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[LeoLeonardoIII]

You would think they would have a tool designed just for this situation.

You know, drill a dry well at the bottom and figure out how to cap it when no pressure is coming out. Then install something that pumps water out the false borehole from a couple dozen yards away, to simulate pressure, and see if they can cap it.

Seems criminally negligent to undertake this kind of operation without a tool deployed in the quite conceivable event of a broken drill pipe / drill retracted suddenly / rig sinking.

Makes me think: does some oil leak out around the borehole under normal operating conditions? How much oil escapes? How much is legally acceptable? Is there even regulation on that?

[Phmcw]

I was so sure that the entire ocean would instantly drain in the oil aquifer.  :o:o
Something is wrong there   

[Aqizzar]

...they have an entire toolbox of options and won't run out of options for a while. One or more than one used together is going to have to work.

Ah, the Gambler's Prayer.  Surely, one of these solutions has to work.  I mean, the Law of Averages wouldn't let us down every single time, right?

Seems criminally negligent to undertake this kind of operation without a tool deployed in the quite conceivable event of a broken drill pipe / drill retracted suddenly / rig sinking.

It does, doesn't it?  Which is exactly why Chris Oynes, MMS head of oceanic drilling ovesight, is "retiring".  Because no one ever actually gets fired anymore.

[Nonsapient]

Makes me think: does some oil leak out around the borehole under normal operating conditions? How much oil escapes? How much is legally acceptable? Is there even regulation on that?

Yes it does.  It goes back into the mud pits while drilling.  When drilling you force mud down through the interior of the pipe, and it comes back up on the ouutside of the pipe.  This is how you carry the rock cuttings to the surface.  Oil is always mixed up in that.  When you put a christmas tree on a well, it seals to the outside walls of the borehole, thus discontinuing the leak.

Yes, pipe (and casing) is still in the well.  They had a fully assembled string in the well when the Blowout Preventer failed to shear it off.  That's part of why there are multiple leaks.  This was all still connected to the rig (via a mile long pipe) when it sank.

Capping the well is pretty difficult.  The relief wells are the only salvation here.  Everything else is song and dance for the media, so it looks like BP is doing something.

[Aqizzar]

Well, nothing but the relief well will actually stop the leak, but reducing it from 50,000 barrels a day to 5,000 a day (or whatever the numbers are now) is nothing to sneeze at.  Besides, they fucked it up, it's time for them to dance and spend a lot of money, because that's what you do when you're a disgraced public spectacle.

[Nonsapient]

Well, nothing but the relief well will actually stop the leak, but reducing it from 50,000 barrels a day to 5,000 a day (or whatever the numbers are now) is nothing to sneeze at.  Besides, they fucked it up, it's time for them to dance and spend a lot of money, because that's what you do when you're a disgraced public spectacle.

That's a good point.  Any reduction of the impact is a good thing.  With that said I wouldn't trust them to get their numbers straight on how much they're reclaiming.

I want to see this cause big Change.

[LeoLeonardoIII]

I wonder if the guy who leaned on the control lever for the drill is one of the fatalities in the rig sinking? Or is he one of the survivors? Did they release the identity?

[Nonsapient]

I wonder if the guy who leaned on the control lever for the drill is one of the fatalities in the rig sinking? Or is he one of the survivors? Did they release the identity?

You know, I read that story and it all sounds pretty good.  Except for two things, namely two doors.

The guy says that, on two separate occasions, the door in front of him was knocked loose from its hinges and hit him, tossing him 35 feet.


How do you survive that kind of impact... twice?  Those are reinforced doors, I mean.   He may not be totally worth listening to.

With that said, I've known of many similar fuckups to the one he described.  It's a simple lever where the amount of weight the auto-driller allows to be on the drill string is controlled.

[Zangi]

Solution to 1 lever...  2 levers!

The second lever controls how far the first lever can go.  Result: Less likely for a super fuckup to occur.

[LeoLeonardoIII]

Solution to 1 lever...  2 levers!

The second lever controls how far the first lever can go.  Result: Less likely for a super fuckup to occur.

I'm sure we can second-guess him now. It might have been a simple miscalculation on drill weight?

