BP Says "Top Kill" Operation Has Failed

MrShaggy sends a quote from a CBC story: "BP has scuttled the 'top kill' procedure of shooting heavy drilling mud into its blown-out oil well in the Gulf of Mexico after it failed to plug the leak. BP chief operating officer Doug Suttles told reporters on Saturday that over the last three days, the company has pumped more than 30,000 barrels of mud and other materials down the well but has not been able to stop the flow. 'These repeated pumping[s], we don't believe will likely achieve success, so at this point it's time to move to the next option,' Suttles said."

long history of cutting corners

[damasterwc]

the good people at larouchepac have compiled nice laundry list of crimes they've committed [larouchepac.com] floating around out there... this is compiled from state and federal testimony.

Expect repost.... from 1979!

[leuk_he]

This is all deja vu. This has occures before [youtube.com]. In 1979 a oil well [wikipedia.org] in the gulf blew and it took 9 months to close the gap, using the same techniques [reuters.com] they used so far.

So expect repost of failed attempts for the next 9 months.... in the true /. tradition. If it is important it will be posted again. ;)

Re:Amazing

[beelsebob]

We are drilling off our own too. And we're drilling off your coast because you gave us the contract to do so.

Not prepared

[Vicegrip]

I suspect that they always knew their attempts to fix it would fall short, this is all make-busy to give the appearance that everything that could be done is being done. The correct solution appears to be forcing oil companies to drill relief wells for existing exploitation. The idea here is that the relief well is mostly completed so that if a disaster occurs, instead of taking months to connect to the main well, the work can be done within days.
BP's experience is showing us that the relief well is the only solution that will work.
It's why the Canadian government is taking the position that one must be drilled at the same time as a new well is being built. Unsurprisingly, oil companies are already lobbying hard to have these measures curtailed.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/ottawa-will-take-tough-stand-on-offshore-drilling/article1557095/ [theglobeandmail.com]
"At issue in talks between the oil industry and the National Energy Board on relief wells in the North is whether they must be drilled during the same season as the primary exploration well. The window for drilling in the North is only a few months because of ice conditions. However, allowing oil companies to wait a season to drill relief wells could leave a new well exposed to a potential rupture for a year or more. Mr. Pryce at CAPP said the policy for relief wells was devised in the 1970s, and alternative technology for dealing with ruptures has advanced considerably. "

Re:wow

[thygrrr]

"Mud" is a technical term for all sorts of drilling fluids specifically designed to keep the pressure on an oil well.

In this case, they used a special type of "Mud", even, "Kill Mud".

But it still failed (and the failure has quite possibly damaged the Blowout Preventer atop the borehole further, potentially increasing the amount of oil gushing into the ocean.

Re:long history of cutting corners

[dangitman]

the good people at larouchepac

LaRouche and "good people" in the one sentence? Mutually exclusive.

Re:Amazing

[Anonymous Coward]

BP is actually the result of a merger between AMOCO (AMerican Oil COmpany) and the old BP.

Same players, same outcomes

[zanderredux]

No, really. If Rachel Maddow is right this has happened before and continues to happen in the same way. All same players, all same tactics, all same outcomes.

Kinda WTF, but check this out:

http://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/c8sqn/rachel_maddow_finds_one_massive_wtf/ [reddit.com]

Re:It's all for show from now on.

[Genda]

Hhhmmm, I don't know, but I think this would have been a really simple thing to prevent... no need for any new technology whatsoever

1. First replace the entire bozo squad passing for government regulators, in fact jail the lot of them, for receiving bribes, and causing billions of dollars of damage to the country.
2. Next when an oil company installs emergency shut off valves at the well head, make certain they work, BP knew for a fact theirs didn't work and ignored it.
3. Additionally, when your high tech well has special high pressure seals, design expressly for potential disasters, and you know you've damaged or destroyed them, stop drilling, and fix the seals, BP knew they had a problem when they brought huge chunks of rubber and again ignored it to continue drilling.
4. Finally, when some idiot from an oil company tells the folks on the rig to remove tons of drilling mud from the well, now, to shave a few days off of opening the well to pumping later, knowing full well that leaving that mud in the well is a critical safety feature for preventing disasters like... this one, they should be politely shot in the head. Twice.

