Top kill fails to plug leak

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/30/us/30spill.html?hp

by j_baker • 16 years ago

140 131 16 years ago

erlanger2• 16 years ago

Hacker news!

campnic2• 16 years ago

This sad attempt at questioning the merit of the article is truly part of the problem with this oil leak. We're talking about one of the greatest ecological disasters in the history of the United States and people seem uninterested. It's pretty sickening. For another perspective see http://www.businessinsider.com/matthew-simmons-dylan-ratigan...

erlanger2• 16 years ago

Well I certainly knew nothing of these developments until they appeared on this website. This is where I go for national news.

rriepe3• 16 years ago

It's relevant as an unsolved engineering problem.

We're all waiting to see which "hack" is going to finally work.

tumult• 16 years ago

Totally off-topic, but I'm posting this here, since it's where most of my other posts were: I was being hugely inappropriate and venting my frustrations in an entirely idiotic manner. I apologize (sincerely) to everyone, and their good taste, that I offended.

campnic2• 16 years ago

Phew. Accepted. Lets continue having fun and a sense of acceptance on HN. Its (part of) what makes it better then other sites.

staunch• 16 years ago

It is time for Plan C: http://trueslant.com/juliaioffe/2010/05/04/nuke-that-slick/

dasht• 16 years ago

It's an interesting question, that one, isn't it? I don't think "nuke" is the operative word because they would want a tiny nuke so "conventional" explosives might do. From what I hear Prof. Bea and some other sources saying I infer that the real danger of that approach is that it can make things much, much worse. (Namely, while it might collapse the pipe, it might also create a large total volume capacity of escape paths for the oil, spread over a larger area. There is already a new leak from the sea-bed 400ft away.).

asdflkj• 16 years ago

Probably a dumb question, but since I don't know the answer, I'll ask it: why not blow up the entire reservoir with a big thermonuclear bomb? Or otherwise set it on fire such that it all burns up before getting out?

tlack• 16 years ago

This is a serious question that I've been wondering. You seem like you might know. The drill goes very deep below the sea floor into the earth to find the pocket of oil, right? Why can't they just collapse the hole they dug using explosives on the sea floor and allow it to close in on itself? Surely it is fragile if it's so deep/hard to drill..

Encosia5• 16 years ago

From what I've read, that option isn't viable in the gulf, due to the composition of the ocean floor there. It would be more likely to open new breaches into the same bore hole than seal the leak.

ErrantX4• 16 years ago

It's not too surprising. Sad, but not surprising.

Yesterday I sat and read up on the past examples of this happening. It's hardly a big field of literature but the overriding result seems to be it takes a long time to fix these things.

The one thing that hacks me off is the way the us govt is jumping up and down banning this and questioning that. Clearly at some point we need to assess what occured and set out blame where appropriate - but it seems to me right now we should quit the politcal posturing and focus solely on stopping the leak.

jbooth9• 16 years ago

Which parts of the us govt, specifically? Questioning or banning what?

ErrantX4• 16 years ago

Obama has banned deepwater drilling (I can buy that at a stretch, but I'm not convinced he's done it for the "right reasons") and the Senate is already hearing testimony.

gometro33• 16 years ago

As interesting of a problem as this is, I don't quite understand how a) BP and other oil companies aren't required to have solved it prior to drilling and b) after more than a month of the world watching, all they could come up with was a solution that might work.

I'm inclined to call to question the caliber of the engineer s working to resolve the leak. Maybe I'm being too harsh?

EDIT: To clarify point (a), I would have assumed that oil rigs would be required to build-in some sort of kill-switch in the event that even the smallest part of the process didn't go as planned.

j_baker4• 16 years ago

They did build in a kill-switch, but it failed. To be fair to the engineers, this is the first time they've encountered a leak at 5000 feet below the ocean.

jsz0• 16 years ago

I appreciate how much of a challenge those conditions must be but I still don't understand why they were so unprepared to fix a leak. Couldn't a 5,000ft leak have been simulated by a computer or in a lab environment? It seems like they're just throwing untested solutions at the problem hoping something will work. With the amount of money these oil companies make there is no excuse to not be fully prepared.

Tichy• 16 years ago

I don't think that's a very good excuse. It's not like as if they didn't know beforehand that conditions at 5000 feet are difficult.

ugh4• 16 years ago

I would assume that many of the safety systems already failed. It’s probably (like nearly always in such cases – unlikely events happen all the time on a planet with six billion people) a 1:100,000 freak accident. The only question is then whether that probability should be lower still.

DrJokepu• 16 years ago

I'm not sure what to think. While I don't know a lot about drilling oil wells specifically, my first degree is in mechanical engineering and although I've never worked as one I know that engineers prefer to oversecure everything where a failure would cause injuries, not to mention disasters on this scale. Simply put, safety always comes first on the drawing boards of engineers.

For example, simple elevators are typically designed to be able to safely carry 7-10 times their normal operating weight, including the cabin. I find it hard to believe that "many of their safety systems" just failed - I think it's a lot more likely that a series of really stupid human mistakes are behind this as well as management that is unable or unwilling to enforce (sometimes costly) safety procedures and practices.

rriepe3• 16 years ago

I'm pretty sure they do, but the explosive (literally) nature of the situation negated all of them. A few people died in the original incident, iirc.

