Giant Methane Leak in California Won't Be Capped For Months 292
Motherboard takes a look at the ongoing leak from a deep well in Southern California, and the engineering challenges that mean it won't be stopped for a while. From Motherboard's report:
An enormous amount of harmful methane gas is currently erupting from an energy facility in Aliso Canyon, California, at a startling rate of 110,000 pounds per hour. The gas, which carries with it the stench of rotting eggs, has led to the evacuation 1,700 homes so far. Many residents have already filed lawsuits against the company that owns the facility, the Southern California Gas Company. ... Part of the problem in stopping the leak lies in the base of the well, which sits 8,000 feet underground. Pumping fluids down into the will, usually the normal recourse, just isn't working, said [copmany spokesperson Anne] Silva. Workers have been "unable to establish a stable enough column of fluid to keep the force of gas coming up from the reservoir." The company is now constructing a relief well that will connect to the leaking well, and hopefully provide a way to reduce pressure so the leak can be plugged.
As the article notes, methane is an especially noxious gas in a figurative as well as literal sense; while it spends less time in the atmosphere than does CO2, it is more effective at trapping heat.
Rotting eggs? (Score:5, Informative)
That would be hydrogen sulfide. Methane doesn't smell like anything. It's odorless; in fact your gas company puts a stinky compound into it so you'll know when there's a leak.
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I assumed that doped CH4 was being released, but if it is from a well, it doesn't make sense that it would be doped. Probably a good thing it smells though.
Re:Rotting eggs? (Score:5, Informative)
The dopant in city gas isn't H2S; it's usually methyl mercaptan. My HS Chem teacher said it's considered the worst smelling substance known, and distinctly (distinkly?) different from H2S (which could masquerade as flatulence).
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"My HS Chem teacher said it's considered the worst smelling substance known"
Yeah.... not even close. Look up thioacetone. :-)
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Mike Rowe has a thing or two to say on smells.
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It's on my mad science to-do list already:
- Achieve first magnetic shrinking of a manhole cover, powered by a lightning strike.
- Build a fusion reactor. Just a fusor.
- Manufacture a thioacetone stink bomb.
- Build a laser lawnmower.
Current project:
- Power a small LED above the handle on my back gate using energy harvested from radio transmissions.
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Ha! Your son's sneakers could be used to freshen the room after opening a Canadian's hockey bag.
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Yes, the two are different. H2S has a slightly sweet aroma. Methanethiol (aka methyl mercaptan), another sulphur compound, has a more sour smell (it occurs in urine after asparagus). Both are toxic in high enough concentrations.
Re:Rotting eggs? (Score:4, Interesting)
and distinctly (distinkly?) different from H2S (which could masquerade as flatulence).
Very different from H2S. H2S is highly toxic and tricks your brain into thinking that you don't need to breath. It has some even better bonus features. At high concentrations (50ppm) it paradises your sense of smell so if you step into a H2S cloud you can get an instant whiff and then think you're back in the clear even though you're at great risk of death.
Methyl Mercaptan doesn't paralyse your sense of smell, but it is also far more toxic. However stench (as it is called in the industry) is detectable in concentrations of 1ppb so you need only a tiny tiny fraction of the stuff to dose your consumer gas, and at that concentration it's quite safe for everyone except for the people working at sites which use it ... and their office workers ... and their families. Had a funny story from a mechanic who drew the short straw to overhaul a stench pump at our work. He walked into the office a day after still smelling and complaining that despite having 3 showers he was still sleeping on the couch and the dog is in his bed with the wife. We all would have laughed but we were holding our breath so we didn't need to smell him.
Re:Rotting eggs? (Score:5, Informative)
It's a storage well so it's processed NG with it's standard marking impurity already added.
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Ah thanks. That makes more sense.
Re:Rotting eggs? (Score:5, Informative)
You misunderstand. This is not a production well, it is a storage well. This is natural gas which has already been pumped topside, treated with scent, and has been forced back underground into an expired oil well. It's a super-cheap way to store fuel, but in the minds of those who are not legally immunized from disasters like this one, extremely risky. When storage wells like this crack open, there's almost nothing that can be done, and no ability to do anything quickly in any case.
