Is the BP Gusher Unstoppable?

http://motherjones.com/blue-marble/2010/06/worst-already-true-BP-well-now-unstoppable

by mbateman • 16 years ago

167 140 16 years ago

russell• 16 years ago

It may be much worse than we thought. The well pipe is nearing collapse under the seabed and efforts to cap it from the top will eventually fail.

ars• 16 years ago

Interesting how it went from a wild guess, to an article, then "may be", and now "is nearing collapse" and "will fail".

Rumors.

JacobAldridge• 16 years ago

It's not rumors. Some guy (gal?) named dougr said so, and he is "seemingly very knowledgable". Q.E.D.

mkramlich2• 16 years ago

Good point. But to be fair, a lot of what BP has seemed to be doing is making guesses. Educated guesses, based on some observations and known facts. But still, guesses just the same. At best, estimates.

joubert• 16 years ago

And that's why the company should have been transparent about the spill from early on.

btilly2• 16 years ago

Short summary, the integrity of the well seems to be compromised below the layer we can reach. Therefore attempting to cap it will just cause it to leak out the sea floor below anything we can reach. The only choice is to let the oil out and try to catch it. However this will erode the already compromised well structure.

At that point it is a race between erosion and the relief wells, which hopefully will relieve the pressure on the existing well.

If the relief wells fail to get there in time, there is a real possibility of the sea floor collapsing and letting the entire oil pocket out. The potential oil spill if that happens could be up to 2.5 billion barrels.

nw• 16 years ago

If I'm not mistaken, that equals 10,000 times the volume spilled by the Exxon Valdez (250k barrels).

nitrogen• 16 years ago

If the sea floor above the pocket is so fragile, what was to stop this disaster from occurring naturally some day, without having ever drilled?

stretchwithme• 16 years ago

That sort of thing may very well have happened in the past. And it probably sucked being a fish for quite a while.

And like many other bad things that have occurred quite naturally in the past, we'll suffer no matter what or who's causing the disaster. When the Toba caldera blew last time, for example, we almost got wiped out.

jonah• 16 years ago

From my reading, it's flow that's causing the erosion. We've punctured the dam.

Consider an earth dam holding in a lake. As long as the water's sitting behind the dam, not much is going to happen but as soon as a little crack appears or a bit of water begins pouring over the top, it starts eroding - carrying away bits of the dam. As the hole gets bigger, the flow increases which accelerates the erosion.

Now picture the oil eroding a hole in the casing and surrounding rock/silt/etc.

Here's a visual from a recent natural disaster: http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/06/landslide_lake_in_p...

URSpider94• 16 years ago

(Not that I necessarily buy the entire article, but)

What he is saying is that the sea floor IMMEDIATELY below the BOP is soft and sandy. That may be the first 10 to 100 feet, which is basically supporting the weight of the BOP.

As another poster has pointed out, it's another 18,000 feet down from the seafloor to the top of the oil deposit.

dlnovell• 16 years ago

From what this guy said, the maximum flow rate if the well fails is 150,000 barrels per day. If there are 2.5 billion barrels in the reservoir, then we'd be looking at a continuous leak at approximately three times it's present flow rate for 45 years before it stopped.

The consequences of that scenario are too horrible to imagine.

avolkov• 16 years ago

4.5 years, not 45 years.

btilly2• 16 years ago

2.5 billion barrels is about 300,000,000,000 liters, which is 300,000,000 cubic meters, which is about half a cubic km.

If any significant fraction of that volume is removed, it seems likely to me that there will be cave-ins around the bubble. If those cave-ins are big enough, they could create cracks that would cause more leaks to come out. Alternately they could produce places for oil to go that won't leak out the current hole. Or they could widen the current hole.

