Armed Polite Society
Main Forums => The Roundtable => Topic started by: Bogie on May 24, 2010, 09:53:44 PM
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Why don't they package up a whole buncha portland cement in paper bags the size of two-pound bags of sugar, and just dump the whole mess on top of that oil leak?
Or other idea... Drop a big cement dealie down there, open at both ends. Put it over the thing, pour in a buncha cement, and then cap it with something with a nice big pipe/valve on it. Let it all set up, then turn the valve off... The oil can't be under THAT much pressure, can it?
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Why don't they package up a whole buncha portland cement in paper bags the size of two-pound bags of sugar, and just dump the whole mess on top of that oil leak?
Or other idea... Drop a big cement dealie down there, open at both ends. Put it over the thing, pour in a buncha cement, and then cap it with something with a nice big pipe/valve on it. Let it all set up, then turn the valve off... The oil can't be under THAT much pressure, can it?
I believe the second one is effectively what they did except the valve was on top of the box they dropped on it. That failed.
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the stuff coming out is under real pressure
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last I heard the pressures involved with the spewingil part were on the order of 60,000 PSI. What I want to know is why they would send a tube down there not capable of siphoning off even 1/2 the oil. What, we ain't got bigger pipe out there? Why not put a giant funnellike dealie on the end of a larger siphon tube and place it where it captures the bulk of the oil?
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One of the big problems is that the oil has a lot of methane and other gases.
As we know Boyle's law. Expanding gases get cold. Cold enough to freeze the water mixed in.
Thats why the pipe leading from that concrete top hat thing froze and the oil just came out around it.
One quick way to stop the leak is through the judicious application of high explosives.
It would crush the ground and the casing sealing it off. Except that it would make the area un-drill able.
Right now they are still siphoning off oil and separating the water and making money. If they destroy the area they are out even more money. Who wants that to happen.
I believe the Russians have stopped similar deep leaks with that method.
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Well, I still think they're trying to be too complicated...
Wouldn't be that hard to drop a few hundred tons of portland cement on it...
And they tried to stick that big funnel looking thing on top of it with it spewing... Open up the big funnel thing, make it easy to screw a lid with a big ol' pipe/valve on it... Put the lid over the thing, start up the pumps (at a rate of 61,000 psi or somesuch, as long as it is more...), and drop it on... The pour as much portland over the sucker as you can manage, and then see if it holds when you turn the valve down...
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Well, I still think they're trying to be too complicated...
Wouldn't be that hard to drop a few hundred tons of portland cement on it...
And they tried to stick that big funnel looking thing on top of it with it spewing... Open up the big funnel thing, make it easy to screw a lid with a big ol' pipe/valve on it... Put the lid over the thing, start up the pumps (at a rate of 61,000 psi or somesuch, as long as it is more...), and drop it on... The pour as much portland over the sucker as you can manage, and then see if it holds when you turn the valve down...
Just a quick comment on the "rop a few hundred tons of portland cement" idea. The pressure of the oil would just push the cement off it before it cured. A one ton granite block can be lifted by only 3 psi of water. It does make me wonder about the funnel idea though. Long suspended pipe over the leak, big bloody funnel at the bottom, and centrifugal water separators at the top, at least until the well can be capped.
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How about blowing up a 15kt nuke on top of it?
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A mile doesn't seem very far unless it's straight down.
jim
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Long suspended pipe over the leak, big bloody funnel at the bottom,
You mean that 60,000 PSI leak?
The one with more pressure coming out of it than a .454 casull round, pushing 55,000 gallons of crude upwards every day, or 2,500 gallons an hour, 41.6 gallons per minute or 2/3 a gallon per second?
That's 20 times the velocity of your shower's output... or twenty times greater volume in surface area. One of the two.
A big, bendy mile long tube ain't gonna stay in place over that.
How about blowing up a 15kt nuke on top of it?
I think this will be the ultimate solution. Fuse the ground solid underneath it and hammer it with the pressure of a nuke, or perhaps for political reasons (we do have that muslim commie hippie Obama in the White House, after all), we'll use a depth-rigged daisy cutter or MOAB device or other conventional explosive in amazingly high volume.
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Eh! Big deal.
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No esta problaymo.
Terry, 230RN
(Pic credits in properties)
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You mean that 60,000 PSI leak?
The one with more pressure coming out of it than a .454 casull round, pushing 55,000 gallons of crude upwards every day, or 2,500 gallons an hour, 41.6 gallons per minute or 2/3 a gallon per second?
Hmm. You're right. How large of a surface area does the oil diffuse to on the way up? Perhaps anchor a large series of oil booms around the area where it's surfacing and then rig the centrifuges to just skim it off the top, separate the water from it and then pump it ashore? Just trying to think up an intermediate way to both stop the spread of the spill and also recover it for processing and use at the same time until the leak can be capped.
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one of the large dredges they use for the beach restorations could get most of the leaking oil. then pump it to a super tanker for separation. no need for a centrifuge as oil and water separates naturally. simply have a pump on the bottom of the tanker pumping out the water, and a pump near the top pumping the oil to another tanker.
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Well this morning they're talking trying to pug it with mud and if that doesn't work we're back to containment dome.
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When I say big funnel thingy I'm thinking big like geodesic dome house size funnel shaped thingy. Like really really big to catch the plume after pressures have dissipated and the majotiry of the gas has bubbled off. Put steering motors on it and drive it around to keep it in the sweet spot if things start to shift.