Thanks, PepsiKid. (Score:2)
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When storage wells like this crack open, there's almost nothing that can be done, and no ability to do anything quickly in any case.
Surely someone nearby owns a quadcopter and a road flare...
Re:Rotting eggs? (Score:5, Insightful)
Something said in another article about this leak, was that they *don't* try to burn them off, because it complicates the repair. I get the impression that the facility this leak is at is still open for business. The heat from the fire would force workers to keep a greater distance, and destroy equipment which the gas plume alone doesn't harm. It also seems that the leak is not coming out of a broken pipe, but rather from where it emerges, or even cracks in the ground nearby it. A fire fed like this might move around, pop up in unexpected places, and perhaps disintegrate the ground underneath the facility. Burnt, it's better for the environment, but set alight, it might never be put out.
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Not to mention all the dry brush from four-plus years of drought just waiting to burn.
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Might never be put out, like this? [wikipedia.org]
50+ years later, still going strong.
Storage Well (Score:3, Interesting)
So this is a storage well for natural gas, right.
Is that anything like the proposed storage wells for captured carbon dioxide? Sequestering billions of tons of carbon dioxide in undrerground in deep wells so it doesn't get into the atmosphere and cause trouble?
Methane is lighter than air and disperses quickly -- in fact it goes to the upper atmosphere where it causes the problems that it causes. So this light gas which isn't particularly toxic hangs around long enough for it's impurities to force the evac
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"Now what would happen if a CO2 storage facility would have a similar blowout, of a gas that is very heavy and creeps along the ground and kills people in houses (and livestock) instead of just stinking them out?"
Lake Nyos.
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One would assume that your CO2 sequestration facility would not operate at atmospheric densities. If you did, it would be incredibly inefficient, but as you stated, not at risk of any kind of eruption without an external force.
My guess is that they would pressurize the storage in order to put more CO2 in there, which is kind of the point. Should the storage rupture, the pressure would force the gas out.
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I know a guy who works in the field and the compressors that pump the natural gas into storage facility operate at 15,000 PSI, the manufacturer's operator school was a month long, as was the maintenance school. I'd assume the same equipment would be used for CO2 sequestration or compressed air energy storage.
The LA area is unique due to the high seismicity, so I'm surprised they can keep anything in the ground, I'm 60 and I've felt a total of 2 earthquake in my entire life in Michigan. Underground s
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They are stored underground AND under pressure. Storing a gas at atmospheric pressure would be a huge waste.
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Neither the CO2, nor the natural gas in question, is just rising due to buoyancy. The weight of the thousands of feet of rock holds the gas under pressure. It's like a whoopie cushion with a stack of 99 cinder blocks on top of it. It's actually physically impossible to store gas underground at surface-level densities. It takes a lot of pressure to force it down there, but the advantage is that you don't need power to extract this gas; just a pressure regulator. The earth is full of cracks and holes, most of
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Can't tell if intentionally trolling or just slightly misinformed. When people talk about carbon sequestration, no one is considering what you just wrote. There are several different methods of carbon sequestration. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
but they involve turning CO2 into solid form, e.g. mineral carbonates (think calcium carbonate, i.e. antacid), that are buried.
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Nature has already done this to almost all of the CO2 that used to be in the atmosphere... It's called "limestone."
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"So far, over 150 million pounds of methane have been released by the leak, " so by that measure 5666792.59539 cubic feet, so about $10 million - 50 million down the drain so far
I'd like to know how much heat trapping capacity they are releasing into the atmosphere as well.
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"What's that in tons or cubic meters?"
- The entire rest of the world.
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"Waa, we can't do simple math or use Google."
-SuricouRaven trying to speak for the rest of the world.
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As compared to what, having
1. Los Angelenos lighting a coal furnace everytime the temperature dips below 22C?
2. CO2 from the curing concrete to build enough Nuclear Fission Reactors to let Los Angelenos heat with electricity?
3. CO2 from the curing concrete to build pads big enough to keep wind turbines from blowing down in the Santa Anna winds?
4. Converting Natural Gas fueled power plant to coal?
WTF timmay (Score:5, Funny)
Pumping fluids down into the will, usually the normal recourse, just isn't working, said [copmany spokesperson Anne] Silva.
Great editing as always, timmay.
