The gulf oil thing is really depressing me

[RichCI]

So as this thread is gaining more political steam.... How should we proceed???

[milod]

You guys all are bringing some interesting points that strike me especially given our generation differences.

 

I joke that I'm a cynical old man, but I'm concluding that younger folks are more cynical.

 

Perhaps there's still a belief among "old guys" that there are some good folks out there. I do still believe it.

 

There's a point of diminishing returns, and I think we're there.

 

m

[mcmurray]

http://www.perthnow.com.au/news/special-features/the-unthinkable-calls-to-use-nuclear-bomb-to-seal-bps-gulf-of-mexico-oil-leak/story-e6frg19l-1225874082633

 

http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0529/energy-expert-nuke-oil-leak/

 

http://www.newsoftheworld.co.uk/news/815530/NASA-bid-to-halt-oil-spill-Obama-puts-A-Team-of-experts-to-the-task-after-giving-up-on-BP.html

 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/energy/oilandgas/7726142/Barack-Obama-sends-nuclear-experts-to-tackle-BPs-Gulf-of-Mexico-oil-leak.html

 

And you guys thought I was a lunatic for suggesting this.

[zigzag]

...we push and push and push for more that will cost less. There's a point of diminishing returns' date=' and I think we're there.

m

[/quote']

 

True on so many levels.

[SGSpecialguy]

mcmurray,, how do they think by nuking that hole it will stop the leak, to me it would seem youre only going to make matters worse and on a MUCH bigger scale then it already is plus what are the ramifications of using nuclear underwater in that area? maybe they do that all the time, (testing nuclear underwater) I dont know,, I dont like the sounds of that though

[Rocky4]

I wonder what level of management is in charge of these rigs. Are they supervised from the top, or from some lesser ranking person in charge of his rig? Does he get an allotment for the safety equipment that he pocketed instead of purchasing. In any line of work, their are dedicated people, people who are merely their for a check, and people who fall somewhere in between.

[zigzag]

According to a Transocean guy on the floating platform, warnings of impending safety issues were ignored by the one guy who was running the show on the platform who worked for BP, and when it was apparent that safety seals were disintegrating, contrary to recommendations made by Transocean, BP continued mining operations.

[mcmurray]

mcmurray' date=', how do they think by nuking that hole it will stop the leak, to me it would seem youre only going to make matters worse and on a MUCH bigger scale then it already is plus what are the ramifications of using nuclear underwater in that area? maybe they do that all the time, (testing nuclear underwater) I dont know,, I dont like the sounds of that though[/quote']

 

 

From what I can gather, the Russians have successfully sealed leaking wells (just like this one) with small nuclear bombs at least 5 times in the past.

 

The idea would be to drill down into the earth's crust and place the bomb adjacent to the leaking well. The idea is the explosion caves the well in from the side. The bomb won't be anywhere near the oil reservoir or the seabed, but rather in between.

 

Obviously like you say, there are risks, but if it goes along smoothly there may well be no detrimental effects on the environment.

[FirstMeasure]

From what I can gather' date=' the Russians have successfully sealed leaking wells (just like this one) with small nuclear bombs at least 5 times in the past.

 

The idea would be to drill down into the earth's crust and place the bomb adjacent to the leaking well. The idea is the explosion caves the well in from the side. The bomb won't be anywhere near the oil reservoir or the seabed, but rather in between.

 

Obviously like you say, there are risks, but if it goes along smoothly there may well be no detrimental effects on the environment.[/quote']

 

Without getting into specifics, I think you hit on what BP is not doing. They are not getting help or advice from countries that have dealt with this sort of thing. Norway and some of those other Norther European countries have equipment designed for just such a deap cold water leak, but they haven't availed themselves of their expertise. They'd rather play dumb and keep trying stupid stuff so they can drive the price of oil up.

[flyingarmadillo]

First of all, BP wants this plugged quicker than anyone else. They're bleeding money like crazy, and there's no profit in any part of this leak. What ever oil they recover probably doesn't even pay for the equipment they're using to recover whatever oil they have picked up.

 

The nuke thing (if it happened at all) was in the early 60's. The US also experimented with nukes for use in the petroleum industry among other things (look up "Project Plowshares"). Current drilling technology is so far ahead of 60's technology that there are better solutions than a nuke. Just the drilling of a borehole to place the nuke would take longer than the two relief wells that are already in progress. Drilling in 5000 feet of water is not a simple thing, much less making a hole suitable for a small nuke. You also run the risk of further STIMULATING production causing a bigger leak of now radioactive oil. "If everything goes smoothly..." was BP philosophy on the whole drilling operation that went wrong.

 

BP is a British company with more overseas experience than just about anybody in the world. To think they're not using technologies that they've used elsewhere in the attempt is simply being willfully ignorant

 

 

A bit of disclosure here, I'm a geologist for a small oil company - we don't work offshore, much less in 5000 feet of water. I have 37 years of experience in the oil business, including experience in the environmental side of cleaning up spills and leaks (on land).