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Like a mega-huge globalindustrial pool cleaner. :cool:
DD
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Exactly! :lol:
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When I say big funnel thingy I'm thinking big like geodesic dome house size funnel shaped thingy. Like really really big to catch the plume after pressures have dissipated and the majotiry of the gas has bubbled off. Put steering motors on it and drive it around to keep it in the sweet spot if things start to shift.
Let me get this straight:
You want someone to design and buiold the worlds biggest ROV (by an order of magnitude) that is capable of a neutral boyancy hover in 5000 ft of water over a pressurized liquid plume. It needs to be capable of maintaing close to neutral bouancy while varying amounts of gass at varing pressures are bubbling around it (changeing the water density) It needs some kind of automated guidence system to track the plume or a seperate ROV for human piloting, 5000ft of power, control and communication cable, and a ship with a derrick capable of supporting said ROV.
In addition it needs to ba stable enough at depthe that we can attache a 5000ft siphon tube to it and pump the high pressure oil out. Oh, and the guidance system has to be able to compensate for the changing pressure inside the house sized dome from the pumping.
I'm not an engineer either, but it sounds easy enough. Get Kaylee on it. =D
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Yup, what's so hard about that? ???
:laugh:
In reality I'd think distance and size are your friend. The farther up you can capture the plume the less complicated it becomes as pressures decrease and gas bubbles off. So the bigger the better.
Think umbrella measurd in acres as another example. First we'll need a really big spring to pop it open. ;)
I'd want to put it in at a point where most of the stuff rising is oil at slow speed and not being affected anymore by the pressures and velocities right at the source. Intead induce it to flow to the umbrella by the pumping creating a lower pressure area in the dome. Just like Doggy Daddy said, a great big pool vacuum. So we'll need a really big brush too. :laugh:
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Just get a Dutchman and have him put his finger in the hole. Worked on the dikes. :P
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Why doesn't the .gov just print up $700 Trillion and dump it right on top of the well?
That should fix it.
jim
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Let me get this straight:
You want someone to design and buiold the worlds biggest ROV
We're Americans. We can do anything...
Okay. How is "mud" different from portland cement?
And I still think that a "gradual shut off" could be interesting...
3 psi can lift a ton? Okay. We'll need more tons.
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We're Americans. We can do anything...
That's the problem: British Petroleum.
:angel: =D
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Oi! =D
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oil can't be under THAT much pressure, can it?
yes is can and is.
The idea of pumping drilling mud, weighted heavier than the oil and heavy enough to stop the flow, is a good plan. If it works. They can chase the oil with cement, weighted more than the mud and just maybe it will work.
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Why doesn't the .gov just print up $700 Trillion and dump it right on top of the well?
That should fix it.
jim
There we go, the perfect plan! :lol:
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How about blowing up a 15kt nuke on top of it?
Soviets did just that.
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I'm beginning to like the Soviets, they don't screw around. ;)
Once again the answer is found in music... Kind of safe for work except it's from when KISS took their masks off and nobody knew who they were. [barf] :laugh:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGpBRyXapuA
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Gene Simmons is a whole lot more forbidding without makeup that with it.
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Right? :lol:
Maybe he could just head down there and stick his tongue in it. :O
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That's the problem: British Petroleum.
:angel: =D
Convince the oil that it's acting too much like American oil. Then it'll furiously attempt to be different in every way possible.
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Convince the oil that it's acting too much like American oil. Then it'll furiously attempt to be different in every way possible.
There is a good joke about UK elites, France, Cajuns, the EU, and the English channel in there, somewhere.
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That's the problem: British Petroleum.
:angel: =D
I guess they are making up for that tea incident. :cool:
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actually, I do have an idea that would probably work, however, they are not accepting outside ideas, even from engineers.....
to get an idea....think of a bunsen burner and it's air flow control...
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no, my idea is the best so there is no need to entertain others. You'll just have to be quicker next time. :P
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Plan A: Insert a semi-rigid tube slightly smaller than the leaker, and wrapped in an inflatable bladder for a few hundred feet. Attach said tube to the surface container and figure out how to pressurize the bladder over its entire length. When you allow the oil and gas mixture to rise, the bladder can seal the pipe with no danger of further blowout in the riser under the seabed.
Plan B: drill a conventional hole next to the leaker and send down however much dynamite the engineers figure is needed to collapse the whole friggin thing.
Plan C: Tell the North Koreans they're welcome to all the oil they can salvage.
See? Easy-peasy! =D
TC
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How long did it take to plan, design, build, and install the well in the first place? A decade or more?
And they think we're going to be able to come up with a solution and implement it in just a few days?
The kind of engineering involved in a project like this is staggering. This would be a tricky enough problem if it were on the surface, where we could reach it easily. How long did it take us to put out all of Saddam's burning oil wells in Kuwait? A coupla years?
Add in the whole mile under the ocean part, the huge pressure bit, the freezing gasses, the mangled wreckage and debris from the explosion and failure of the rig, and, oh yeah, that mile under the ocean thing, and it's just not a problem that's going to be solved easily or quickly. I'll be impressed with BP if they get the thing shut off within a year.
Why on earth are we drilling for oil 65 miles off shore and a mile down, when there's plenty of oil near the shore and on land that we could use instead?!
=|
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And they think we're going to be able to come up with a solution and implement it in just a few days?
The soviets did.
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I don't think nukes are an option in the BP toolbox.
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The one thing I have not heard yet, with all the wailing and teeth-gnashing going on, is how slow the gooberment has been to do anything.