Of course long before that point we should have relief wells. But the challenge there is that the wells are hard to put in and the existing leak lends an element of instability. The last thing anyone wants is to have further accidents on the relief wells. But when you're hurrying under difficult circumstances, accidents cannot be ruled out.

starkfist• 16 years ago

This MotherJones article is entirely based on an anonymous comment on another blog, which is sort of interesting in and of itself.

freescale• 16 years ago

And that an article in MotherJones based on an anonymous comment on another blog is currently #2 on HackerNews is simply dispiriting.

thaumaturgy8• 16 years ago

Yep, especially since BP's presentation to Congress [1] would indicate that that anonymous commenter doesn't have a complete understanding of what's going on.

[1] http://energycommerce.house.gov/documents/20100527/BP.Presen...

davidw2• 16 years ago

Agreed. I've bitched about seeing right (or libertarian)-wing propaganda sites like mises.org here - same thing goes for motherjones - it's politics, and politics do not belong here.

biznickman• 16 years ago

I think we all want the comment to be wrong ... no matter what the source

sv123• 16 years ago

Reading that comment scares the shit out of me.

houseabsolute18• 16 years ago

Not so quick question: if this indeed does happen could more extraordinary measures possibly fix the problem? For example:

    Bombs          Bombs
    \\      |      //
    --------|--------
    ########|########

Or is it basically oil ocean forever? And: how catastrophic of a situation is this? Not, I would guess, an existential risk. Could it be measured in terms of percentage of world GDP that will be lost trying to fix or mitigate the symptoms? And if so, what approximate percentage would that be? Another nice thing would be if it could be measured in terms of the overall historical benefit of offshore drilling.

Edit: I'm not really suggesting bombs; that's just something off the top my head. The main idea is that I want to know if there is any potential mitigation if the story is true? And just how bad is it if there isn't?

micmcg• 16 years ago

I don't see how you could possibly consider the catastrophic nature of the situation only in terms of financial cost and not environmental. No amount of money can bring back extinct species.

houseabsolute18• 16 years ago

I care more about my fellow man's skin than some extinct species. All other things being equal extinctions are bad, but in my world it's lower priority than the losses that humans face (at some level of conversion).

Anyway, if it makes you feel better, you can try to come up with an extinction's dollar value and add that in to your estimate. That sort of thing is perfectly valid. I suggest: "How much money would I pay (or advocate to be paid) to prevent this extinction?" Then do that for each extinction you believe is likely.

electromagnetic• 16 years ago

Umm, is it just me or aren't they already doing IVF treatments between rhino species to use the more prevalent species to recover the virtually extinct species to aid in re-population efforts.

Why is it such a hard leap that the DNA of recently extinct (as in holding the last one in your hands) cannot be recovered and used to perform similar methods. If you've got the species you can harvest the eggs and sperm and produce thousands of offspring.

It's exceptionally naive to say "no amount of money can bring back extinct species" because you just have no grasp of what money can actually buy. If I can harvest the complete DNA of several animals from one species, including their mitochondrial, you can easily reproduce the species by emptying one of the species native eggs and filling it with the harvested foreign material, by all standards that I've read it should survive until gestation (assuming regular IVF failure rates for the species) and resurrect a species.

You don't need an African Elephant to give birth to African Elephant babies, because an Asian Elephant will do a suitable job. In fact it's believed an African (IIRC) elephant would be a suitable enough host to resurrect a mammoth (mitochondrial DNA would be required due to its specializations).

Please any amount of money can do virtually anything. It's currently engineeringly feasible to construct a gigantic nuclear powered mass driver on the moon to turn it into a world ship . . . or alternatively a massive billiard ball to explode mercury with. It's far, far, far from practical, but screw radiation shielding and deploy a few gigantic RTG's onto the moon and your money is getting what you want.

Money is a direct equivalent to resources, which is the entire point of why we use it as a common currency instead of arguing over how much steel a bar of gold is worth and how many bars of gold it would take to turn said steel into a car. If you have the money/resources, you can do anything physically possible.

mkramlich2• 16 years ago

Especially if one of the species turns out to be homo sapiens. :)

thaumaturgy8• 16 years ago

I did a fair bit of research on the technical details of the Deepwater Horizon disaster. I, too, wanted to know why "they" didn't do X, Y, or Z, so I decided to find out. :-)

The first thing you need to know is that it's 5,000 feet from the surface of the ocean to the ocean floor at the well, and then there's another 18,000 feet of shaft below the ocean floor to the oil and gas reservoir. So, there's no clear position from which explosives can be used to "seal" it. If explosives were used, there's a pretty good chance it would blow up in our face, so to speak -- not only would the gas ignite (making the process somewhat unpredictable), but it would also likely create a huge number of microfissures that would lead to an even bigger oil geyser.