The one safety measure of note is the relief well. They're not required to drill them along with the primary well. I read somewhere that it's not this way in Canada, and that BP had been lobbying them to let them drill without a relief well. Good luck with that now, BP. Hopefully we'll see a law that requires relief wells here in the US.

Of course, they're scrambling to drill a relief well now, which they predict will be done in early August.

chancho• 16 years ago

a few = 11

tbrownaw• 16 years ago

> I read somewhere that it's not this way in Canada, and that BP had been lobbying them to let them drill without a relief well.

That's from Reddit, and it looks like it wasn't exactly correct: http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/c8t30/in_canada_it...

wayne• 16 years ago

According to 60 Minutes's interview with one of the engineers, the main failsafe equipment was damaged weeks before the explosion, and BP didn't bother repairing it and in fact increased drilling speed since they were slipping behind schedule.

http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=6490509n

http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/content/view/35642/

matt1• 16 years ago

I've been reading many of the news articles about the leak, but most seem to stray away from the long term effects of the leak if it's not fixed soon. If the engineers don't stop the leak within, say, a month, what kind of ecological damage can we expect? What about three months? A year? Longer? Is there a chance that it will just "run out" anytime soon?

ars5• 16 years ago

I've been wondering that too, and the best answer I have is to look at the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ixtoc_I_oil_spill

It spilled for 10 months! At that spill was 2 to 6 times worse in terms of barrels per day.

The only difference was that it took 2 months to reach the US coast, so we were a bit more prepared for it.

I have not yet read about the long term effects. But my quick skimming did not come up with anything major. (Just short term effects.)

And no, it won't run out anytime soon.

jbooth9• 16 years ago

Don't quote that barrels per day figure too readily, the barrels per day from the BP spill figure is based on.. BP's estimate. I'd double the estimate just on general principles.

Encosia5• 16 years ago

The relief well they're drilling should resolve the issue sometime in August. Everything else they're trying in the meantime are just stop gap measures to mitigate the flow until the relief well is finished.

seldo5• 16 years ago

BP knew for weeks in advance of the explosion that the well was unsafe, and had deliberately dialled-down the federally-required tests they were running on the well, which strongly suggests they knew it wouldn't pass the real tests:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/30/us/30rig.html

This is not an engineering puzzle; good engineers in the oil industry have been drilling much deeper wells than this for years:

http://www.wired.com/cars/energy/magazine/15-09/mf_jackrig http://factoidz.com/the-deepest-offshore-oil-rig-in-the-worl... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_platform#Deepest_oil_platfo...

This accident is the result of greed and a failure of regulation; an economic and political problem. Once we have found the engineering solution to shut down this well, the pressure to prevent it happening again must focus on politics, not technology.

ojbyrne3• 16 years ago

But I thought regulation was always bad? Isn't that the consensus here?

seldo5• 16 years ago

I would love to hear the libertarian defence of a private enterprise's accident that is putting thousands of people out of work and destroying an entire coastline's worth of ecosystems.

silentOpen3• 16 years ago

The protection of rights overrides the spectre of regulation. It is illegal for one citizen to kill another or even endanger another. Similarly, it should be illegal for corporations to endanger thousands and wreck ecological destruction on a wide scale.

ams6110• 16 years ago

Regulations are generally the after-the-fact reaction to irresponsible, negligent, or ignorant behavior.

The problem is, the folks who think that more regulation is the answer seem to think that the government regulators are benevolent gods who themselves never make mistakes, are not subject to greed, corruption, political influence, negligence, incompetence, etc.

rms2• 16 years ago

The corporate death penalty exists and it is a shame that it is never practiced.

See the case of multiple time convicted felon and statistical mass murderer Pfizer, where the law mandated a corporate death penalty, but the government hacked around that requirement.

http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/04/02/pfizer.bextra/index.htm...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pfizer

anigbrowl7• 16 years ago

I agree. BP is not an American company but I think it would be entirely appropriate to rescind their US licenses and freeze any assets possible. On the basis of similar episodes elsewhere it could take several months to bring the spill under control. Economically speaking, this may become as expensive to the US as 9/11.

j_baker4• 16 years ago

I'm not sure if I agree with you or not so I'm going to play devil's advocate. Corporations in and of themselves can't make decisions. Plus, if a corporation were to receive the "death penalty" you're suggesting, it could be as bad for us as it is for the company (in terms of lost jobs, competition, etc).

Why does the corporation need to be held responsible for something like this? Why not hold the employees behind these incidents accountable?

mattmcknight2• 16 years ago

That's a bit of a stretch from the Times article. Yes, they were trying to get the well under control, that's what they were doing when it blew up. Yes, the MMS approved lower pressure tests so it would be less risky to run the tests.

I love how people act as if it were in Transocean and BP's interest for the well to explode, people to die, and the ocean to be poisoned. They didn't want this to happen. BP shareholders have already lost $52B. Transocean shareholders are down $6B.