Yes, I know there is absolutely nothing the gooberment could do, with the possibility of throwing FEMA traiulers overboard in hopes of hitting a 5,000-foot "swish" goal that miraculously caps the sucker.
But all the "dem-Libs" that demamded that the goobermint under Bush "do something" every time Momma Gia had a hissy fit are astoundingly quiet now that the gooberment is the other party.
What gives? (rhetorical question, for the most part.)
stay safe.
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By Tim Johnson | McClatchy Newspapers
MEXICO CITY — The Ixtoc 1 oil spill in Mexico's shallow Campeche Sound three decades ago serves as a distant mirror to today's BP deepwater blowout, and marine scientists are still pondering what they learned from its aftereffects.
In terms of blowouts, Ixtoc 1 was a monster — until the ongoing BP leak, the largest accidental spill in history. Some 3.3 million barrels of oil gushed over nearly 10 months, spreading an oil slick as far north as Texas, where gooey tar balls washed up on beaches.
Surprisingly, Mexican scientists say that Campeche Sound itself recovered rather quickly, and a sizable shrimp industry returned to normal within two years.
Luis A. Soto, a deep-sea biologist, had earned his doctorate from the University of Miami a year before the June 3, 1979, blowout of Ixtoc 1 in 160 feet of water in the Campeche Sound, the shallow, oil-rich continental shelf off the Yucatan Peninsula.
Soto and other Mexican marine scientists feared the worst when they examined sea life in the sound once oil workers finally capped the blowout in March 1980.
"To be honest, because of our ignorance, we thought everything was going to die," Soto said.
The scientists didn't know what effects the warm temperatures of gulf waters, intense solar radiation, and other factors from the tropical ecosystem would have on the crude oil polluting the sound.
There were political implications as well; the spill pitted a furious shrimping industry, reliant on the nutrient-rich Campeche Sound, against a powerful state oil company betting its future in offshore drilling, particularly the continental shelf in the Gulf of Mexico it began developing in the late 1970s.
In the months after Ixtoc 1 was capped, scientists trawled the waters of the sound for signs of biological distress.
"I found shrimp with tumor formations in the tissue, and crabs without the pincers. These were very serious effects," Soto said.
Another Mexican marine biologist, Leonardo Lizarraga Partida, said the evaluation team began measuring oil content in the sediment, evaluating microorganisms in the water and checking on the biomass of shrimp species.
As the studies extended into a second year, scientists noticed how fast the marine environment recovered, helped by naturally occurring microbes that feasted on the oil and degraded it.
Perhaps due to those microbes, Tunnell found that aquatic life along the shoreline in Texas had returned to normal within three years — even as tar balls and tar mats remained along the beaches, sometimes covered by sand.
"We were really surprised," Lizarraga said. "After two years, the conditions were really almost normal."
The Gulf currents and conditions of the Ixtoc 1 spill helped. Unlike the BP blowout, which has spewed at least 5,000 barrels of oil a day, and perhaps many times that, at depths near 5,000 feet, the Ixtoc 1 oil gushed right to the surface, and currents slowly took the crude north as far as Texas, killing turtles, sea birds and other sea life.
"I measured 80 percent reduction in all combined species that were living in the intertidal zone," said Wes Tunnell, a marine biologist at the Harte Research Institute of Gulf of Mexico Studies at Texas A&M University in Corpus Christi.
While that was severe, Tunnell noted that natural oil that seeps from the seabed releases the equivalent of one to two supertankers of crude in the Gulf of Mexico each year.
"It's what I call a chronic spill," Tunnell said. "The good side of having all that seepage out there is that we've got a huge population of microbes, bacteria that feed on petroleum products in the water and on shore. So that helps the recovery time."
An expert on the biodegradation of petroleum, Rita R. Colwell, who holds posts both at the University of Maryland and Johns Hopkins University, said microorganisms are good at breaking down the short chain molecular compounds in crude.
"For the bacteria, they really chew it and release it as CO2," Colwell said. "The longer stuff that has long ring compounds, that's the stuff that remains."
A bloom in oil-consuming microorganisms turned out to be a boon to shrimp in the Campeche Sound, to the relief of the crews on the 650 shrimp boats that trawled in the sound back then.
"The shrimp fed on the bacteria. When you are making the chemical analysis of the shrimp, you obtain the fingerprint," Soto said, adding that petroleum compounds contain unique chemistry just as flora and fauna contain unique genes.
Just as a human body rallies its defenses to fight off invasive germs, Soto said, the microorganisms prevalent in warmer ocean waters help break down the crude.
"What we learned is that tropical environments have a better chance to recover equilibrium," Soto said, adding that he believes the Campeche Sound was largely back to normal "perhaps in a year and a half."
Crude oil does contain toxic compounds, known as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, which aren't easily absorbed by bacteria. Scientists are still studying whether bacteria can be cultivated to break down them down.
"Fortunately, they don't bio-magnify in species as they go up the food chain. They seem to just get passed through and dropped out," Tunnell said.
Colwell, nonetheless, warned of eating shrimp harvested in the immediate area of an oil spill: "If you are eating shrimp during the current season or next season, I wouldn't recommend it."
Lizarraga, who works at the Center for Scientific Research and Higher Studies of Ensenada, on the Baja California peninsula, criticized the heavy use of chemical dispersants to break up the oil gushing from the BP spill into droplets, saying it isn't yet clear how the dispersants will affect the oil-degrading microorganisms.
In the Ixtoc 1 spill, "not so many dispersants were used," he said, allowing natural processes to take their course.
