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Is it a requirement that oil spill clean-up operations like military operation have to have daft names ?
i am just waiting for "Operation Backshaft" and "Operation Giant Squid" in which the first one they use a pipe to fire oil at the oil in a effort to push it back into the hole, and the second were they catch a giant squid and ... well you get the picture.
I think so. Big picture what they are trying to do they call "Shut In". The first orientation I went to they told us never, never, push the "Shut In" controls that were everywhere.Quote:
Originally Posted by NeedSomeAnswers
What is "Shut In" ?, last i heard they were carrying out "Operation Top Hat 2" which could almost be a film sequel !Quote:
I think so. Big picture what they are trying to do they call "Shut In". The first orientation I went to they told us never, never, push the "Shut In" controls that were everywhere.
Shutting in is lowering the amount of product produced to lower than available, an emergency shut-in is an attempt to set the amount produced to 0.Quote:
Originally Posted by NeedSomeAnswers
Every attempt since the very beginning has been an emergency shut-in attempt.
Aha i see, its just TopKill, TopHat, Junk Shot e.t.c sound far cooler for the Media.Quote:
Every attempt since the very beginning has been an emergency shut-in attempt.
Yeah, for Monopoly, The Movie.Quote:
Originally Posted by NeedSomeAnswers
And Junk Shot sounds like something out of adult films.
Hey, it is the Stock Predictor! :)
When I wrote that, I was thinking that perhaps I should add the punchline to the post, but decided against it, since it was more fun letting people think about it. After all, it was kind of a lame punchline, so the guesswork was all the entertainment people would get from it.
Guys
OK, now that Top Kill died, let's examine why --
...the mud column wasn't "heavy" enough.
Maybe this would work...
If they were to add open pipe at the top of the back-flow preventer, thenCode:---------------------------------------------- sea level
|
4000 ft
|
-------------
| | |
| | M |
| | U |
| | D |
1000 ft | |
| | |
new pipe | |
| | |
v | |
-------------| |
| | |
| | |
20 ft | |
| | |
back-flow | |
preventer | --------
| | < MUD << top-kill
| | --------
v | |
-------------| |--------------------------- sea bed
| | |
| | |
| | O |
4 +/- | I |
miles | L |
| | |
| | |
| | |
v | |
------------ | |----------------------top of oil resevoir
- no real difficulty
- not dealing with pressure in pipe since top is open
- pipe segments could be made neutrally-bouyant by adding air-bag ring at top of each segment
- a "simple" collar joint would probably suffice
- then, inject mud at back-flow preventer (as before)
- this time, the mud column can develop enough weight to overcome oil pressure
Piece of cake.
Anyone care to venture how tall the pipe-stack would need to be?
My guess is 1000 ft. Could be much less.
Spoo
Suppose you were to taper the pipe that was added on, thereby creating a narrower vent? If the mud were sufficiently viscous, you wouldn't need as much, as it would not compress well getting out the vent. If you were to then taper it further, you would decrease the mud needed. Of course, you could taper it all the way, or just add a valve that could be closed, and you wouldn't need any mud at all. All you would need would be a fairly tight seal between the new pipe and the old. Apparently, that can't be done.
However, if the idea is that a mud seal would also be able to wedge into any gap between the old and new pipe, the concept would have merit...IF you could get enough mud into the pipe fast enough that it would plug the pipe before it was forced out by the oil. The injection volume would have to be pretty high, or else you are effectively repeating Top Kill.
Of course, if you CAN add a length of pipe onto the top of the existing pipe, then why not make the pipe long enough to reach the surface. Then, even if the oil does come out, you would still be able to collect it....which is what is now being called Top Hat II.
Spoo, I think the problem is directly related to the enormous pressure that the oil is overcoming to escape. The seawater alone is exerting 2300 psi on the wellhead and the oil is laughing at that as it escapes. It also laughed at the topkill approach.
Try to imagine holding back the pressure of an ordinary garden hose with something heavy over the top of it. Even in that rather trivial case, you need a cap with screws and a good washer seal to stop the water from escaping. Trying to do even that with the hose operating is a chore to say the least.
The heavy mud also tends to be less heavy due to the water's buoyancy force. I never even gave the topkill a 30% chance of working. :sick:
Should one of the things that come out of this be that the government provides, tests, monitors, etc. blow-out preventers?
I would want it to work like brakes on trains, some kind of pressure from above keeps the hole open, remove the pressure a valve closes.
Doc
I agree with your garden hose analogy ... sort of.
Let's look at 3 scenarios:
Givens:
- hose is point straight up
- water pressure is 100 psi
- hose's cross-section area is 1 square inch
- water weighs 64 lb/cubic foot, or 0.037 lb/cubic inch
Calculation: To obtain a water column that has a 100 psi
pressure at its base, you'd need 100 lbs of water (since the
area of the hose is 1 sq-inch)
- 100 / 0.037
- = 2,700 inches
- = 225 feet
Scenarios:
- Plug: Try to screw a nozzle that is closed to end of hose -- darn near impossible.
