This is ten days old, but it's the first thing that I've seen that explains the behavior of the Obama administration and BP:
First of all...set aside all your thoughts of plugging the well and stopping it from blowing out oil using any method from the top down. Plugs, big valves to just shut it off, pinching the pipe closed, installing a new bop or lmrp, shooting any epoxy in it, top kills with mud etc etc etc....forget that, it won't be happening..it's done and over. In fact actually opening up the well at the subsea source and allowing it to gush more is not only exactly what has happened, it was probably necessary, or so they think anyway.
So you have to ask WHY? Why make it worse?...there really can only be one answer and that answer does not bode well for all of us. It's really an inescapable conclusion at this point, unless you want to believe that every Oil and Gas professional involved suddenly just forgot everything they know or woke up one morning and drank a few big cups of stupid and got assigned to directing the response to this catastrophe. Nothing makes sense unless you take this into account, but after you do...you will see the "sense" behind what has happened and what is happening. That conclusion is this:
The well bore structure is compromised "Down hole".
They can't "plug the damn hole" because it's way more than the blowout preventer that has failed, it's the well itself somewhere in the three miles beneath the sea floor.
I looked for some official confirmation of this and found that Admiral Allen talked about the possibility about two weeks ago:
ADMIRAL THAD ALLEN: The reason they want to keep the production going is not what they may recoup out of that in terms of production. The reason you want that flow to continue is it alleviates pressure on the wellbore. We did the top kill. We were able to force mud down the well boar to the point where we actually suppressed all the oil, but the minute they stopped pumping the mud, the oil came back up. The reason they didn't go any further is they do not know the condition of the wellbore and the casings down there, and if you exert pressure on that, you wouldn't want to force oil out into the formation or the strata and have it come up through the sea floor. So you want to -- you want to produce the oil for safety and containment reasons.
It came up again yesterday:
ADMIRAL ALLEN: Well, one of the issues is we don’t know the exact status of the wellbore.
A while back, in fact, many weeks ago when we were discussing the top kill operation, we were having a significant discussion and we had a two-hour conference call on a Sunday, which Secretary Salazar, Secretary Chu called a scientific summit. We were going through the parameters of the top kill procedure, and they were trying to establish threshold for how much mud they can put down there and how much pressure they wanted to create in the wellbore.
And there was some discussion at that point about the uncertainty of the—of the condition of the casings in the wellbore which you would want to do is drive so much mud down there and such a pressure that you might cause a problem and the problem was they didn’t know and they still don’t know the condition of the wellbore. For that reason, they erred on the side of safety on how much pressure they would exert, and when they got near those pressures without having success in killing the well—killing the well, that’s when they backed off.
So I’m not going to use any hard and fast scientific evidence or anything like that. I think there’s a general notion by everybody that there could be something in the wellbore that can be problematic. We don’t know because there’s no way to really check it. That’s the reason they ceased the top kill procedure where it was at and went to containment, and then relying now on the bottom killer, going into the bottom of the well near the reservoir to put the mud in and seal it from there.
The reservoir that the Deepwater Horizon had tapped into was estimated at 50 million barrels. TThat first link warns that if the wellbore itself has failed it could right now be undermining the seabed under the BOP and/or exploiting any other seams it may have found. It could be doing anything, meaning it could be setting the stage for a massive collapse or even worse, the sudden appearance of gushers in multiple locations.
It may turn out that the failure of the BOP was actually a good thing? Is that how this is adding up?
I don't know about that, but perhaps it explains why no other engineering attempts are being made to plug the well at the top, which was making absolutely no sense to me. Now I guess we pray that the current system hangs on so they can still at least recover some of the oil and gas until they can attempt the plugs at the bottom of the wellbore.
Recent Comments