"into the will"? "copmany spokesperson"? (Score:2)
I believe Timothy is showing signs of hypoxia. Better evacuate him immediately.
(Typos not present in source article. Yes, I checked. Clicking through and copying text is one of my apparently-rare mutant powers.)
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Typos not present in source article.
So much for those who say the editors don't do anything anymore.
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Obligatory (Score:3, Funny)
Well it sounds like this really stinks for those residents.
Throw a flare at it? (Score:5, Insightful)
If it's really that bad, strap a flare to a drone and fly it into the methane exhaust.
Then maybe someone will take notice and actually do something about it, rather then this bullshit "oh well, ho hum, we'll drill another well as soon as we can" business-as-usual attitude. I'm guessing the facility is fully operational and pulling in profits for SCGC, despite the insane environmental harm it's currently causing? What incentive do they actually have to fix it right now? They haven't even confirmed if the secondary well will actually do anything.
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Re:Throw a flare at it? (Score:5, Funny)
A flare won't work, methane has horrible eyesight and won't be attracted by it.
Re:Throw a flare at it? (Score:5, Insightful)
But the flare would be attached to a drone and methane's vision is based on movement.
Burn it (Score:3)
Burn it. It's far better to burn it than let it escape as methane.
Re:Burn it, but that would make CO2...Gasp! (Score:5, Insightful)
No. An accident is when you're drunk and you think you have to fart but you end up crapping your drawers.
When a leak in your natural gas storage facility springs a leak so bad that it makes an entire California town uninhabitable and the residents seriously ill, has already dumped the greenhouse equivalent of a million tons of CO2 into the atmosphere and you won't be able to stop the leak until at least March, 2016, it's a fucking crime. They should be frog-marching the CEO and Board of Directors of SoCal Gas in handcuffs right now. Let the hundreds of families that have had to leave their homes indefinitely throw rocks at their heads.
http://www.theguardian.com/us-... [theguardian.com]
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No. An accident is when you're drunk and you think you have to fart but you end up crapping your drawers.
When a leak in your natural gas storage facility springs a leak so bad that it makes an entire California town uninhabitable and the residents seriously ill, has already dumped the greenhouse equivalent of a million tons of CO2 into the atmosphere and you won't be able to stop the leak until at least March, 2016, it's a fucking crime. They should be frog-marching the CEO and Board of Directors of SoCal Gas in handcuffs right now. Let the hundreds of families that have had to leave their homes indefinitely throw rocks at their heads.
http://www.theguardian.com/us-... [theguardian.com]
Well first what are the alternatives, coal fired power plants? Here's the real skinny,
Notice that state regulators , how many rate increases to upgrade infrastructure has the state regulators turned down in the last
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Why don't you tell us? How many?
http://www.wsj.com/articles/se... [wsj.com]
Re:Burn it, but that would make CO2...Gasp! (Score:5, Insightful)
They should be frog-marching the CEO and Board of Directors of SoCal Gas in handcuffs right now. Let the hundreds of families that have had to leave their homes indefinitely throw rocks at their heads.
Cowboy up. The world and no one on owe you anything.
So what you're saying is that the people affected by this problem should take the law into their own hands, and string those fuckers up? Because the world and no one owes them anything, like protection from those who would attack them?
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Hell, yeah!
Its more sensible than a lot of other things that happen in Texas, and the movie rights would be worth even more than the legal fees. Unless God's legal team actually win and Texas has to pay - where is Chuck Norris when you need him?.
Golden Opportunity! (Score:5, Interesting)
Look at the prevailing atmospheric vorticity of the area, place a bunch of counter-vorticity-inducing stators around the biggest leak (just a few percent cant on them is sufficient) and light it up. The updraft will pull air in through the stators inducing continuous vorticity that will form a fire tornado [youtube.com] miles into the atmosphere, totally oxidizing the methane and anything else that might burn in the gas.
Once the fuel supply is cut off, the vortex may be self-sustaining due to the temperature difference between the ground and the upper troposphere. This is known as an Atmospheric Vortex Engine [vortexengine.ca].
To turn it off, you turn the stators straight in thereby removing the vorticity and the vortex structure dissipates into a normal updraft.
