tunnelcat wrote:
Much appreciated dissent. I was referring to the comedy of errors surrounding BOTH the government's and BP's flailing attempts to seal the well, the myriad ideas and efforts to contain that oil and the blame casting being thrown around for the accident. "Not my fault, not my fault! It was his fault!" I even heard some TV network news reporter call it the 'Three Stooges' analogy too.
...
... BP even tried the 'junkshot' in between the other 'top kill' drilling mud attempts these past few days. No luck. I guess what didn't work in 1979 wasn't going to work now either. Now I've heard reports that they're going to try and connect another blowout preventer to the top of the damaged one in hopes of shutting off the flow. And now there's this 'cut the riser pipe and fit a cap over the well hole' attempt next. I'd wouldn't be surprised if the flow rate went UP catastrophically if they did that. There's a lot of pressure in that particular oil field. I don't have high hopes in either case.
Except I'm still going to disagree with you TC that what is happening are a lot of "flailing attempts to seal the well". It's really easy to Monday-morning quarterback to failed attempts to date, since, well they failed. Is this "flailing" or is this having difficulty to accomplish something that has never been done before in a challenging environment? There have been cameras on this from the get-go, allowing all sorts of amateur pontification on what's bad, what's good, etc. I'm still going to give credit to those folks in the Unified Command (BP, other oil industry firms, various Federal agencies) who have been working round the clock for weeks trying just to get get the well under control or sealed. Can't fully address the issues of clean-up and investigation of the DWH explosion until this occurs.
Where did you get your information that "what didn't work in 1979 wasn't going to work now either"? I presume you're referring to the
Ixtoc 1 blowout. What did Pemex do to seal that well, other that the relief wells that they drilled? Oh, here's a
NOAA page that has some info.
In the initial stages of the spill, an estimated 30,000 barrels of oil per day were flowing from the well. In July 1979 the pumping of mud into the well reduced the flow to 20,000 barrels per day, and early in August the pumping of nearly 100,000 steel, iron, and lead balls into the well reduced the flow to 10,000 barrels per day. Mexican authorities also drilled two relief wells into the main well to lower the pressure of the blowout. PEMEX claimed that half of
the released oil burned when it reached the surface, a third of it evaporated, and the rest was contained or dispersed.
Now, I don't know - just how accurate were Pemex's estimates for ANY of the numbers they released. Did they have 24/7 camera coverage? btw, that well was in 160 feet of water, reachable by divers from the surface. The DWH well is in 5000 feet of water. That's about 85 pounds per square inch working environment versus the current about 2200 psig working environment. If the DWH well was in 160 feet of water the containment dome might very well have worked (since the gas hydreates would not have formed), and people would already be well into the clean-up and lawsuit phase.
Oh, and for the clean-up, Pemex told the US to kiss off.
At this point, it looks like they're ready to try the
LMRP deployment. Ultimately, they probably aren't going to have this sealed for shure until the kill well is completed and they've pumped in a cement plug. Until then, hopefully, this can mitigate some of the problem.
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