[flyingarmadillo]

I wonder what level of management is in charge of these rigs. Are they supervised from the top' date=' or from some lesser ranking person in charge of his rig? Does he get an allotment for the safety equipment that he pocketed instead of purchasing. In any line of work, their are dedicated people, people who are merely their for a check, and people who fall somewhere in between. [/quote']

 

BP would be responsible for running things and on an operation this large it would have been somebody senior. The rig itself probably cost $1 million/day to operate. this was not a normal production operation where they might have put junior personel in charge - it was an expensive exploratory well. Drilled to evaluate a very expensive lease. Rig workers get bonuses for safely completing wells, although some management types get bonuses for cost containment.

[Jantha]

Thanks flyingarmadillo.. It's nice to hear a voice of reason.

 

I'm getting tired of people ripping on BP over this situation. The whole incident sucks.. it's going to cause a lot of damage.. but it WAS an accident. I know from our viewpoint, it looks like they are doing very little to rectify this situation.. but that's just not true. What BP has done from a logistical standpoint alone is amazing. We also have to remember that they are trying to NOT make the situation any worse... so every potential fix has to be thoroughly evaluated.

 

It's also absurd to think that they want to preserve this well. They are trying to get it shut down as quick as possible, and I applaud their effort. Anyone that thinks they can do better, quicker, should send in their resume.

 

I say good job guys.. keep up the effort and lets hope this next solution works.

[myspace.com/jessenoah]

Like I said in a different thread, I would rather see the problem fixed first, questions asked later after the problem has been stopped

 

 

what is saddening to me is that oil is still leaking into the ocean, I am not an expert, but you get the right stuff shipped in, work round the clock to get the problem fixed, but why does that have to take a month, 2 months, 4 months?

 

if they can photograph the titanic, dig up old WW2 wrecks, or transport ICMBs, surely they can handle a leaky broken pipe right?

[milod]

I dunno...

 

A mile down is not a friendly environment.

 

I did notice that even CNN is being rather critical with both BP and the U.S. government.

 

m

[mcmurray]

what is saddening to me is that oil is still leaking into the ocean' date=' I am not an expert, but you get the right stuff shipped in, work round the clock to get the problem fixed[/quote']

 

This is exactly what they're doing, but it's gonna take as long as it takes. This sort of operation has never been done before, so it's full of unknowns.

[zigzag]

...I'm getting tired of people ripping on BP over this situation. The whole incident sucks.. it's going to cause a lot of damage.. but it WAS an accident... I say good job guys.. keep up the effort and lets hope this next solution works.

 

We can play the blame game later if you'd like, but from everything I've heard and read to this point, BP was losing money on this well, and the people from BP calling the shots decided to take risks in order to make that well productive, and now those decisions are biting them in the ***.

 

The reality appears to be that there will be no quick fix and a huge part of the gulf will be sacrificed for BP profits. I hope they get what they deserve, but I also applaud everyone's efforts to try to rectify the problem.

[heymisterk]

Thanks flyingarmadillo.. It's nice to hear a voice of reason.

 

I'm getting tired of people ripping on BP over this situation. The whole incident sucks.. it's going to cause a lot of damage.. but it WAS an accident.

 

I respectfully disagree. To me, this is accident like a drunk driver killing someone is an accident, or the Massey coal mine disaster a couple of months ago was an accident. It was sheer negligence, not an accident.

[Artie Owl]

Oh man, I thought we covered the whole nuke will make it worse thing, but when some people get an idea in their head...

 

I guess the most ironic thing about the whole situation is that when the explosion happened there were bp executives on board the rig celebrating a good safety record. Lets not forget that men just doing their job died in the explosion, 11 or 12 engineers and deck hands lost their lives in the blow out. We can argue till the cows come home about how this could have been different or prevented but it wasn't, no one wanted this and now we have to deal with it.

 

Going forward though, anyone who thinks sinking a nuke is a good idea, and that it could be done successfully is getting their posts blocked, fair warning.

[flyingarmadillo]

We can play the blame game later if you'd like' date=' but from everything I've heard and read to this point, BP was losing money on this well, and the people from BP calling the shots decided to take risks in order to make that well productive, and now those decisions are biting them in the ***.

 

The reality appears to be that there will be no quick fix and a huge part of the gulf will be sacrificed for BP profits. I hope they get what they deserve, but I also applaud everyone's efforts to try to rectify the problem.