Some fundamental questions remain about the volumes of oil that microorganisms can break down in an oil spill. Tunnell said long-term comprehensive studies are rarely carried out after workers finish mopping up crude oil coating beaches.
"When its cleaned up, the studies stop," he said. "There's a lot that we don't have the real answers to."
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The one thing I have not heard yet, with all the wailing and teeth-gnashing going on, is how slow the gooberment has been to do anything.
Yes, I know there is absolutely nothing the gooberment could do, with the possibility of throwing FEMA traiulers overboard in hopes of hitting a 5,000-foot "swish" goal that miraculously caps the sucker.
But all the "dem-Libs" that demamded that the goobermint under Bush "do something" every time Momma Gia had a hissy fit are astoundingly quiet now that the gooberment is the other party.
What gives? (rhetorical question, for the most part.)
stay safe.
They got the explosives to seal that bad boy up tighter then a ducks rear end?
Seriously. Send a couple subs and torpedo the thing. Yes I realize that's likely an over simplification, but I'm sure the military would be more then happy to rig something up that can get to the right depth and explode with enough force to collapse the well.
And agree, had Bush been in the WH when this happened they'd be all over his ass about not doing anything.
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actually, I do have an idea that would probably work, however, they are not accepting outside ideas, even from engineers.....
but thier pr people do have a great web form to make people believe they're listening!
http://www.horizonedocs.com:80/artform.php
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Hmmm... Another idea... Pump a lot of high pressure air down to the area, and strike a match... Heck, add a little O2 and acetylene while you're at it...
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You forgot the det cord and duct tape.
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Use the detcord to set off the Soviet nukes.
:P
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Just get a whole bunch of people to chew up some bubble gum, and then stuff it down the pipe :P
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RTV Silicone cement, duct tape, and WD-40 will solve any mechanical problem.
Between these three items, I have saved 23,842 man-hours over my lifetime.
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Idea:
Given the following two factors:
-This well is at 5000 feet below sea level. Water pressure is enormous.
-This well is a high pressure leak. Back pressure is enormous.
-The "dome" that was put in place allowed water pressure to still cyrstalize the methane gas, meaning it did not use positive pressure to its own best interests.
Re-do the dome. But:
-Make it heavier. Put 20,000 pounds more cement into its base. Make it sink into the mud REAL good.
-Make it air/water-tight. Except for the pipe to pump the crude up, of course.
-Run a 5000 foot air hose to it, capable of exceeding the PSI strength of the crush pressure of the ocean. Run a positive air feed into there.
-Lower the acting pressure inside the dome so that the methane hydrate no longer crystalizes.
-Suck the oil up.
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http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-oil-spill-stopped-top-kill-link,0,1045555.story?track=rss
Coast gaurd is reporting they've stopped the leak.
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http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-oil-spill-stopped-top-kill-link,0,1045555.story?track=rss
Coast gaurd is reporting they've stopped the leak.
Without the use of WD-40 or nukes.
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Coast Guard is reporting they've stopped the leak.
Without the use of WD-40 or nukes.
Well, that was no fun.
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Without the use of WD-40 or nukes.
I'm sure there's WD-40 and duct tape on that ship.
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http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-oil-spill-stopped-top-kill-link,0,1045555.story?track=rss
Hmmm...
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/politics/sns-graphics-oil-spill-estimate-gx,0,2477093.graphic
"Worst oil spill in US history," so they don't have to mention the mess the Mexicans made with IXTOC I. Funny how nobody's brought it up in the mainstream media while they're saying we have nothing to go by on what sort of environmental catastrophe this will be.
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By Tim Johnson | McClatchy Newspapers
MEXICO CITY — The Ixtoc 1 oil spill in Mexico's shallow Campeche Sound three decades ago serves as a distant mirror to today's BP deepwater blowout, and marine scientists are still pondering what they learned from its aftereffects.
In terms of blowouts, Ixtoc 1 was a monster — until the ongoing BP leak, the largest accidental spill in history. Some 3.3 million barrels of oil gushed over nearly 10 months, spreading an oil slick as far north as Texas, where gooey tar balls washed up on beaches.
Surprisingly, Mexican scientists say that Campeche Sound itself recovered rather quickly, and a sizable shrimp industry returned to normal within two years.
Luis A. Soto, a deep-sea biologist, had earned his doctorate from the University of Miami a year before the June 3, 1979, blowout of Ixtoc 1 in 160 feet of water in the Campeche Sound, the shallow, oil-rich continental shelf off the Yucatan Peninsula.
Soto and other Mexican marine scientists feared the worst when they examined sea life in the sound once oil workers finally capped the blowout in March 1980.
"To be honest, because of our ignorance, we thought everything was going to die," Soto said.
The scientists didn't know what effects the warm temperatures of gulf waters, intense solar radiation, and other factors from the tropical ecosystem would have on the crude oil polluting the sound.
There were political implications as well; the spill pitted a furious shrimping industry, reliant on the nutrient-rich Campeche Sound, against a powerful state oil company betting its future in offshore drilling, particularly the continental shelf in the Gulf of Mexico it began developing in the late 1970s.
In the months after Ixtoc 1 was capped, scientists trawled the waters of the sound for signs of biological distress.
"I found shrimp with tumor formations in the tissue, and crabs without the pincers. These were very serious effects," Soto said.
Another Mexican marine biologist, Leonardo Lizarraga Partida, said the evaluation team began measuring oil content in the sediment, evaluating microorganisms in the water and checking on the biomass of shrimp species.