Re:Golden Opportunity! (Score:5, Funny)
I'll agree to your plan, but only if we make Dennis Arriola, the CEO of SoCal Gas light it with a Bic lighter while wearing a suit made from styrofoam peanuts soaked in gasoline.
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Bad idea. At least you should give him a reliable lighter. Or a flare, just to make sure.
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Wait, you mean CEOs are all my servants? And I'm the master? Then I want Tim Cook to deliver a brand new Surface Pro to my house this afternoon along with a case of beer.
Roman Marquez, you are a dope.
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This would punch a hole through any temperature inversion.
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Christ, will you please contact those idiots in California and convince them to use your plan? This is probably the smartest, most informed thing I've read on Slashdot all year.
Moreover, it reinforces the observation that when something REALLY insightful (not merely marked as such) is posted, chances are very high that it was from someone with a low ID. Wisdom comes with age, as they say.
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It might be a density issue - methane requires a certain stoichiometric density to be flammable, somewhere around 17% I believe. Too much methane, not enough oxygen to support combustion.
I'm sure there's some kind of goldilocks zone on the perimeter of the gas plume where you would get a very nice explosion and shock wave, but the higher densities towards the center wouldn't burn without some kind of oxidizer being injected.
more to it (Score:5, Informative)
This article is pretty light on details. I know some of the residents in that area, and these are things some retired engineers have passed on to me from community meetings SCGC has had with them.
This is an old (early 20th century) oil field with over 80 wells. If you've never driven around LA, you may not know that there are still operational oil fields inside the city, but think of the La Brea tar pits, and it makes sense.
All of the wells in this field were designed to pump out oil. The pipes used in the wells are larger inner diameter than typically used with methane and have thinner and more porous wall material than typically used with methane. The pipes used are perfectly fine for oil, but would not be approved for a new methane well.
SCGC uses this underground cavern emptied of oil as storage for methane for Los Angeles in lieu of constructed tanks. They can and do pump methane in and out, it's all processed and comes from somewhere else.
What they did not do is verify that this old oil field will actually hold methane before they started using it. This leak looks like the methane is going through the porous concrete pipe that makes up the well and through the surrounding rock to the surface. This is why they can't seal the leak by clogging the pipe. It seems unlikely that anything short of capping all of the wells at the bottom or pumping out the methane will stop the leaking for good. They're halfway through drilling for one well, and don't intend to start on others until they show signs of leaking. All of their sensors are at ground level, so they will have no advance notice of an imminent leak.
The local schools have been closed due to air quality issues, and a few thousand people have been temporarily moved at SCGC's expense. This leak accounts for 25% of the total expected statewide carbon emissions.
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Re: more to it (Score:2)
From what others have said, this well is storing processed methane with the oderant added in already. So, it would smell worse than dead people's farts.
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The methanethiol they add to natural gas is about equally toxic. The use the different chemical so you know it's natural gas and not something else. Methanethiol occurs naturally in the body, so small concentrations are harmless. High concentrations are deadly. Methanethiol, like H2S, is heavier than air and it may pool in low lying areas.
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I've only been gassed once. It happened earlier this year from a fumarole in a geothermic area. I breathed the vapours for about half a minute when the wind shifted and ended up with irritated lungs for the next few hours (my eyes were also sore, but that could have been due to the sun; I was already sunburnt). My breathing peaked in tightness about an hour later. I also had a sore throat. No pulmonary edema. I'm not sure if I lost my sense of smell or not at the time. I do remember some drowsiness shortly
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Yeah, because this thread has a complete lack of people in it that want to see a perp walk of a CEO.
Are you cracked?
Where is the FEMA money or similar? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Where is the FEMA money or similar? (Score:5, Informative)
Why isn't there a serious response on the federal level instead of expecting the company to do whatever they can with their own resources? A spill in the gulf was dealt with on such a level.
Actually, the spill in the gulf was mostly dealt with on a company level, with the feds breathing down their neck going 'fix it now!' That involved subcontracting, which is the same sort of deal we're seeing here.
For that matter, the gulf spill involved the same sort of response - they had to drill a relief well to take pressure off the original in order to fix a leak.
Which brings up the question: How do you propose that the feds increase the speed of drilling the relief well? Think of it like drilling into a safe. It's going to take a while, and having a dozen guys 'assisting' isn't going to make it go any faster.