"Politics" is not a great way to solve this and the engineers on the rig were not driven by greed. For wells this deep, it looks like the risks are higher than estimates, and a relief well needs to be prepared. Human progress requires us to try new things. We learn what works, and what doesn't. We learn to price the risk.

seldo5• 16 years ago

It is absolutely in BP's and Transocean's interests for this well to explode and people to die. That's my point.

Avoiding accidents by drilling more safely and expensively is not in the interests of BP and Transocean; it makes more sense for them to be risky, gamble 50 times on other wells, make 10x more than they would if they were doing it more safely, and use those profits to cover this one unlucky time.

Forcing them to do it safely even though this makes the well 2x, 5x or 10x less profitable is the purpose of government regulation. In the case of the US oil industry, the regulator is corrupt, completely in thrall to the industry with no accountability.

Hence, the solution is not about pricing risk -- BP have already done that, and this is the logical result. The solution is a regulatory one, which means a political decision.

Jeema3000• 16 years ago

You're missing the point: of course it's not in BP's interests to have a well explode, but the people making the important decisions are often not making those decisions based on sound engineering, but on political pressures and incentives from above.

Richard Feynman showed an excellent example of this after the Challenger disaster. He was on the Presidential task force after that disaster, and he asked NASA management and engineers, separately, to quantify what they felt the odds of a catastrophic failure resulting in crew loss were prior to the disaster. The risk values quoted by engineers and by management were something like 2-3 orders of magnitude different (with the engineers quoting the much more likely value)...

seldo5• 16 years ago

Update (I can no longer edit parent): the Wall Street Journal has a longer and even more damaging report on what was going on inside BP prior to the blowout:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870402620457526...

In summary: they were doing it cheaply, and in a hurry, and skipped standard safety precautions, and ignored several warning signs.

vaksel• 16 years ago

they tried all these retarded ideas back in the 70s with the Ixtoc oil spill http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ixtoc_I_oil_spill

the only thing that worked was drilling the relief well

I bet the reason they are doing these retarded ideas while they drill the relief well is to make people think that something is being done

brianobush• 16 years ago

Well to a non-oil expert, they seem to have some merit. To me, the execution seems flawed.

vrode• 16 years ago

All businesses work this way to day, but only few has such a high risk. What BP did there was practically a 50/50 game of chance, and they've lost. It seems that in the shadow of profit, the risk becomes transparent. Sometimes other risks, like 'losing market value' seem more real than the risk of bursting such well. Maybe it is because economists are in charge and their lack of technical expertise, makes the technical risk less real.

ck2• 16 years ago

This proves the #1 regulation that should be created after this is a relief well MUST be drilled at the same time a main well is drilled, regardless of cost if they want to do business.

A few of these per century will really destroy the environment, and who knows how much worse this is going to get with just one hurricane in the next few months.

rjett• 16 years ago

This might be a naive question, but why are they still estimating how much oil is leaking? If they have pumped x amount of heavy mud in which temporarily capped the leak but was subsequently blown out because of the pressure of the escaping oil, couldn't they determine the exact pressure that the oil is coming out, and if they know the size of the opening, a flow rate?

proee• 16 years ago

The pipe is leaking both oil and gas. The ratio of the two is unknown and therefore makes calculating the oil flow difficult.

philfreo• 16 years ago

You may want to follow BP's PR Twitter... http://twitter.com/bpglobalpr ;)

tmsh• 16 years ago

So I looked at this link (via the above) from the WSJ:

http://bit.ly/cqsUZV

Anybody know why digging a hole say 500 feet deep, 50 feet side by side with the gushing well and putting some c4 in there wouldn't work?

At any rate, I read this:

http://www.wnd.com/?pageId=158297

Particularly, the non-nuclear option. I think they should run models and truly consider it. Perhaps they need to run models and then f-ing blow that up (if the models say that the resulting rubble will sufficiently re-cover the well).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KkhbbX4AcU

They could assemble a massive amount of dirt around the well. Create a large circular mound, and then just collapse it from underneath. That's what I would do. And I didn't even stay a Holiday Inn last night. Jk. I'm sure everyone has an opinion. I couldn't find a place to really say anything here:

http://www.deepwaterhorizonresponse.com/go/doc/2931/546759/

So I posted this. Anyway...

earnubs• 16 years ago

1. The leak is at 1,500m. Doing anything is difficult and dangerous.

2. The well has a measured depth of +10,000m, the pressure acting on the reservoir is ejecting the hydrocarbons with a very large force.

wsbail29• 16 years ago

My layman's idea for stopping the leak:

Insert a drill pipe into the well with some sort of expandable yet sturdy bag tucked into the end. Once the pipe is fairly deep inside the well, pump a dense liquid into the pipe expanding the bag similar to an angioplasty procedure. Then cap the well from the top once the flow is stopped or reduced significantly.

Another similar solution would be to attach high explosives to the drill pipe and collapse the well from deep inside.

Have these approaches been considered?

brown9-2• 16 years ago

I think that a problem with this idea is that the "expandable yet sturdy bag" would have to be able to withstand great pressure, not just of the oil itself but to survive a mile underneath the ocean.

Top kill fails to plug leak

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