More scary information is coming to light in regards to the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill that is taking place in the Gulf of Mexico.
In a nutshell, all the efforts to stop the hemorrhage of oil into the Gulf of Mexico are failing, BP knows this, and they also seem to know that there may be much larger problems afoot than they are admitting.
Let’s start with the “Top Kill” effort, pumping the well full of drilling mud to seal the well.
It didn’t work, but it did create evidence of what is really happening. First of all the method used in this particular top kill made no sense, did not follow the standard operating procedure used to kill many other wells and in fact for the most part was completely contrary to the procedure which would have given it any real chance of working.
When a well is “Killed” using this method heavy drill fluid “Mud” is pumped at high volume and pressure into a leaking well. The leaks are “behind” the point of access where the mud is fired in, in this case the “choke and Kill lines” which are at the very bottom of the BOP (Blow Out Preventer) The heavy fluid gathers in the “behind” portion of the leaking well assembly, while some will leak out, it very quickly overtakes the flow of oil and only the heavier mud will leak out. Once that “solid” flow of mud is established at the leak “behind” the well, the mud pumps increase pressure and begin to overtake the pressure of the oil deposit. The mud is established in a solid column that is driven downward by the now stronger pumps. The heavy mud will create a solid column that is so heavy that the oil deposit can no longer push it up, shut off the pumps…the well is killed…it can no longer flow.
Usually this will happen fairly quickly, in fact for it to work at all…it must happen quickly. There is no “trickle some mud in” because that is not how a top kill works. The flowing oil will just flush out the trickle and a solid column will never be established. Yet what we were told was “It will take days to know whether it worked”….”Top kill might take 48 hours to complete”…the only way it could take days is if BP intended to do some “test fires” to test integrity of the entire system. The actual “kill” can only take hours by nature because it must happen fairly rapidly. It also increases strain on the “behind” portion and in this instance we all know that what remained was fragile at best.
Early that afternoon we saw a massive flow burst out of the riser “plume” area. This was the first test fire of high pressure mud injection. Later on same day we saw a greatly increased flow out of the kink leaks, this was mostly mud at that time as the kill mud is tanish color due to the high amount of Barite which is added to it to weight it and Barite is a white powder.
We later learned the pumping was shut down at midnight, we weren’t told about that until almost 16 hours later, but by then…I’m sure BP had learned the worst. The mud they were pumping in was not only leaking out the “behind” leaks…it was leaking out of someplace forward…and since they were not even near being able to pump mud into the deposit itself, because the well would be dead long before…and the oil was still coming up, there could only be one conclusion…the wells casings were ruptured and it was leaking “down hole”
Umm, Houston, we have a problem..
So why did it take BP so long to acknowledge the failure? Could it be that they already know that there are much larger issues at hand? What next? Lets see:
A down hole leak is dangerous and damaging for several reasons.
There will be erosion throughout the entire beat up, beat on and beat down remainder of the “system” including that inaccessible leak. The same erosion I spoke about in the first post is still present and has never stopped, cannot be stopped, is impossible to stop and will always be present in and acting on anything that is left which has crude oil “Product” rushing through it. There are abrasives still present, swirling flow will create hot spots of wear and this erosion is relentless and will always be present until eventually it wears away enough material to break it’s way out. It will slowly eat the bop away especially at the now pinched off riser head and it will flow more and more. Perhaps BP can outrun or keep up with that out flow with various suckage methods for a period of time, but eventually the well will win that race, just how long that race will be?…no one really knows….However now?…there are other problems that a down hole leak will and must produce that will compound this already bad situation.
This down hole leak will undermine the foundation of the seabed in and around the well area. It also weakens the only thing holding up the massive Blow Out Preventer’s immense bulk of 450 tons. In fact?…we are beginning to the results of the well’s total integrity beginning to fail due to the undermining being caused by the leaking well bore.
The first layer of the sea floor in the gulf is mostly lose material of sand and silt. It doesn’t hold up anything and isn’t meant to, what holds the entire subsea system of the Bop in place is the well itself. The very large steel connectors of the initial well head “spud” stabbed in to the sea floor. The Bop literally sits on top of the pipe and never touches the sea bed, it wouldn’t do anything in way of support if it did. After several tens of feet the seabed does begin to support the well connection laterally (side to side) you couldn’t put a 450 ton piece of machinery on top of a 100′ tall pipe “in the air” and subject it to the side loads caused by the ocean currents and expect it not to bend over…unless that pipe was very much larger than the machine itself, which you all can see it is not. The well’s piping in comparison is actually very much smaller than the Blow Out Preventer and strong as it may be, it relies on some support from the seabed to function and not literally fall over…and it is now showing signs of doing just that….falling over.