There was absolutely no need for this mess. BP played loose and fast with the lives of millions of people. Hell, they virtually murdered the drilling crew. They knew they were engaged in risky behavior, they cut dozens of corners, shaved the rules, lied about their problems, and did anything at all to cut their expense and increase their profit. At some point, when a company creates, literally manufactures a disaster of this proportion, and the only significant cause is a blatant and callous disregard for human life, and environmental safety, I think it's only fair to invite them to leave the country permanently. They've demonstrated they have absolutely no interest whatsoever in being responsible, decent, or even vaguely accountable. We're still the largest consumer of petroleum products in the world. They must serve us, and not the other way.

Re:long history of cutting corners

[bmo]

>What does LaRouche have to do with the TeaParty?

The LaRouchians are within your ranks. Get to know them.

If this is not obvious to you, YOU SHOULD BE MORE OBSERVANT.

>Its rallies have actually be characterized by being peaceful and resulting in less damage to property and shared services than Obama political rallies.

Not when you ransack classrooms when you don't like the New Deal collage on the wall.

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/joan_walsh/politics/2010/05/14/maine_tea_party_worse_than_you_thought [salon.com]

Posting with no karma bonus, because it's off topic.

--
BMO

Re:Pissing contest.

[iserlohn]

/faceplam

The new BP is just a rebrand after the BP + AMOCO (ie. AMerican Oil COmpany) merger.

Re:Amazing

[lul_wat]

And the company which was sub-contracted to do this job is the same company which caused the 1979 Gulf Of Mexico oil spill (apparently) Link: http://www.wimp.com/oilspills/ [wimp.com]

Re:Amazing

[mother_reincarnated]

You have no idea what your electricity costs, do you?

I'd be willing to pay maybe $0.05/kwh more, 33-50% increase, but I'm not too interested in the 300-500% increase you seem to be willing to accept!

Re:I'm almost afraid to ask...

[vlm]

Probably around 10 billion barrels. Seriously. Undersea wells can produce unbelievable amounts of oil.

10 BBL would be the biggest entire-field discovery of the last half century, at least. I think no oil fields in the last quarter century have been found above single digit billions.

Actual production from a professionally managed well, in a legendarily great field, that undergoes multiple enhancement and recovery operations, would be a world record setter at 100 MBL or so.

Since this is a hybrid gas/oil well, and in a "eh" of a field, and nothing kills future production like overproduction today, I think a high guess for this well would be 5 MBL liquid oil.

Assuming constant production (huge mistake), 5 MBL producible, and a reasonable leak rate of about 10 KBL/day, the well would stop on it's own sometime next summer. If you believe the idiots whom claim its leaking 200 KBL/day (more than any historical well has ever produced under any circumstances, as far as I know), it would have emptied out a couple weeks ago.

However, wells actually produce in an exponential decay, more or less.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_depletion#Oil_well_production_decline [wikipedia.org]

So, the well will never quite go to zero, but once it drops to less than the battleship Arizona leak rate, I think we can stop worrying.

Re:How to really motivate them...

[Anonymous Coward]

Parent is not a troll.

Re:It's all for show from now on.

[ShnowDoggie]

Genda probable got those statements from 60 minutes. This is what they are reporting. There is mounting evidence that at least some of these facts are true. Bottom line - compare what was in the application to drill, with what they did, and they either outright lied or cut corners.

Re:Peak Oil

[Mindcontrolled]

According to Peak Oil, oil will possibly never run out - economically extractable oil runs out. You gotta be blind not seeing this happen right now. Why do you think we are drilling under such extreme conditions - deep water, arctic? The shallow, easily extractable wells are dry. There have been no giant fields explored for decades. Just a number for perspective: The Macondo field currently spilling into the Gulf contains an estimated 100 megabarrels - That satisfies world consumption for about 30 hours. All this effort drilling at the edge of technology, all these investments, all this infrastructure, for a day's worth of oil.