Water just squirts out the sides, resisting your attempts to "plug the hole"- 225-ft hose: Try to screw a 225 foot hose (that is dangling straight down from a tree)
to the end of the hose -- again, darn near impossible, for similar reasons.- 1-ft hose: Try to screw a 1 foot hose -- seems like this would be the easiest to do,
as water would only need to overcome the 1-ft height to squirt freely out the
open end. Repeat this 225 times.. would get progessively easier.
We agree that Scenario 1 is virtually impossible.
Likewise, Scenario 2 very tough -- and this equivalent to Top-Kill 2
Nonetheless, if we had more than a 225-ft tall hose, do we at least
agree that no water would escape from the top open end?
Spoo
DB
Good ideas.
Along the lines of your train brakes concept, I'd take it
one step further -- assure that it is truly "fail safe."
Did you happen to catch the 60 Minutes show a few
weeks back? Apparently, the drilling crew tried to pull
up the drill string while the anular ring in the back-flow
preventer was "locked", effectively destroying the
anular ring (bits of rubber were seen to come out of
the drill string) -- or at least something along those lines
happened. My understanding is that this event is what
damaged the back-flow preventer.
Lesson: make it impossible to do that.
Spoo
The Government has reeled in James Cameron for advice on the Oil Spill. :o :eek: :sick:
This was on news this morning.
Abhi
LOL ... btw, The Abyss was a great flick.
Spoo
Spoo, this is an interesting engineering discussion to say the least. Doing all this above ground would probably be a piece of cake, but trying to do it 5,000 feet underwater has proven imposible.
The sea water exerting 2300 psi on the wellhead is actually preventing this leak from becoming a virtual geyser, but it also made the topkill mud too light to do its job because of the buoyancy force. Even if they got 100 lb/cu ft mud, the water suddenly made it 37 lb/cu ft equivalent. So the oil pushed it right back out.
I'm not sure what the oil pressure against the sea water actually is. If I knew that, and the diameter of the well head opening, we might be able to calculate the height of the column required and then add another 100 ft for good measure. I think you have to assume that the absolute oil pressure is about 2500 psi and work from there, but I assure you that I am firing from the hip.
Has BP measured and announced the absolute pressure that the well head is exerting? Anyone know?
And does anyone believe them? They've low balled every estimate so far....except one. Apparently, in the pre-drilling documentation, they estimated that the flow from a blowout would be in the vicinity of 160,000 barrels per day, which is considerably higher than the highest estimate of the current flow.
SH, I understand your frustration and so do thousands of others, including petroleum engineers, mechanical engineers, scientists, etc. This whole catastrophic event has been hush-hushed since the explosion. We are only allowed to read what BP and the feds allow us to read.Quote:
Originally Posted by Shaggy Hiker
All of the potential solutions contain risk. Some are far worse than others. Nuclear detonation 5,000 or more feet below the surface has never been attempted. We are treading on untested ground and thin ice at the same time. I guess they never thought about that when they started to drill. :sick:
Old naive me thought that was the governments job, make sure the catastrophic couldn't happen. How many failures led to this? If the government wasn't so cozy with the industry would this have happened? And the one thing that isn't rocket science, protecting the coast from the oil, the government can't even handle that.Quote:
Originally Posted by Code Doc
It is going to be a long time before an incumbent politician gets my vote. Businesses are, and have always been, willing to push the edges, just as far as the government lets them. These past couple of years have shone a bright light on who controls the country. If Mr. Lincoln were writing today it would be "...and that government of business, by business, for business, shall not perish from the earth."
It is quite self evident that the government has not regulated the oil industry as much as they should but in today's free market, virtually every major private company has asked for less regulation and lobbied for less regulation and for this reason BP must be held just as culpable if not more so than the US government.Quote:
Old naive me thought that was the governments job, make sure the catastrophic couldn't happen. How many failures led to this? If the government wasn't so cozy with the industry would this have happened? And the one thing that isn't rocket science, protecting the coast from the oil, the government can't even handle that.
BP (amongst others) pushed for less regulation to increase there profit margins as far as possible. It seems to me that this disaster and the banking crisis have just shown that private enterprise cannot be trusted to regulate itself.
Now the public realises this they get on the governments back about it (and although in this case i am talking about the US Government, dont forgot looser and looser regulation has been happening all over the world.) but just a few years ago if the government had talked about tightening regulation for the private sector they would have been shouted down, nobody wanted to know.
Only now are we starting to see the effects of years of de-regulation has had, and for me as for many other the eventual cost is too high. Big business still holds to much power in my eyes, and to much influence on politicians.