As the studies extended into a second year, scientists noticed how fast the marine environment recovered, helped by naturally occurring microbes that feasted on the oil and degraded it.
Perhaps due to those microbes, Tunnell found that aquatic life along the shoreline in Texas had returned to normal within three years — even as tar balls and tar mats remained along the beaches, sometimes covered by sand.
"We were really surprised," Lizarraga said. "After two years, the conditions were really almost normal."
The Gulf currents and conditions of the Ixtoc 1 spill helped. Unlike the BP blowout, which has spewed at least 5,000 barrels of oil a day, and perhaps many times that, at depths near 5,000 feet, the Ixtoc 1 oil gushed right to the surface, and currents slowly took the crude north as far as Texas, killing turtles, sea birds and other sea life.
"I measured 80 percent reduction in all combined species that were living in the intertidal zone," said Wes Tunnell, a marine biologist at the Harte Research Institute of Gulf of Mexico Studies at Texas A&M University in Corpus Christi.
While that was severe, Tunnell noted that natural oil that seeps from the seabed releases the equivalent of one to two supertankers of crude in the Gulf of Mexico each year.
"It's what I call a chronic spill," Tunnell said. "The good side of having all that seepage out there is that we've got a huge population of microbes, bacteria that feed on petroleum products in the water and on shore. So that helps the recovery time."
An expert on the biodegradation of petroleum, Rita R. Colwell, who holds posts both at the University of Maryland and Johns Hopkins University, said microorganisms are good at breaking down the short chain molecular compounds in crude.
"For the bacteria, they really chew it and release it as CO2," Colwell said. "The longer stuff that has long ring compounds, that's the stuff that remains."
A bloom in oil-consuming microorganisms turned out to be a boon to shrimp in the Campeche Sound, to the relief of the crews on the 650 shrimp boats that trawled in the sound back then.
"The shrimp fed on the bacteria. When you are making the chemical analysis of the shrimp, you obtain the fingerprint," Soto said, adding that petroleum compounds contain unique chemistry just as flora and fauna contain unique genes.
Just as a human body rallies its defenses to fight off invasive germs, Soto said, the microorganisms prevalent in warmer ocean waters help break down the crude.
"What we learned is that tropical environments have a better chance to recover equilibrium," Soto said, adding that he believes the Campeche Sound was largely back to normal "perhaps in a year and a half."
Crude oil does contain toxic compounds, known as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, which aren't easily absorbed by bacteria. Scientists are still studying whether bacteria can be cultivated to break down them down.
"Fortunately, they don't bio-magnify in species as they go up the food chain. They seem to just get passed through and dropped out," Tunnell said.
Colwell, nonetheless, warned of eating shrimp harvested in the immediate area of an oil spill: "If you are eating shrimp during the current season or next season, I wouldn't recommend it."
Lizarraga, who works at the Center for Scientific Research and Higher Studies of Ensenada, on the Baja California peninsula, criticized the heavy use of chemical dispersants to break up the oil gushing from the BP spill into droplets, saying it isn't yet clear how the dispersants will affect the oil-degrading microorganisms.
In the Ixtoc 1 spill, "not so many dispersants were used," he said, allowing natural processes to take their course.
Some fundamental questions remain about the volumes of oil that microorganisms can break down in an oil spill. Tunnell said long-term comprehensive studies are rarely carried out after workers finish mopping up crude oil coating beaches.
"When its cleaned up, the studies stop," he said. "There's a lot that we don't have the real answers to."
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Really, the dome thing shouldn't be that hard...
Big dome. Big hole coming out the top, into fitting that can hold a big pipe...
Now, can you suck 60,000 psi of water through that sucker? PSI? how much of a cross-section? If not, you need more pumps.
Drop the cylinder. Weight it. Drop the top. With the top open. Idea: two valves... One to the -60,000 psi vacuum sucker pipe (that goes to Mr. Tanker...), and the other that is just flat huge and open... Get it cinched down, with Mr. Tanker doing his thing, and then start to close the "open to the sea" valve.
On time, under budget.
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Really, the dome thing shouldn't be that hard...
Big dome. Big hole coming out the top, into fitting that can hold a big pipe...
Now, can you suck 60,000 psi of water through that sucker? PSI? how much of a cross-section? If not, you need more pumps.
Drop the cylinder. Weight it. Drop the top. With the top open. Idea: two valves... One to the -60,000 psi vacuum sucker pipe (that goes to Mr. Tanker...), and the other that is just flat huge and open... Get it cinched down, with Mr. Tanker doing his thing, and then start to close the "open to the sea" valve.
On time, under budget.
Except the water pressure at 5000' below sea level compresses the methane gasses into crystallized methane hydrate.
Without control of the water pressure surrounding the pump, you still get essentially methane ice that clogs up the pipe. You have to decrease the water pressure immediately surrounding the leak. The dome itself doesn't do that. It has to be built to contain a positive pressure differential from the outside sea water environment, such that the methane crystals no longer form from pressure.
Pressure increases by 1 atmosphere every 33 feet underwater you go. At 100 feet, you are at 4 air atmospheres of pressure.
This depth is 150 atmospheres. Air pressure at sea level is about 15psi. Crushing pressure of the ocean at 5000 feet is therefore about 2250 PSI.