How catastrophic is it? It's ... well, not to be dramatic, but if this doesn't end up being one of the nastier long-term natural catastrophes of the next few decades, then I shudder to imagine what's coming next. Not only is this killing seabirds and mammals, it's also de-oxygenating a large portion of the Gulf rather nicely.

If BP does stick to their commitment to pay for the whole thing, I expect that they will file for bankruptcy next year. (In large part because their market cap is dropping like a rock.)

This particular incident is sort of the perfect storm of conditions for an oil disaster: it occurred at challenging depths, and when efforts have been made to stop the leak at those depths, something has gone wrong each time to stall or defeat the effort.

For further perspective: the US Navy's Seawolf class submarine has a crush depth of approximately 3,000 feet. At that depth, you're dealing with around 2,000 psi of pressure, but that's not the nasty part: the gusher is estimated to be at around 12,000 psi.

So, yeah. Explosives are probably not a wise idea here.

houseabsolute18• 16 years ago

Oh, I wasn't saying that explosives were the right way. I'm just trying to show that I'm at least thinking about the problem a little rather than asking a dumb question. :P Thanks for the information.

blahblahblah• 16 years ago

"If explosives were used, there's a pretty good chance it would blow up in our face, so to speak -- not only would the gas ignite (making the process somewhat unpredictable), but it would also likely create a huge number of microfissures that would lead to an even bigger oil geyser."

How exactly is the gas going to ignite in the absence of atmospheric oxygen? Remember, this is the bottom of the ocean. There's no air for the gas to react with. Presumably the solid oxidizer and fuel components of any explosive that would be used for this purpose would be well mixed and present in a stoichiometric ratio and, therefore, side reactions between oxidizer and gas aren't all that likely.

I agree on the fissure problem, though.

DannoHung• 16 years ago

> How catastrophic is it? It's ... well, not to be dramatic, but if this doesn't end up being one of the nastier long-term natural catastrophes of the next few decades, then I shudder to imagine what's coming next. Not only is this killing seabirds and mammals, it's also de-oxygenating a large portion of the Gulf rather nicely.

Point of clarification, this is a man-made catastrophe.

hyperbovine• 16 years ago

The thrust of the original comment that inspired this whole blogroll is that the entire well structure is essentially on the verge of forming a giant, gushing oil sinkhole on the ocean floor, the likes of which the world has never seen. So I'm gonna go with no on the bombs.

demallien• 16 years ago

Personally I'm for going all Deep Impact on it. Nuclear bombs on the sea bed being blown to get down to the deeper leaks, and then going for another topkill... Of course, I know nothing about how to fix oil well leaks, underwater nuclear explosions or topkill, so I wouldn't listen to me. Still, I like the image - would a nuclear bomb going off underwater create a tsunami?

viraptor• 16 years ago

Ok - I haven't been following this event that much so far. Can someone tell me why the simplest solution of limiting the leak effects is not possible - namely building a large tunnel going from the surface to the leak point, making a space where the oil can safely leak, while it's being transported away? Is it the depth? area? size of the flow?

jbarciauskas• 16 years ago

I don't know but I imagine that the complexity of building said tunnel is much higher than the alternative that is currently being pursued - relief wells and the "bottom kill".

Building things in water is many many times more complicated than the same things not in water. Which is why deep sea drilling is so controversial to begin with.

brown9-22• 16 years ago

The leak is 5000 feet below the surface of the ocean.

Water is heavy. 5000 feet of it is a whole lot of pressure that such a tunnel would have to withstand.