As for protecting the coast, from what i have heard the main thing they have been making sure is that BP actually pay for it rather than the US Tax payer, so they have waited to make sure of this.
If BP had been willing to splash out more of its cash on this earlier then more may have already been done.
The one argument i do not get is this idea that this is not BP's fault its the governments for not regulating them properly, this is just plainly ridiculous.
If BP were not at fault then if we transferred that idea over to people instead of companies, would we accept the defence of "its not my fault, its there fault because they didn't stop me from doing it" no i think not !
"The one argument i do not get is this idea that this is not BP's fault its the governments for not regulating them properly, this is just plainly ridiculous.
If BP were not at fault then if we transferred that idea over to people instead of companies, would we accept the defence of "its not my fault, its there fault because they didn't stop me from doing it" no i think not !"
BP took advantage of the system. Arguing that they influenced the system means that the Government allowed it. If they broke a law they should be punished, just like you and me. But do you really think that the bought / paid for government will allow this to go to far up the food chain? Some mid-level manager is going to fall on the sword, regardless of how much further up it went.
I am not a big fan of government regulation, up until "Catastrophic" failure. I guess it was the banks fault that they were too big to fail?
I do not hold blameless these large corporations, but what is the common denominator?
Zzzzz....ZZZZ......ZZzzzzz
National Geographic had a special on the disaster that aired last week. I just watched it. It was good, but it raised other questions in my mind.
1 - They tried to manually close the BOP, almost from the beginning.
2 - They knew if the BOP didn't close the rig was going to go down, or break free and maybe drag the riser across other pipes from other rigs.
So why didn't they cut the riser near the surface while they were still in "control"?
DB asked, "So why didn't they cut the riser near the surface while they were still in "control"?"
--------------
Perhaps there was no motivation nor any incentive to do so. From the beginning, BP erred in estimating how serious the leak was, initially reporting to the world that only 1,000 Barrels were leaking per day. That was a pure blunder because more than 40 times that amount was the actual case.
At that time, the 1979-80 Ixtoc I spill was far greater, so they thought they were playing with small potatoes. Then suddenly they woke up and discovered in horror that this mess was going to make the Ixtoc I leak look like small potatoes. :eek2:
Now we are all paying the price of atrocious projection analysis by a collection of buffoons playing with forces that are out of control. :down:
One thing I've been wondering about in general
(ie, before the disaster occurred) ...
The drill rig was floating... what kept it in position
- long anchors (like, way long)?
- GPS driven propellors on board?
- the drill string -- unlikely.
- something else?
Spoo
Yes that is part of it, Governments has been to close to big business for some time now, and this is not just incumbent governments but also for the past 10 - 20 years.Quote:
BP took advantage of the system. Arguing that they influenced the system means that the Government allowed it. If they broke a law they should be punished, just like you and me.
The problem is the system is broken still. While we have the current level of lobbyists and while large businesses can help decided the outcome of political campaigns by donating large sums of money we will have this skew towards big business interests in Politics.
You or me can't go and lobby the court system to get more favourable laws passed for our benefit.
Also for me there is quite a difference between Regulation and Red-tape, and regulation as i see it is something that big business in particular need more of to make sure they behave.
If there attitude is to push the rules to breaking in order to make the most profit then they need more regulation to curb this kind of behaviour, particularly when it effects the whole economy or has wide environmental effects or that kind of size issue.
Red-tape on the other hand is something we need less of, overly complicated forms to fill in and hoops to jump through just to operate normally and that type of stuff.
I was talking about before the rig sank. What was holding the rig in position was the riser pipe that was fueling the fire that eventually melted and sank the rig. The rig sinking made a mess of the drill string.Quote:
Originally Posted by Code Doc
@spoo, GPS and azipods.
DB
Azipods ... who knew?
Great crossword or Scrabble word.
Spoo
Aren't those the curiously strong mints?
Aside from better regulation regarding "fail-safe"
blow-out preventers and such, I've been dubious
about all the wild gripes that the Government should
do more.
Except for this... the BP dividend.
I heard a news report that BP plans to pay out
their "normal" dividend .. I missed the amount, but
could it have been $50 billion?
Anyway, I don't have a specific problem with BP
paying a dividend (a lot of Brits rely on that income),
but the Government should force BP to set aside at
least $50 billion to cover upcoming restoration costs.
What we don't need is for BP to go bankrupt after
paying out dividends.
Spoo
Hah!
BP slated to announce they'll be setting aside funds
into an escrow account.
What do I win?
Spoo said, "What we don't need is for BP to go bankrupt after paying out dividends."
-------------------
BP will not go bankrupt after paying out dividends or paying another $10 billion or more on top of that to help out Gulf seashore merchants. This company has assets that reach all the way into the British crown and a continuous stream of cash flow.
Also, take a look at their proven reserves of natural gas. This company is filthy rich (no pun intended).