Such a concrete dome has to withstand 2250 crushing PSI, then withstand the blast of 60,000 PSI inside and vent it appropriately while otherwise settling/sealing to the ocean bed, then support some sort of positive pressure mitigation sufficient to eliminate the methane crystallization due to the 2250 PSI crushing ocean pressure, and withstand the pressure differential between inside/outside ocean water, then have a valve to cut off the 60,000 PSI vent and start sucking up oil... while maintaining a positive pressure differential with the 2250 PSI external pressure that causes crystallization.
And be able to be suspended by a 5000 foot cable from a ship without snapping.
That's some serious engineering.
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The water pressure is actually the least of the enginering challenges. 2500psi of water is nothing compared to the pressure from the well itself.
Also, there is no "seafloor" down there. This is not a clean hole drilled in a granite countertop. The actual drilled hole starts about 1000' below the top of the well. The first 1000 feet of the "seafloor" is a layer of sediment that's something like cheesecake. Dropping a giant cube of dense material would crush the pipe running through this layer and cause a leak below the surface that would just find it's own way out. That's why sinking a tanker full of concrete won't fix it.
Head over to theoildrum.com for some commentary by folks with detailed knowledge of undersea drilling.
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That's some serious engineering.
We're Americans. I saw that John Wayne movie.
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America, *expletive deleted*ck yea! :cool:
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There are reports that the hole has been plugged.
But then The Obama said in comments being reported early today by NPR (really, I just tune it in for the classical music [tinfoil]) that the stuff is still leaking at "a tremendous rate." [I understood that to be faster than he is spending the money the Treasury cannot print fast enough to keep up with him.]
stay safe.
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Last I heard, all that was coming out of the hole was mud, and not oil. That's a decent sign, but hey.
I still dunno why we just don't light a 15-30kt nuke under the sea. I'm sure whatever fallout would be will kill less sealife than whatever the oil has already done.
I also have no idea how a small atomic detonation would affect the water and coastline nearby, that could be another thing. It can't be any worse than what the oil has already done, though.
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Idea: We make a ten ton thermite bomb, steer it on top of the thing, and let 'er rip? Put a buncha scrap iron on top of it...
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Idea: We make a ten ton thermite bomb, steer it on top of the thing, and let 'er rip? Put a buncha scrap iron on top of it...
thermite = magnesium.
magnesium = burns in contact with water.
The second you put the thermite into the water, and long before it gets to 5000 feet depth, it will ignite.
Then you will have no thermite. And no plug.
But, good idea if the liquid were other than H2O.
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magnesium = burns in contact with water. ?
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thermite = magnesium.
magnesium = burns in contact with water.
The second you put the thermite into the water, and long before it gets to 5000 feet depth, it will ignite.
Then you will have no thermite. And no plug.
But, good idea if the liquid were other than H2O.
Uh....I think your thinking about potassium, sodium or lithium.
Magnesium does not burn on contact with water. It will burn IN water once ignited, which is why it's useful in a survival kit, but it won't burn on CONTACT with water.
Edit: just did some research. It will burn, but it's very, very slow, and since magnesium usually has a non-reactive oxidized coating, it will only do so if the layer is removed.
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Idea: We make a ten ton thermite bomb, steer it on top of the thing, and let 'er rip? Put a buncha scrap iron on top of it...
Melt the riser pipe into the semi-fluid sand and then have the flow blow it off... We could just shear the whole thing off at the seabed and let it gush unabated. It would be faster.
Ten tons of thermite would float like a balloon over a 10,000psi gusher unless it had a cross section of less than two inches presented to the flow. You need just this side of three million pounds if you're going to drop an object on top of it and not have it blown off. And then there's the problem of crushing the top 1000' of drill pipe when you do it.
This isn't so simple.
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3 million pounds, hmmm. Ok, now we need a really big rock. =)
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I once saw this movie with an asteroid...
(seriously, tho, wouldn't it be kinda kewl if an interwebz bs session came up with an idea that would work?)
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I actually came up with a good idea that would plug it, but there are some practical problems.
What we need is to design and build a stellar scoop and a faster-than-light drive. A plug of neutron star material, at the required 18" diameter, would only need to be a few microns thick to provide more than enough pressure to plug the well, the volcano in Iceland, and Joe Biden at the same time.
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I once saw this movie with an asteroid...
That's it! We just shove enough nukes down the hole to blow the planet into small pieces! No containment, no pressure; no pressure, no leak.
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thermite = magnesium.
magnesium = burns in contact with water.
The second you put the thermite into the water, and long before it gets to 5000 feet depth, it will ignite.
Then you will have no thermite. And no plug.
But, good idea if the liquid were other than H2O.
Magnesium is a common ignition source for thermite but is by no means required for the reaction. There are many different types of thermite that are not reactive to water.
Besides its not like you would just dump it over the side of the boat, you would have it in some sort of container to help control the reaction of the thermite.
I ain't no engineer but why don't they take a threaded cone(much like a step bit) attached to a rigid shaft and thread it down inside the well shaft. They know the diameter of the well so if the bit grew to only slightly bigger than the diameter of the well it shouldn't stress the pipe to much and still be able to lock itself in place with the threads. The bit could have ports that could be opened to relieve the pressures while inserting the bit and closed to block the flow once the bit is inserted. Would require removing the riser from the BOP or the BOP from the wellhead.
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You're talking about a specially designed bit that would probably take a couple of months to design and machine.
You are then talking about threading a needle, btw with thread bigger then the eye, from a mile away. Oh yeah, and with several thousand PSI of force pushing against it to wiggle it around and currents to push it around.
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You're talking about a specially designed bit that would probably take a couple of months to design and machine.