Re:Amazing

[Kijori]

You have made quite a few assertions as to the viability of attempting such a maneuver, could you please provide evidence in the form of a well respected news article or scientific journal? As was noted by another poster the USSR often claimed things worked when they, in fact, did not.

I can't help out with the viability of it - I'm not sure how you would really go about working that out, to be honest - but I had a read through the Russian reports of this and previous disasters and a group of their nuclear weapons experts have apparently offered to help out; they claim that under the USSR they performed this operation 6 times, using bombs of around 20 kilotonnes, and that five of the operations were a success. The exception (an attempt in 1972 to use a 4kt bomb to seal a gas 'fountain' at a depth of just over 2km in Kharkovskaya oblast') was not successfully closed by the detonation but the situation apparently wasn't made worse.

Again, not passing any comment on the possibility of using a nuclear bomb, just thought I'd provide some information from Russian sources since the English-language information is rather poor.

Re:long history of cutting corners

[Rockoon]

This.

Any competent attorney will tell you to ALWAYS invoke the 5th when you are being COMPELLED to testify about ANYTHING.

Re:Amazing

[drinkypoo]

Which energy source can, with better economics, replace oil as a transportation fuel ? (better, since you say it's a conspiracy "holding us back", which only makes sense if there's a better alternative)

Using technology developed in the 1980s by the USDOE at Sandia NREL, we could replace our transportation fuel needs with biodiesel using a fraction of our available desert land, growing algae in open raceways, using seawater as the medium. Since so much of our oil-related energy need is indeed diesel-fuel based (in transportation, shipping, and even power generation) this is a feasible solution today. Yet, no oil company is building biodiesel plants, even though we literally have suitable technology twenty years old.

In the 1970s, it was known that solar panels would pay back the energy cost of their production in less than seven years, and in the 1980s GM built electric cars that were suitable for most households, being capable of serving the automotive needs of about 90% of the population. Yet no energy company built out large PV installations, and GM wound up crushing the cars. Yes, we could have been on a primarily-electric personal transportation infrastructure long before now. But power companies are in bed with oil companies, and power companies aren't required to buy power from producers at a reasonable rate, so there's no meaningful competition.

Anyway, I have provided two examples of replacements which are viable, if not complete. There's not going to be a single answer anyway. Heavy vehicles or long-range ones can stick with diesel, and run on biodiesel with zero modifications; it's a good idea to run a veg-oil crankcase lube if you run biodiesel, because the blow-by from bio is less compatible with petro oil than the blow-by from petrodiesel. Small and short-range vehicles can be full-EVs. In between we can have series hybrids with diesel engines or regenerating microturbine generators using 1960s Chrysler technology! All of these problems are long-solved (twenty years or more) and your ignorance amounts to deliberate obtuseness. If you were qualified to contribute to this conversation nobody would have had to tell you any of this.

Re:I'm almost afraid to ask...

[Anonymous Coward]

10 BBL would be the biggest entire-field discovery of the last half century, at least. I think no oil fields in the last quarter century have been found above single digit billions.

Yeah, but no, but yeah but:
Kashagan field (2000): 30 billion
Zagheh field (2003): 7-9 billion
Azadegan field (2004): 26 billion
Sugar Loaf field (2007): 25-40 billion
Tupi field (2007): 5-8 billion

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_oil_fields#Oil_fields_greater_than_1_billion_barrels

Re:long history of cutting corners

[Mindcontrolled]

If people would have a look at the geology in the Gulf, they perhaps would finally shut up about the nuke nonsense. You can't just drop a nuke on top of it and hope it closes the wellbore. The seafloor in the Gulf is a huge layer of sediment, hundreds, if not thousands of feet strong. If you nuke that, you just blow away the silt and sand - now you have an underground blowout spilling the oil into the sediment layer, from where it will find its way up. So, if you want to collapse the bore, you gotta drill down to solid rock and explode your nuke there. At that point, you can as well drill a relief well. Besides, do we have a nuke that works under the pressure of 6000+ feet of water? This is a completely different situation than it was back when the Russians used nukes.