The "simplest solution" is often one that is completely impractical given the facts.

giardini• 16 years ago

No, No! Neither "tunnel" nor well need to withstand the pressure of 5000 feet of water. Reason is that the well (tunnel) is always filled with either water or drilling mud (roughly the same density as water) so the inside and outside pressure on the drilling pipe are the same. The pressure differences are not significant until/unless drilling into an oil or gas pocket. Even then the pocket must have a pressure significantly greater than that of the 5000 feet of water to be any problem. But that's what blowout preventers are for.

signa11• 16 years ago

> simplest solution of limiting the leak effects is not possible...

For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.

-- H.L. Mencken

billswift8• 16 years ago

Mencken was talking about political and economic problems which are extremely complex. The oil spill is a hard problem, but it is not an especially complex problem.

jonknee2• 16 years ago

That's what they tried with the containment dome (a big box with a pipe up to the surface where oil would be collected in tankers. Turns out that at those depths gas from the well makes methane hydrate crystals and it blocked up the pipe and no oil was collected. Back to the drawing board...

Flash forward a few crazy ideas (namely tossing a bunch of trash into the BOP to try and clog it) and they went back to a similar method called the LMRP. This time they sawed off the riser from the BOP so that the opening was flush and designed a containment cap that fit better around it than before (less of a chance for water to mix in and make the hydrate crystals) and developed a system that continually pumps hot sea water and methanol down the pipe to also help tap down on the hydrates. This method is actually gathering oil, but since they sawed off the riser a lot more oil started leaking so the net result is even more oil is getting into the ocean. BP hasn't "sealed" the LMRP for fear that it will blow out the BOP, which is pretty much what the Mother Jones piece is about.

tl;dr they have and it's not that easy.

stcredzero3• 16 years ago

Not just the BOP. The actual well lining itself is eroding from the flow. There's a risk that this will deteriorate to the point that there's no way to seal the leak and the entire oil deposit will leak out.

It seems the article was too long for many people's patience/understanding threshold.

codingthewheel• 16 years ago

The largest two oil spills in recorded history:

Lakeview Gusher: around 9 million barrels, est. Gulf War Spill: around 6 to 11 million barrels

Deepwater Horizon has a ways to go. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_spill#Largest_oil_spills

yardie• 16 years ago

#1 On land, relatively easy to cleanup, but expensive

#2 On land, relatively easy to cleanup, but expensive

#3 5000 ft underwater....expensive

ZachPruckowski2• 16 years ago

According to that chart, it's halfway to the lower-end estimates of the Gulf War Spill, and we're barely halfway done with the spill in the best-case scenario.

sosorry• 16 years ago

What if we just sank something really big and made of concrete on top of the oil leak, like a cruise ship or an aircraft carrier? Just something really really heavy, and wide enough to cover the hole by a large margin.

chronomex• 16 years ago

I can't see that making a good enough seal with the seafloor to be a viable solution.

nevinera• 16 years ago

So you have this huge, powerful, not particularly sturdy hose sticking out of the middle of your yard.

You decide that you need to stop it up, so you place the top of a bird-bath over it, upside down. How well do you think that will work?

The sea floor is not made of bedrock.

ck2• 16 years ago

2.5 Million gallons per day. Years after the news stops reporting it in a couple months, the wildlife will never recover.

Relief wells must be made MANDATORY or we've learned nothing and it will happen again.

BP's deepwater Atlantis is poised to do the same thing in our lifetimes.

jurjenh• 16 years ago

So the direct consequence currently is that millions of barrels are venting directly into the gulf. I'm not too clued up on crude oil, but as far as I'm aware, oil is less dense than water, thus rises. Gulf currents will dissipate this as seen from aerial photos, so without containment, oil will end up in a lot more places than just the gulf.

How is the oil flow being contained, and how effective is this - remembering there may be billions of barrels to be contained...

What percentage of the oil will be sub-surface - a lot harder to contain. And how can this be contained?

What are the flow-on effects of a possible sea-floor collapse and how much of an impact will this have on the structure of the gulf?