If you have been watching the live feed cams you may have noticed that some of the ROVs are using an inclinometer…and inclinometer is an instrument that measures “Incline” or tilt. The BOP is not supposed to be tilting…and after the riser clip off operation it has begun to…
This is not the only problem that occurs due to erosion of the outer area of the well casings. The way a well casing assembly functions it that it is an assembly of different sized “tubes” that decrease in size as they go down. These tubes have a connection to each other that is not unlike a click or snap together locking action. After a certain length is assembled they are cemented around the outside to the earth that the more rough drill hole is bored through in the well making process. A very well put together and simply explained process of “How to drill a deep water oil well” is available here: http://www.treesfullofmoney.com/?p=1610
The well bore casings rely on the support that is created by the cementing phase of well construction. Just like if you have many hands holding a pipe up you could put some weight on the top and the many hands could hold the pipe and the weight on top easily…but if there were no hands gripping and holding the pipe?…all the weight must be held up by the pipe alone. The series of connections between the sections of casings are not designed to hold up the immense weight of the BOP without all the “hands” that the cementing provides and they will eventually buckle and fail when stressed beyond their design limits.
These are clear and present dangers to the battered subsea safety structure (bop and lmrp) which is the only loose cork on this well we have left. The immediate (first 1,000 feet) of well structure that remains is now also undoubtedly compromised. However…..as bad as that is?…it is far from the only possible problems with this very problematic well. There were ongoing troubles with the entire process during the drilling of this well. There were also many comprises made by BP IMO which may have resulted in an overall weakened structure of the entire well system all the way to the bottom plug which is over 12,000 feet deep. Problems with the cementing procedure which was done by Haliburton and was deemed as “was against our best practices.” by a Haliburton employee on April 1st weeks before the well blew out. There is much more and I won’t go into detail right now concerning the lower end of the well and the troubles encountered during the whole creation of this well and earlier “Well control” situations that were revealed in various internal BP e-mails. I will add several links to those documents and quotes from them below and for now, address the issues concerning the upper portion of the well and the region of the sea floor.
The ramifications of this can be spectacular. If this whole thing leads to a “bleed out” of the entire deposit that was tapped, it will be a catastrophe the likes of which that has never been witnessed by human kind. The oil deposit is thought to contain approximately 1.5 BILLION barrels of crude oil, this makes the amount that has spewed out in the gulf thus far only a drop in the bucket. At this point the estimate is that approx 39 million gallons have leaked into the gulf, if the entire deposit bleeds out the 1.5 BILLION barrels, at 55 gallons per barrel, it could be up to 82.5 BILLION gallons of oil!
More chilling words from the author of the article that these excerpts were taken from:
Over the next 2 months the mechanical situation also cannot improve, it can only get worse, getting better is an impossibility. While they may make some gains on collecting the leaked oil, the structural situation cannot heal itself. It will continue to erode and flow out more oil and eventually the inevitable collapse which cannot be stopped will happen. It is only a simple matter of who can “get there first”…us or the well.
We can only hope the race against that eventuality is one we can win, but my assessment I am sad to say is that we will not.
The system will collapse or fail substantially before we reach the finish line ahead of the well and the worst is yet to come.
Sorry to bring you that news, I know it is grim, but that is the way I see it….I sincerely hope I am wrong.
We need to prepare for the possibility of this blow out sending more oil into the gulf per week then what we already have now, because that is what a collapse of the system will cause. All the collection efforts that have captured oil will be erased in short order. The magnitude of this disaster will increase exponentially by the time we can do anything to halt it and our odds of actually even being able to halt it will go down.
The magnitude and impact of this disaster will eclipse anything we have known in our life times if the worst or even near worst happens…
We are seeing the puny forces of man vs the awesome forces of nature.
We are going to need some luck and a lot of effort to win…
and if nature decides we ought to lose, we will….
Another article confirms that oil and gas have been spotted escaping crack in the seafloor in the area of the well, this is in line with what the author has stated:
Over Two weeks after it was widely reported by those watching the BP live oil leak cam that a series of explosions may have Gulf of Mexico sea floor to collapse the Government is now investigating those reports.
I first reported here that a series of those explosion of oil and debris continued and caused topkill to fail although there was no immediate mention of the event in the media, until now.
Last night on Countdown Keith Olbermann said their is now evidence that an underground blowout may be happening causing oil to seep out of BP’s leaking well through in various places on the ocean floor.
If this continues to go as badly as it has been already, this can end up being the worst ecological disaster that man has ever unleashed on this planet, the results of which have the probability to impact many facets of our lives for decades or longer.
Originally posted on June 14th
Source 1: http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6593#comment-648967
Source 3: http://www.tpass.org/
This is not information, but those who missed it or only get their new from the lamestream media, it seemed worth re-posting!
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