Re:Amazing

[Anonymous Coward]

This [culturechange.org] is the story from the early '50's, and no, the argument hasn't crumbled because that was when the damage was done.

Re:Not prepared

[Anonymous Coward]

They are not required to drill a relief well at the same time - that is nonsensical.

They are in fact required to show that they will be able to drill a relief well in the same season.

Given that icing is not a problem in the gulf, they don't have the seasonal issues that Canada has, and thus a relief well can be drilled at any time. The problem in this instance is the depth of the well.

Re:Informative?

[Khyber]

"Electricity is NOT oil powered."

Dead wrong. I can take you through two power plants in Memphis (non-TVA) that run off of refined oil products.

Re:long history of cutting corners

[Anonymous Coward]

I was about to post the same thing. After reading the LaRouche commentary on the spill, I clicked to see their video, "The Case for Impeachment". At 0:36 in the video: "In characteristic negro fashion, the president went absolutely berserk and demanded that all such senate insubordination be crushed immediately." This, to me, raises some red flags as to the credibility of their other arguments.

Did they think it wasn't racist because the guy they paid to read the script is Black?

Re:Amazing

[Khyber]

"Show me the reference where algae-based biodiesel plants will produce cheaper per-mile fuel than oil."

If you can't do the math in your head alone, just be quiet.

We don't have to drill for algae. Algae is almost impossible to NOT produce when water is exposed to light, and we can just use the sunny open desert to produce the fuel. Seawater is absolutely abundant and will work perfectly.

The cost alone for production is far cheaper. Refining algae fuels takes nowhere near the amount of energy as it takes to refine crude into the varied useful products. The infrastructure for production is much cheaper, as well, as you're basically just making vegetable oil to use for fuel.

Someone hasn't ever done any research on this, I see.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to get back to making LED panels SPECIFICALLY FOR algae-based biofuel production.

Re:It's all for show from now on.

[Kenz0r]

After reading your comment I watched the episode online [cbsnews.com], thanks for pointing it out to me.
I don't live in the US so I can't watch CBS on tv.
I recommend to everyone that hasn't seen it yet to check it out, it's been really educational.

Props to CBS for not filtering out non-US IPs like other some tv stations do.

Re:Time to invest in renewable energy?

[Hognoxious]

According to the media, this well's oil would have been sold on the international market.

So whoever bought that oil wouldn't be bidding for - and driving up the price of - the oil the US does use.

Re:It's all for show from now on.

[IdolizingStewie]

Pigs go in pipelines. What you are calling pigs are simply referred to as plugs on every rig I've ever been on and are generally manufactured in bright colors and made out of different types of rubber than an annular, which is typically black. I have only heard the generic "rubber" used to describe what was brought to surface, but I would think the mudman would be able to tell the difference.

Re:Amazing

[EdIII]

Too bad the people doesn't control the tax rate. Big corporations do.

Uhhhh, how is that deserving of a Troll moderation?

It's very true. It is a simple fact of modern politics that on a daily basis politicians *hear* more arguments from paid lobbyists, representing Big Corporate's interests, than they do from people representing what is in the interests of the People, the Environment, or our Future.

Nothing tin-foil hat or crazy about that statement.

It's the biggest problem we have in modern politics is that our voice, The People's voice, is heard at nothing above the level of a whisper in Congress. Take an honest look at every single action government has performed in the last 50 years and put a check mark into two columns... The People... The Corporations. Tally them up.

Corporations Win. Therefore, they are the ones that are setting the tax rates.

Re:Informative?

[haxney]

Well, you're right, but "I can show you two power plants" is not a good argument. It's fairly easy to take a look at the DOE list [doe.gov] of US electricity sources to see that we get (as of 2009) 48.2% of our energy from coal, 1.1% from petroleum liquids and "petroleum coke" (whatever that is). Another 21.4% comes from natural gas, which I guess could be considered oil, but usually is in a separate category.

It would definitely be accurate to say that most of our energy comes from fossil fuels or non-renewable resources, but we actually only get a small amount of our electricity from oil.