With the source:
http://workinprogress.firedoglake.com/2010/06/23/two-workers-dead-in-bp-oil-disaster-recovery-effort/
So that's one dead from a "swimming incident", and one confirmed suicide...

[Phmcw]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/jul/18/bp-oil-spill-gulf
It's an old problem : oil company, are tempted to reduce security cost to save money. It's true for nuclear energy too and has already led to nuclear incidents(for instance Tokaimura's).
Bu in this case, BP seems particularly over the top.

[smjjames]

Oh, wow, just noticed this on the wikipedia page for the spill:

13 dead (11 killed on Deepwater Horizon, 2 additional oil-related deaths)[1][2]

With the source:
http://workinprogress.firedoglake.com/2010/06/23/two-workers-dead-in-bp-oil-disaster-recovery-effort/
So that's one dead from a "swimming incident", and one confirmed suicide...

I think I heard that the swimming incident was a swimming pool incident and since they said it was not work related....

Anyways, Discovery news page of the photoshopping incident: http://news.discovery.com/tech/another-altered-bp-photo-raises-eyebrows.html

While you'd think that a company would be more careful about public relations in such a situation, I'm not surprised given their previous PR blunders.

[smigenboger]

ouch, any news on the seepage?

[smjjames]

ouch, any news on the seepage?

I don't think so, nothing new anyways.

[Duuvian]

It seems like BP's solutions always involve ruining the oil, even going so far as to burn it once it was on board a ship. Is anyone working on alternative plans to allow pumping in the well to continue safely?

If they have a system of valves in place in case of an emergency relating to pressure increase, I was wondering why they don't attach "hoses" to them. That way, half the hoses could go to a bunch of floating containers or tanks, and half could go to a tanker. When the tanker is full, switch the valves to the floating containers until a new ship is lined up. That way oil won't be spraying everywhere. Then you could have a 3rd fleet of ships to empty the containers into once the next ship is in place and the oil pumping to it.

Also, are there any non-industry estimates on the size of the well collected by non-industry related people?