Now I’m Concerned
The Times-Picayune has a graphic of BP’s current effort, and I have to say that it looks an awful lot like the funnel I proposed back on April, 30th.
Now I’m wondering where I screwed up, because if BP is doing it, there is probably some basic flaw I missed during the 10-15 minutes it took me to come up with the plan.
Of course, back then, I wanted to install a shut off valve as step two, but after a month of additional sand blasting neither the riser nor the BOP may be in any shape to withstand the pressure of stopping the flow.
3 comments
😆 Yeah… It’s not at all funny… but it is! Been there myself, you have my sympathies m8! *sigh*
Anyway, if they do screw it up, you know that there are always ways to screw things up no matter how simple they may be. 😉 Some people (and companies) are just screw-ups! And some do it on purpose.
They spent millions building that first failure to fit a bent pipe, when it would obviously be easier in every way to cut off the riser and deal with a straight vertical pipe. It gives access from all sides and only requires looking at a single problem. I just don’t see the logic behind the way they have approached the problem.
Now they have screwed around so long that the relief well is the only option left. Now we get to see if it can intersect with the blow out. The way things have been going, I fully expect the relief well to hit a gas reservoir and blow out too.
The relief well should intersect just fine. At least, I could have done it with late 1980’s technology and I know that the electronics available today, at least, are far better than what I had to work with back in the 80s, magnetometers are sensitive enough now to pick out the drilling casing from a fair distance and guide the drillbit to it (as an aside, I did that work on DOS in Microsoft C on an 80286 with 1MB of RAM… my iPhone has more CPU power than that PC did!). And the relief well shouldn’t blow out because they’re gonna have it full of mud (doh!). Which is going to present problems because of the fractured formations they have to go through, which have a bad habit of collapsing and grabbing drilling tools if you don’t use a heavy enough mud, or fracturing and losing the mud and ruining drilling tools if you use a too-heavy mud, either one of which is bad news, but with *two* wells being drilled we’re as close to 100% as it’ll get.
So anyhow, the logic behind leaving the bent pipe on was that it was restricting the flow. But the kill attempt showed that any restriction was within the blowout preventer itself, probably from partially-deployed rams. At which point it becomes clear that the answer is to cut off the pipe. What has baffled me about all of this is the ridiculous amount of time that it takes BP to do *anything*. It’s as if the company is being run by the same people who handled the Katrina response. Hmm….
– Badtux the Oil Penguin
.-= last blog ..Crashing halt =-.