[/quote']

 

This was an exploratory well, it was never intended to be productive. so you try and drill them as cheaply as possible. Since this was the first well on this project, BP had no idea if they were even going to find oil. While the numbers have gotten better, exploratory wells have a 1 chance in 50 of finding commercial quantities of oil, and finding something as large as this appears to be is about 1:10,000. To simply breakeven on this (assuming they hadn't had a problem) they would have had to produce about 2.5 million barrels of oil. That's a lot of oil considering that the average well in the US makes less than 50 barrels a day. BTW, from what's been released publicly, BP didn't break any laws, but they certainly violated best practices. My guess would be that they had some hotshot that they were trying to move up the corporate chain and gave him this project. I'd also guess that whom eveer made the call on the completion/plugging procedure (they were plugging it when they had the problems) had mostly land experience - some of the decisions where simply wrong for offshore, but acceptable on land.

[zigzag]

I don't know how many of you saw the 60 Minutes show a couple of weeks after the platform explosion. There was a guy interviewed who worked for Transocean. My impression was that he had some authority to make decisions on behalf of Transocean, and he barely escaped the platform when it blew up. He did not have anything flattering to say about the BP personnel on the platform making the decisions (why would he since he held them responsible for almost killing him). In the report, a complete explanation of what they were doing and how they were doing it was illustrated. He attributed the irresponsible decisions to strictly monetary concerns that BP had, and he was sure that if his recommendations had been followed, there would have been no disaster. There were safeguards in place and procedures to follow in their situation that were not followed. Transocean's recommendations were overruled. From what I saw, he had no agenda, but that's not to say that he wasn't covering his own butt.

[RichCI]

This was an exploratory well' date=' it was never intended to be productive. so you try and drill them as cheaply as possible. Since this was the first well on this project, BP had no idea if they were even going to find oil. While the numbers have gotten better, exploratory wells have a 1 chance in 50 of finding commercial quantities of oil, and finding something as large as this appears to be is about 1:10,000. [b']To simply break even on this (assuming they hadn't had a problem) they would have had to produce about 2.5 million barrels of oil. That's a lot of oil considering that the average well in the US makes less than 50 barrels a day.[/b] BTW, from what's been released publicly, BP didn't break any laws, but they certainly violated best practices. My guess would be that they had some hotshot that they were trying to move up the corporate chain and gave him this project. I'd also guess that whom eveer made the call on the completion/plugging procedure (they were plugging it when they had the problems) had mostly land experience - some of the decisions where simply wrong for offshore, but acceptable on land.

 

To put those numbers in perspective, most reports are putting the amount of oil leaking at 19,000 barrels per day. Going more conservatively at 15,000, over the past 45 days since the leak began that adds up 675,000 leaked so far, or nearly 1/4 of what they would have needed to produce to break even. So, this well potentially could have broke even in around 6 months of production.

[myspace.com/jessenoah]

touche ^

[flyingarmadillo]

I don't know how many of you saw the 60 Minutes show a couple of weeks after the platform explosion. There was a guy interviewed who worked for Transocean. My impression was that he had some authority to make decisions on behalf of Transocean' date=' and he barely escaped the platform when it blew up. He did not have anything flattering to say about the BP personnel on the platform making the decisions (why would he since he held them responsible for almost killing him). In the report, a complete explanation of what they were doing and how they were doing it was illustrated. He attributed the irresponsible decisions to strictly monetary concerns that BP had, and he was sure that if his recommendations had been followed, there would have been no disaster. There were safeguards in place and procedures to follow in their situation that were not followed. Transocean's recommendations were overruled. From what I saw, he had no agenda, but that's not to say that he wasn't covering his own butt.[/quote']

 

 

The chain of command ends at BP, they have the ultimate say in what happens. The top of the onsite command chain is the "Company Man" either an employee of or contractor to the oil company. He reports to the main offices for the oil company, but handles all of the onsite decisions, usually autonomously. In this case it sounds like there were higher ups from BP that may have over-ruled him. The head of the drilling crew is called the "tool-pusher" (there's usually one for each shift) who passes on the Company Man's decisions and carries out his instructions. Under the Tool Pusher is the Driller who actually operates the machinery and directs the rest of the rig hands. Most rigs now are running three shifts per day with maybe 6 men maximum per shift. So of the 130 people on the rig only about 30 were involved in the drilling - the others ran the ship (this was a semi-submersible rig which means it sails like a ship, gets on location and is ballasted down until the hulls are submerged). There was probably a ships captain but he would have had no say in the drilling operations.

 

Rich - you're right, but it never would have been produced as a single well operation. They would have set a production platform (cost about $500 million) and drilled 10 - 20 additional wells from that (cost about $20 million each) before it ever went into production. And it never would have been allowed to flow at the current rate. Wells are only very rarely allowed to flow at their maximum rate - if you do you damage the rock and reservoir qualities and can't recover as much of the oil. The Russians produced many of theirs as hard as they could under the Soviets and now many of those wells are giving up early. Typical primary recovery is about 30% of the oil in place the Russians are getting less than 25 out of their old fields. The additional oil can be recovered but it's much more costly.