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I'm glad I stocked up on shrimp last month...
News Alert: BP says new cap on well fully closed, no more oil leaking into Gulf
03:47 PM EDT Thursday, July 15, 2010
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BP says oil has stopped leaking into the Gulf for the first time since April.
BP has been slowly dialing down the flow as part of a test on a new cap. Engineers are now monitoring the pressure to see if the busted well holds.
That's great news though.
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Of course, there are plenty of other valid thoughts.
1) They didn't have the equipment on hand
2) They were afraid of making it worse with every change
3) They were trying to get this closed up as cheaply as possible
4) They didn't know WTF to do to stop the oil from leaking.
Several other issues I'm certain.
"Its technical........"
I think it depends on the mixture, sometimes you get that splooge outta the muffler.
I don't believe it's capped, my neighbor's kiddie-pool has a 10W-40
viscosity level now - and we live in &*&%^%% OHIO !
Knowledge? I'm comfortable saying they did not know for sure what what to do and I am comfortable saying they didn't want to make it worse by making a bad choice. Go read what Knuckle posted about the well casing issues.
Cheap? Fuck yeah, they are cheap. Having worked in a refinery for a couple of years and engineering for 17 years, they were looking to minimize costs.
What else do you believe to be made up?
I'm stoked that the oil leak is stopped, but this is a very high-risk operation that can't really give them any indespensible information that's needed for the real kill. This isn't a kill - the only way to kill this thing is by filling it with mud to counter the formation pressure and achieve a static fluid column, then filling it with cement.
If the test is OK and the well pressures up to full formation pressure (about 12,000 - 15,000 on bottom and about 10,000 on top), they know the wellbore is intact and they'll know exactly what weight mud they need in the kill. If the well won't hold pressure, they'll know the casing is breached - which doesn't change their kill in any real way, other than they're going to need a lot of mud and probably lost circulation material.
But they're taking a risk that any breach in the casing can be made much worse; and if they let too much oil flow through a breach it can rupture the surrounding rock, making the well MUCH harder - potentially even impossible - to kill.
To me, this is more of a stunt than a test. The engineers know already what they have to do in the kill process. They should have just hooked up all the collection systems to the new capping stack (which they DID need for the kill operation) and collected the oil until the relief wells were done. That's the lowest risk option, and it achieves the goal of keeping the oil out of the ocean.
So BPs stock takes a big jump at a very opportune time, and if it works, nobody will ever really KNOW how much oil was leaking from the well because they'll never have a 100% capture system in place. And the only downside is - well, they risk everything to get that.
I would trade eating crow and being wrong, for a successful outcome of capping this well in a heartbeat. Although you are much better at getting your point across that I am, you are reading my mind.
As I said, I hope that I am wrong.
Over at The Oil Drum, there's been talk that this well is only drilled into 60' of pay zone; real good Gulf wells are drilled into 600' + of pay.
Pit Row
English please for the simpletons like me..
I think you are giving yourself a little too much credit!
But it's also possible that the casing is leaking and that's why pressure hasn't come up any more than it has.l
Oops, I missed a shift there - I was thinking Farad, not Pascal.
Yes, Pascals law describes the pressure effect of mud in a well - pressure is high at the bottom and lower at the top.
When they were drilling, they were using 16# mud and apparently balancing the well with that. At 18,000 feet, that implies a pressure of almost 15,000 PSI. They may have been somewhat overbalanced, but surely not so much that formation pressure is low enough that a top pressure of only 6700 is implied. If you assume the well is now filled with oil (not much natural gas), then the hydrostatic pressure of the oil is about 5,000 psi, and if you had a formation pressure of 15,000, that would imply a top pressure of 10,000 - which makes sense with them looking for 8,000 to 9,000. But 6700 is low for that scenario. Maybe they just pulled enough volume out of the formation to pull it down that much, but it's also very possible they have a casing leak.
One of the reasons the independent scientists shut the thing down for 24 hours and did a pre-integrity test seismic survey - if they have a leak, now they can do another one and they might be able to tell what depth the leak is at.
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