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Yeah, maybe the EPA could come in and clean it up like they did in Colorado and Utah.
If you need FEMA you are already FUCKED (Score:2)
Why isn't there a serious response on the federal level instead of expecting the company to do whatever they can with their own resources? A spill in the gulf was dealt with on such a level.
If you're looking for relief from FEMA, you are looking in the wrong place. We just had a fire here in NoCal called the Valley Fire. First the ARC showed up and mismanaged the refugee camps to the point that aid supplies were just lying around. They not only didn't put on enough people to handle the problem, but they actively chased away any volunteer who was not a member of the ARC and refused to let them help. This was followed up by FEMA making people apply for aid on specific dates, then telling even pe
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YOU insisted on swallowing the rhetoric of government == evil because you thought you'd keep more of "your" money. YOU don't get to piss and moan that government isn't wealthy enough to help when there's a disaster.
No, no I didn't, and you can anonymously eat a bag of dicks up for leaving this comment as a reply to what I wrote. I have always argued for distributed government with oversight, not against government.
Well done... (Score:2)
Re:Well done... (Score:5, Interesting)
Assuming it's pure methane, that would be ~23k BTU/lb [energy.gov], or about 2.5B BTU/hour.
At around $1.80 per Million BTU [eia.gov], that's about $4,500 worth of gas leaking out per hour. About $3.2M/month.
Not good, by any means, but I think dollars puts it into better scale.
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Not really pounds per hours seems reasonable. You want to measure a quantity of gas escaping per unit of time not a volume (which would depend on temp an pressure). Stating it in moles or some other unit not familiar to lay people to whom you're trying to communicate would be foolish.
Re: Well done... (Score:2)
I agree with the units issue. The American pre-distribution NG sectors work in standard cubic feet (where standard is usually but not always 15C and 1 atm). Sometimes they work in standard liters. In Europe they frequently work in normal cubic meters.
If I were reporting this, I would give units of cfh and btu/hr. Btu is what a person is actually paying for.
why stockpiling? (Score:3)
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The same reason all gas companies use large storage vessels of some sort or another:
Demand is never constant, supply can be highly variable and you need to maintain delivery pressure within a fairly tight window regardless.
There's usually 3-6 months' supply of gas in the EU distribution networks at any one time, which is handy when russia cuts off the flow into western europe during a dispute with Ukraine, etc. On the other side of the continent, LNG ships plugged into the distribution system result in high
hmmm.. (Score:2)
it's natural gas (Score:2)
Methane is natural gas. In this country it's piped to homes for cooking and heating. Why can't they do that in California?
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We do. I live in suburban Los Angeles county, and our heating and cooking is all done by natural gas (methane). That's why the Southern California Gas Company exists.
compared to cow farts (Score:3)
Metric, please (Score:2)
... 110,000 pounds per hour... 8,000 feet ...
We are an international audience. Many of us are engineers. Probably the majority of us are not used to thinking in the American dialect of Imperial Measures. Is it not time that we show a bit of curtesy to people and start using metric? I mean, it is not even as if anybody actually has much of an intuition of how much "110,000 pounds" is, other than "it's a lot". Metric tons we can compare to things we know - a lorry, a cubic meter of water (there was the metric again) etc. 110 kpounds? Probably about 500
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500 metric tons is almost exactly right for 110,000 pounds. Sorry for not having much sympathy, I have to do these conversions in my head all over the place (in the reverse direction, I don't natively "think metric" but I also don't expect anyone else to translate for me) and pounds-to-kilograms is one of the easiest, along with yards-to-meters and miles-to-kilometers. This is not because I am an engineer, the only thing I engineer is audio and our decibels are the same as yours.
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110,000 pounds is equivalent to the weight of 460 Homer Simpsons.
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_5koC... [blogspot.com]
So you are correct: "it's a lot".
Change of assumptions (Score:2)
I hope this event leads to a change of the default assumption that a natural underground reservoir that held liquid hydrocarbons is automatically qualified to hold gaseous hydrocarbons. It should be necessary to test such reservoirs before pumping gas into them -- say, with air tagged with extra argon or something. If it escapes, no harm is done. It is just being done to see if the damn thing leaks.