I've heard that people typically prefer a specific level of risk. We will act safer when we feel things are risky. This safe action changes the actual risk downward to the comfort level.

But the inverse is also true. When the risk level is very low, we will act in more risky ways. This includes manually disabling safety measures, such as not wearing a helmet or removing a tool-guard. Part of this is because the safety measures make the work a little inconvenient. So we have a reason to remove them in the first place. So if we feel very safe, we might remove them. But if we don't feel safe, we leave them on.

Thus makers of safety equipment have to make the equipment very effective, but make you still feel not very safe when using it.

Take this with a grain of salt, of course, because I can't find the source that talks about the study. I definately remember reading it, but whatever.

[Greiger]

When I worked in a factory we had knurling machines.  They would take a long sorta hollow cilender designed to connect power lines together and imprint lettering into it by basically hitting it really hard with a lettered plate.  The plate went from one side of the part to the other and the part was on rollers, so it would inbed part numbers and all kinds of stuff like that into the part.

The thing was absolutely terrifying, you would knurl something like 10000 parts a day and every time you used it it would make a really loud slamming noise and shake the entire bench.

I think it was intentionally made to look that intimidating, I could set the machine up to not hit the part as hard, but they didn't like me leaving it that way when my shift was over.  I think the machine was intentionally built to look as scary as it was to make sure nobody gets the dumb idea to stick their finger in there.  (Not like you could anyway, you had to hit 2 switches simultaneously of opposite sides of the machine to activate it.)

I forgot what my point was.  Awesome anecdote though.

[LeoLeonardoIII]

Yep, pretty awesome. I think you were saying it in support of my idea that they have to make things look unsafe?

Perhaps "menacing with spikes of" is the Dwarven equivalent of safety regulations.

[Duke 2.0]

Perhaps "menacing with spikes of" is the Dwarven equivalent of safety regulations.

Woah Askoth! Careful! That lever almost impaled you! It must be in charge of something that could probably flood the fortress.

 I like the idea of more dangerous machines looking visibly more dangerous. Then sweatshops could be sold machines that could easily be converted to war machines, so the owners would have to take care of their employees or else they have a rampaging sewing mech that can shoot needles out of their hands.

[Aqizzar]

I'd love to read an actual study on the effect of making things appear dangerous increasing safety, because I've certainly seen the effect in action.  The UPS shipping hub that I work at was built in 1979, the very first of the modern designs.  Consequently, every piece of equipment in the building is thoroughly obsolete, badly overused, and very poorly maintained.

Safely auditors come around every few months to observe our work methods and ignore all the machinery.  While we do have a slightly higher accident rate than other facilities, it's nothing close to what they expect from such shoddy equipment, especially compared to other problem facilities that happen to be newer.  Heck, I even had an auditor outright tell me I was using a machine wrong, but she didn't know the right way to use it because they were long phased out everywhere else.  Everything in the building leaks, shakes, screams, and sparks, and we get maybe one accident a month, usually from bad lifting motion, not the machines.

Completely unrelated - anyone else ever been to Pike's Peak?  I forget the actual arrangement, but the park around Pike's Peak is not a normal national park.  They're exempt from the normal rules for road-safety, which means among other things that there's hardly a guardrail in the whole park.  A park made entirely of switchback gravel roads bordering mile-high cliffs.  They've had virtually no fatal accidents; a standard guardrail would do absolutely nothing to stop a car from flying off the ledges, but just knowing that there's nothing between you and an agonizingly long plummet to your doom is so fucking terrifying that their biggest problem is cars scraping along the inside walls of the roads.


Getting back to the topic at hand: surprising no one, British Petroleum has been massively underselling the flow-rate of the leak.  Like, 95,000 barrels a day massively.

[Nonsapient]

I'm sorry if I have seemed high-handed or arrogant in this thread.  This is one area I have a lot of experience in.  Directional Drilling has been my career for 5 years.  We did a lot of this kind of stuff.


I'd really like to get my hands on the well plans for that well,  and their geologist's reports.  100,000 barrels a day seems like a lot,  but it is somewhat understandable.  I'm sorry,  I don't have as much experience on the production side of things.