You are then talking about threading a needle, btw with thread bigger then the eye, from a mile away. Oh yeah, and with several thousand PSI of force pushing against it to wiggle it around and currents to push it around.
You could rig a support structure on the sea floor that holds a hydraulic drive system over the well. Then the boat at the surface simply powers the drive system. That way you oonly have to deal with the distance from the drive system to the well and you would get better leverage on fighting the pressure. Would not be easy and you're right it would take awhile to prove the concept and design the stuff.
Another idea. Why don't they inject the BOP with all the human hair they have collect and decided not to use in the booms. Might clog it better than golfballs.
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You could rig a support structure on the sea floor that holds a hydraulic drive system over the well.
The seafloor is 1000' of very watery mud. Won't support any weight.
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The seafloor is 1000' of very watery mud.
Well, that's Bush's fault :P
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Well, that's Bush's fault
That SOB, when will it end? :mad:
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Mighty Putty!!!....and it only costs $19.95!!!.... =D
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkuReA-AGa8 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkuReA-AGa8)
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I actually came up with a good idea that would plug it, but there are some practical problems.
What we need is to design and build a stellar scoop and a faster-than-light drive. A plug of neutron star material, at the required 18" diameter, would only need to be a few microns thick to provide more than enough pressure to plug the well, the volcano in Iceland, and Joe Biden at the same time.
Your calculations are off. Leave out plugging Joe Biden and your scheme would work.
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Okay... They stuck a pipe in the thing to shove "mud" in...
Okay... They can do that... Stick another pipe in, or just two tube through the existing pipe, and start with the epoxy.
LOTS of epoxy.
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Okay... They stuck a pipe in the thing to shove "mud" in...
Actually, they used an existing port on the BOP.
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Okay... They stuck a pipe in the thing to shove "mud" in
Ok, close your eyes and imagine for a second...
Ok, wait, that won't work.
Ok, imagine with your eyes open:
There's a tube coming out of the ground. At the top of it is a big sideways t-joint, so there's now a vertical pipe with a horizontal tap on it. Now, take the vertical pipe right above the t-joint and bend the hell out of it until it's horizontal. Now pump very high pressure oil up from underneath. Then you take a water-based mud, roughly double the density of water, and pump it in the horizontal tap with enough force to blow the oil back down the pipe without all leaking out what remains of the vertical pipe at the top of the fitting.
Now, look surprised when it doesn't work.
It's also worth noting that this procedure failed, repeatedly, with the Ixtoc well. Actually, this has never succeeded with a full-on blown-out gusher.
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It's also worth noting that this procedure failed, repeatedly, with the Ixtoc well. Actually, this has never succeeded with a full-on blown-out gusher.
They couldn't exactly run up and start hooking hoses to this one right away when it popped, before the press started taking interest. How long does it take to shut down a typical onshore blowout? I have a feeling there are probably a lot of successful top kills and other shutdown methods that we never heard about because the incident never hit the media before it was under control.
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oh hell
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2011988248_oil30.html
By Joel Achenbach and Alec MacGillis
The Washington Post
It is the well that will not die.
BP's effort to throttle the leaking Gulf of Mexico oil well with multiple blasts of heavy mud has failed. The attempted "top kill" was abandoned Saturday afternoon, leaving the well free to pump at least half a million gallons of crude a day into the Gulf.
"I can say we tried. But what I can also say is this scares everybody, the fact that we can't make this well stop flowing," BP Chief Operating Officer Doug Suttles said at a news conference.
"There's no silver bullet to stop this leak," Coast Guard Rear Adm. Mary Landry said.
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I have a feeling there are probably a lot of successful top kills and other shutdown methods that we never heard about because the incident never hit the media before it was under control.
Yes, there most definitely are. Perhaps I'll add "at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico" to "full-on blown-out gusher."
The problem here is the remoteness. If this happened onshore, it might be an hour, it might be a few days, but the time it took would depend more on the availability of the supplies than on whether each step worked. Here, they have to work in baby steps, from the least likely to blow the casing up like a big banana and toss the whole package to the moon to the most. If the whole stack goes, they're done. The ships all head for port and we wait for the relief well.
And really, it doesn't take much water to do it. Ixtoc was less than 200' underwater.
And scale is important. These deepwater wells are big, big boys. Basic economics should make that obvious. The Saudis can sink a well every ten feet if they want to, and for cheap (by comparison). Off in the deep water like this, you get half a dozen holes and thats it. The Ghawar field produces about five million barrels a day. This latest one's cousin, Thunder Horse, produces about 250,000. But Thunder Horse is all of seven wells. The Saudis have thousands in Ghawar. This blowout is on a wholly different scale.
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Now they're scared? What a bunch of dumbasses...
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What happened to them being confident "because [they] have a Plan B, C, & D, should Plan A (the top-kill attempt) fail"? If they have other ways to stop the leak, seems a dumb move to be telling the public they're scared. Maybe they were blustering about plans B through D....
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Maybe they were blustering about plans B through D....
Oh, of course they are. Plan A is drilling a relief well, and it's a sure bet. Plans B and onward are just stop-gap measures because Plan A takes so long.
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Actually, they had NO plan. The essence of their environmental impact statement was "There has never been a serious environmental problem with an offshore well, so we don't expect any with this one."
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Actually, they had NO plan.
They "had no plan" in the same way that I had no plan for dealing with traffic when I left the house this morning. Yet, somehow, I was able to avoid at least two idiots that I can remember. Just because I didn't write down every possibility doesn't mean I wasn't aware of means to avoid or correct for most of the hundreds of things that could go wrong. Just because there are a few things that could go wrong that I might not be able to deal with doesn't make me an incompetent or careless driver, either.