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"a natural underground reservoir that held liquid hydrocarbons"
Almost all such reservoirs also held gas and in old fields it was flared or simply vented long ago. The point made by another poster is that the issue isn't the reservoir itself, but the fact that much of the pipework feeding in/out of it is not gas-tight.
Argon's not going to help much for testing. Methane has much smaller molecules and will leak in a lot of places that argon won't (not to mention that there isn't that much in the way of noble g
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I chose argon because it is the one noble gas that is fairly plentiful, 23 times the abundance of carbon dioxide. If argon is too big, that's good reason not to use it, but it's certainly not hard to find. Every time I've bought wine directly from a winery and they bottled it on the spot, they first filled the bottle with argon to clear any oxygen out. Nitrogen would obviously be safe, but it would be a big ask to detect excess nitrogen when the air is itself 80% nitrogen. I was just trying to think of a ga
Meantime (Score:2)
In the Leptov sea, substantially more methane is pouring out with no attempts being made to mitigate it.
Use A Bomb (Score:2)
What makes the problem complex (Score:2)
What makes the problem complex is that they are trying to stop the leak while keeping the well. It is a much simpler problem to stop the leak if one is willing to lose the well in the process.
somebody needs to call International Well Control (Score:2)
i would say call The HellFighter but i don't know the country code for the correct section of the HereAfter.
this might be a case of try to suck the well dry and or just LIGHT IT UP.
AWG "fans" must be having generalized tonic-clonic seizures left right and center
Re: More proof CA is ruled by those... (Score:2, Funny)
People forget that it is the Republicans that rule CA. The Democratic Party has no influence here.
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We have oil wells even in Beverly Hills! This state has a horrific environmental record because of the Republicans.
Are you going to blame the Republicans for La Brea tar pits [wikipedia.org] as well? Perhaps the oil wells are relieving natural pressure in the oil containing formations and are reducing environmental damaging oil seeps elsewhere; like the ocean.
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Don't think so. I think they gave up on that some time ago, but they can't get the concrete deep enough or keep it there long enough to set.
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Not an expert in this field, but what you are advocating would almost certainly not work for natural gas. Imagine a propane tank with an access port where you can add or remove gas (don't know if the gas is liquified at storage temperatures and pressures). If the tank springs a leak somewhere else in the tank, you are not going to be able to seal it with a fluid that falls to the bottom when you pump it in-- unless the leak is at the bottom. What you propose works when the stored fluid is about the same den
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Concrete is a nice fluid for this. But it will cap the well permanently, so it looks live those greedy private morons are still trying to salvage it, out of pure greed
It's a well into a natural gas storage field, they've already decided it has to be capped, it's not like it's the only well into the storage field, the leaking well was used to pump fluids into the field to maintain stable pressures. The easy fix is to drill another well to pump concrete down to the area of the leaking well to reduce pressure in the leaking well casing an then fill the leaker with concrete to seal it, i.e. cap the well permanently.
The alternative is to shutdown facility and fill it with flu
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BP received one of the largest fines in history for their deepwater screwup: $18.7 billion, or roughly six year's worth of declared operating profit. The investigating revealed systematic incompetence and lax safety practices, including deliberately electing not to install essential but expensive head equipment and falsifying equipment tests. Despite this few individuals have faced any serious penalty because the corporation, as corporations are intended to do, acts to shield individuals from liability. The
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Yup, the only recourse is to force them to give you a loan and then pay it back slowly over time. Good thinking there. Oh wait. Force them to give the government regulatory agencies money and then pay it for them. Either way, the residents (who are also most likely customers) end up paying.
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Methane in its natural state is colorless and odorless but what comes out of the ground is a mixture of methane, propane and (usually) a bunch of sulfur-related compounds.
It does tend to smell like rotten eggs, but the hydrogen sulphide is removed long before it hits consumer outlets as that compound is highly toxic (almost as toxic as hydrogen cyanide). What's added to consumer gas is mercaptan - equally pungent but unlikely to kill people.
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I forgot to add: raw gas also contains copious quantities of CO2 (up to 50%) and CO, neither of which you really want hanging around in a populated area.
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It's a storage well containing already processed methane.
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Does methane have some sort of time reversing capabilities that I'm not aware of? If not how would it be possible for a 3 month old leak to cause a several year old drought?