And then the overriding question of all - is it worth it?

If there is a relatively easy way to extract crude from the water, it may in fact be more economically feasible to extract the oil by destroying the well than to repair the well itself. Of course, none of this is taking into account the environmental impact...

itgoon• 16 years ago

The problem with the underwater plumes is that they can't be contained. While you may have the image of an underwater oilslick, it isn't - the oil can be measured in parts per million (you might not even notice if you had a glass of it).

The problem with those plumes is that bacteria eats the oil, and then breeds. Those organisms use up the oxygen in the water, leaving a dead zone unfit for life. There was already a decent sized dead zone from the Mississippi, but this has the potential to dwarf it.

varjag• 16 years ago

How about U.S. government finally uses some of it's many nukes for good of the world?

No, not on BP headquarters, but blast it in proximity to kill the well?

Jim_Neath• 16 years ago

+1 for the use of the word "Gusher"

quizbiz• 16 years ago

What does a well look like under water?

jpdbaugh3• 16 years ago

BP definitely understands, better than anyone else who pretends to what is going on. The problem is that what is really going on is incredibly scary proposition. The truth is that from the beginning the only real way to fix this is with relief wells which they are in the process of drilling. The problem with the relief well is that it takes about 6 months to implement. Do you really expect BP to come out with that to the American people?

I have this on good authority by a petroleum engineer in a rival oil company. Believe me or not but I think that the people in the oil industry probably no better about how to fix this problem than Obama or anyone else in government who are just going to get in the way. First, I do not at all agree with offshore drilling, however it bothers me that people assume that BP is holding out or that this is really an easy thing to fix. They aren't because letting the disaster continue will destroy their company and it isn't easy considering they are composed of people who studied petroleum engineering and actually no what they are doing. Johnny's silly, uninformed ideas aren't going to work either. Hell, the petroleum engineer I know also said that Russia's idea of nuking the leak would be the quickest way to fix but the government, or sane people, wouldn't allow that.

The bottom line is that we should never have been drilling in the first place. This spill is terrible but it happened and we have to deal with it. It bothers me though that people really think BP isn't doing the best they can and has the best people in the world working on this. The entire oil industry is helping them. The government and other entities should worry about supporting them and helping the people affected by this cope with the fallout. Leave the technical details to the professionals because everyone else ideas are uninformed, will slow things down, and will not work. Only a relief well will and thats 4 months away so why not worry about helping the people of the golf? The truly sad thing is that Americans will still get up tomorrow and drive their gas guzzling SUVs 2 miles to work instead of riding bike and those bullet trains and public transportation efforts are still decades away...

Tekhne3• 16 years ago

> ... Americans will still get up tomorrow and drive their gas guzzling SUVs ...

Let's say that I'm an American with a gas guzzling SUV. For the sake of discussion, what would you suggest are my better alternatives (taking into account the money I've already invested in the SUV)? How would those alternatives help fix the current BP problem? I'm not trying to be contrarian. I would like to start a discussion here.

jpdbaugh3• 16 years ago

I don't think Americans really need to do anything personally. I think the primary issue is the lack of public transportation here in America. We need leadership on this from the top so that we can catch up to the rest of the world. You can go anywhere in Europe in hours on a train. I know America is big but we are still (perhaps) the richest country in the world and we can implement a quality public transportation system. It would even help the economy by providing jobs, just like all of the infrastructure projects of the new deal did.

Besides public transportation though, just working on our infrastructure would help with fuel saving. Sitting in traffic all day doesn't help MPG. Hell, sometimes I wish I had an SUV for some of the roads here in Pittsburgh, with the potholes its like I am driving through in Iraq. Also, my beef isn't really with all SUVs. I mean the Traverse gets what 33/mpg? I am talking about the people who drive Escalades to and from work and don't haul anyone around.

jim_dot• 16 years ago

this post seems to suggest that Dougr's ideas that oil is escaping into the surrounding rock are wrong: http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6611#more

Is the BP Gusher Unstoppable?

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