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Wait, wait, I got it, I got it!
All we have to do is raise the level of the ocean until the water pressure at the new depth equals the pressure of the well.
Simple, huh?
Terry, 230RN
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Wait, wait, I got it, I got it!
All we have to do is raise the level of the ocean until the water pressure at the new depth equals the pressure of the well.
Simple, huh?
Terry, 230RN
And you thought that globular warming was going to be all bad!!
=D
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I just read in the news that all offshore drilling has been stopped, but that they are drilling a relief well =|
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Can someone explain to me why we seriously just don't blow this thing to smithereens?
it seems really simple to me. Why aren't we doing thaT?
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Apparently BP wants to save the well. =|
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No. The well is done. This drilling block will not produce until we're at a Star Trek level of technology.
As for blowing the whole thing up...
Stop Watching Bruce Willis Movies
Everything seems really simple when you have no understanding of the complexities.
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No. The well is done. This drilling block will not produce until we're at a Star Trek level of technology.
As for blowing the whole thing up...
Stop Watching Bruce Willis Movies
Everything seems really simple when you have no understanding of the complexities.
So please explain the complexities to me...
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So please explain the complexities to me...
Do it yourself; turn on the garden hose, and try to seal it with leftover fireworks.
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Do it yourself; turn on the garden hose, and try to seal it with leftover fireworks.
That's actually not a bad demonstration, but it's only one of the possible methods.
The idea is not that you'd cram a nuke down the pipe and set it off. That might work to collapse the formation if the geology is just so, but if you could cram an object down the pipe, a cement plug would be just as effective as a bomb (and a lot less radioactive).
So please explain the complexities to me...
So, we have two other options. Detonate a nuke at the wellhead, or drill a parallel bore and detonate it down there. Detonating it at the wellhead won't do anything but mangle the upper ~1000' of the casing and make the leak completely impossible to get to because the top ~1000' of casing is run through the sandy, silty goop deposited there by the Mississippi River. It's something like cheesecake or a thick pudding. You'd have to do a whole bunch of nuclear explosive excavating to get down to where the casing meets something hard enough to seal against. If you want to talk about ecological disasters that dwarf this little popped cork, this is the way to go. You'd have to eject cubic miles of earth to get anywhere with this plan.
Option two is to drill a parallel bore, drop a nuke down the bore, and blow it. The theory (and I stress *THEORY*) is that it would create some kind of horizontal movement in whatever formations are at whatever depth which would choke off the flow of oil. There are several problems with that. First, it hasn't been verifiably tried. This story about the Russians nuking wells is unsubstantiated. With no reliable evidence around which to build an kind of model, there's no way to know if it will work. Second, they're drilling a relief well anyway, so by the time you get to nuking depth, you're halfway to a proper kill shot. Which leads to the most important part...
We don't know if setting off one or more nukes is going to be a bigger ecological disaster than a runaway well. It may be that nuking the thing tomorrow is somehow less disastrous than letting it run another couple of months. What we do know is that the well is one disaster, and a nuke is another, and combined that's two disasters. And two is more than one. That may seem sort of silly and childish, but it's just that simple. Why go chasing one doomsday scenario with a second one?
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Option two is to drill a parallel bore, drop a nuke down the bore, and blow it. The theory (and I stress *THEORY*) is that it would create some kind of horizontal movement in whatever formations are at whatever depth which would choke off the flow of oil.
You left out the simple fact that shoving huge formations around could easily lead to all sorts of unintended consequences. It's amusing that the same people bitching about "screwing with nature" by drilling little holes in the rock support the idea of trying to cause a moderately large tectonic event.
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Do it yourself; turn on the garden hose, and try to seal it with leftover fireworks.
Perhaps if the hose was undeground, and so were the explosives
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No. The well is done. This drilling block will not produce until we're at a Star Trek level of technology.
I thought if they managed to cap the thing or install another BOP as they're talking about, they'd still be able to harvest(?) the oil.
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Have I linked this video before?
Urta-Bulak nuclear strike (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ord-AyaFLaA&) and Grach Nuclear Strike (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F68xG0nLxPg).
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was the second nuke to squeeze more yield from the oil field?
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was the second nuke to squeeze more yield from the oil field?
Yes.
Well, the second video records three nukes being used in rapid succession for that purpose.
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I thought if they managed to cap the thing or install another BOP as they're talking about, they'd still be able to harvest(?) the oil.
Nope. Dropping another BOP on top may let them close the well for now, but the wellhead and whichever casing shoe blew out are too badly damaged now to allow production. The only completely sure way to plug it is the relief well, which they will do regardless of the outcome of the LMRP or another BOP. That will stop it up from the bottom with cement. They'll have to re drill the whole thing to get production from this formation.
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I see, thanks for the info! That's what I like about APS, we got experts on pretty much anything around here. ;)
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And then there's 280plus, who I heard is not even that good at HVAC. :P
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That guy? Yea, he sucks! :P
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Looks like they just pulled the shears off the riser without a successful cut. That's Bad News(tm).
For anybody wondering, thy were trying to clip off the riser just upstream of where it lay on the seafloor to take stress off the joint where it is connected to the BOP. Just like cutting a tree branch off a foot or so from the trunk so that the final close-up cut doesn't rip off any bark.
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They are cutting it with what looks like an abrasive disk right now.
edit: I take that back they stopped the blade long enough to see, it has teeth.