By John Ballard
The industry has a name for it. Top Kill. Kinda like enhanced interrogation but more macho-sounding. Like something from a Chuck Norris movie.
If you're thinking this will actually "kill" the well, think again. From what I read it will only kill the equipment standing in the ocean on top of the well. Look at this graphic.
Later this week, BP will perform a "top kill" on the oil well. The process requires injecting 40 barrels a minute of "kill mud" into the broken well and then sealing it with cement. The material will be pumped at high pressure down the choke and kill lines of the blowout preventer, which failed to seal the well after the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded on April 20. Choke and kill lines are used to control the amount and pressure of drilling mud in the wellbore, so that surges of oil and natural gas can be kept under control.
BP had initially planned to precede the top kill with a "junk shot," pumping debris such as golf balls and shredded tires into the blowout preventer to clog the leak, before adding the mud. But BP decided not to do the junk shot under concerns that it might cause more damage. BP spokesman Mark Proegler said the junk shot carried certain risks, specifically that the debris could shoot through the well causing more oil to leak.
A look at comments left at this link and several others indicate I am not alone wondering why this was not the first option.
The delivery pipe divides into two lines, one to the choke valve, the other to a kill valve. These are not my terms. They are shown on the graphic. As I have said before, I'm not an engineer, but anyone looking at this graphic can see that (1) the "kill valve" and "choke valve" would have been a much better place to attack the gusher than the equipment further up the line. And (2) the diameter of the "Oil well" looks smaller than that of the equipment between the well and the delivery line.
I need for someone to splain to me in layman's terms why a deepwater explosive device destroying the whole mess would not also have stopped the well from flowing. Like many others, I'm wondering if the efforts thus far have been to insure the future success of this well as a revenue stream for BP rather than stopping the disaster we all can see.
It's like stopping a war.
Only when the body bags pile up is there enough political critical mass to reach a tipping point.
I need for someone to splain to me in layman's terms why a deepwater explosive device destroying the whole mess would not also have stopped the well from flowing.
ReplyDeleteDestroying the whole mess would not plug the flow. In fact, it might open the well up so that it would be more difficult to plug, crack the casing, etc etc.
I think that there may be shaped charges designed to crimp the casing that are used by organizations like Red Adair's and Boots & Coots. But there are probably difficulties in placing and fusing them in this situation.
Thanks.
ReplyDeleteI guess that makes sense when I recall seeing fires burning in flooded areas because gas lines are damaged or when earth moving equipment accidentally tears into an underground utility.
Call me a cynic, but I can't shake the feeling that someone's cost/benefit analysis has deemed the ROI of the oil deposit greater than the environmental costs.
Maybe those "shaped charges" you mentioned should become standard on underwater wells, ready to detonate as another fail-safe layer.
When investigations are done, my guess is that regulatory neglect of already-in-place safety protocols is to blame. A political mindset driven by Reagan's famous "government IS the problem" credo has led to technocratic carelessness that has produced a mine disaster in West Virvinia, a global financial crisis of 2008, a credit and housing bubble and the Maddoff scheme.
Explosives won't work to fix this blowout for the same reason that dynamite can't fix a leaking water pipe. Explosives make large holes. To fix a leak or a blowout, you need to take a large hole and seal it over completely. Explosives can't do that.
ReplyDeleteThe diagram you've posted is not to scale. The well is 36" in diameter while the clear diameter inside the BOP is 18 3/4" and the riser is 21".
If you're going to write about Macondo, you really should be reading specialist sources (Upstream Online, Rigzone, TheOilDrum, The Driller's Club, etc) and doing your own research.
I think you are actually showing the "junk shot" there, which blocks the blowout preventer. The "top kill" pumps heavy mud and then cement into the drill bore column to seal the well itself.
ReplyDeleteFor topkill diagram see here.
Thanks for that. The Times diagram is more helpful. I'm not sure what the manifold does but the other input valves (choke and kill) look the same. The Times diagram, however, clearly shows how the stopping pressure of the "mud" must exceed that of the oil coming out.
ReplyDeleteI saw a helpful demonstration of "non-Newtonian mud" on CNN using cornstarch and water, giving new meaning to the saying "clear as mud." No wonder they haven't tried to explain what's happening in lay terms.
Yesterday's post by John Cole struck me as commonsensical.
I hear screams to �take over� the operations from BP. And do what? Is there some secret naval division that handles deep-sea drilling that we have not deployed? Does the government have some elite unit with better equipment than BP? I�m as pissed at them as anyone and want the government to make them pay for every penny of the clean-up, but I have to believe that all the people with experience fighting these things and all the equipment to deal with this sort of thing is already there with BP. And that if we �took over� from BP, it would still be the same people.
...�...
I suppose if someone can point to millions of feet of boom stockpiled in a government warehouse somewhere, or some sort of equipment the government has but is not using, then I could understand screaming about the federal response. But other than that, what do we expect them to do? FEMA and the Coast Guard don�t drill oil wells 5,000 feet underwater. As I said to JSF last night, this is like one of those disaster movies where we have to come up with some plan to explode the comet before it hits the earth, except in this case, the comet has already hit the earth and Bruce Willis and Morgan Freeman are fresh out of solutions.