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Edited Date/Time
1/23/2012 2:36pm
Holy cow, BP is reporting that one of their relief wells is within 200' of the blown out well. That's freakin' amazing. From MSNBC.com:
"Kent Wells, senior vice president of exploration and production, said the first relief well being drilled is within 200 feet of the blown-out well. The aim is for one or both relief wells to intersect with the leaking well to pump in heavy drilling fluids and cement."
How'd they do that so fast? If that information is accurate, that's a real accomplishment. I don't know what their exact strategy is, but they could conceivably be trying to kill the well in mid-July.
"Kent Wells, senior vice president of exploration and production, said the first relief well being drilled is within 200 feet of the blown-out well. The aim is for one or both relief wells to intersect with the leaking well to pump in heavy drilling fluids and cement."
How'd they do that so fast? If that information is accurate, that's a real accomplishment. I don't know what their exact strategy is, but they could conceivably be trying to kill the well in mid-July.
But it won't be ready until mid to late July.
The Shop
Or, if that's not feasible due to back pressure, but a Y on it...valve on one end, pipe going to the surface on the other side (with valve). Drop Y on top, open valve to surface, close valve to gulf...produce well.
Just curious if you know of a reason something simple like that would not work.
If things get really bad - and they might - I'm jazzed that they have one well so close. I worked on a couple of relief wells and we killed the blowout both times, no problem. It's scary stuff, though.
I worked on a well that took such a strong gas kick that the gas pressure in the well was pushing a 100,000# set of drill pipe and collars up and out of the well - we chained the drill string down to the drill floor with chains that looked like battleship anchor chains with the BOPs closed and the choke WFO and pumped mud as fast as we could to push the gas back and reestablish control. All the time, the drill crew walked around the outside of the rig location to see if any gas was coming out of the ground outside the well - if it did, we'd have abandoned the whole thing and just let it blow. It's pretty cool now, but that was a long few days hoping we'd be alive at the end of our shifts.
As far as using a Y like you suggest (which is a logical approach), to produce a well you have to choke it down to prevent it from flowing so fast that it erodes the wellhead, and then of course you wind up building back pressure so you're right back in the same boat.
But, I'm not certain I understand how the back pressure would be problem in a solution like I mentioned versus the BOP.
Drilling directly into the original wellbore is a pretty good trick since the target is about 7" in diameter and of course you can't "see" where you're going. But in this case, there's casing in the original wellbore so they can use tools that detect magnetic fields and direct the drill bit toward the casing.
They'll then redirect the relief well to the reservoir and make that a production well.
If nothing catastrophic happens before the relief well(s) are drilled, they should be able to kill this thing.
Oil exploration is the greatest, most interesting industrial thing I've ever been involved in. It's fascinating stuff.
In this case, there's no mud in the well.
The whole art of well control is to try to keep as much mud in the well as you can - the more mud you lose, the less control you have and the more formation pressure is exerted against the well structure, and the higher the chance of an underground blowout, which is very, very hard to fix - and usually just blow out until the reservoir depletes. That's not good when the reservoir is known to be as HUGE as this one - maybe one of the top 5 individual reservoirs in the entire world.
I hope this makes sense.
Do we really think this is going to work? I don't. I have this sick feeling this incident will kill the Gulf and seriously damage the Atlantic for a long damn time.
And I'm an optimist.
I hope that I am wrong.
I think that might already be the case.
I think in the beginning, BP wasn't truthful about their situation, particularly in the amount of oil leaking, and even now I don't think they're helping their own case by not being honest about the fact that they're concerned about the structural integrity of the wellbore and that's why they don't want to restrict the oil flow - they need to play it straight and tell the public, "No, we don't WANT to stop the oil. If we do, we risk a disastrous underground blowout, and there's no certain fix for that." BP has also done a poor job of engineering capture systems - they should have designed one that would capture much higher volumes right from the start because they knew the well would flow more oil as time went on - that may have been a result of their apparent desire to lowball their estimates of the amount of oil escaping. When company politics starts to intrude on engineering, that's a bad thing. Overall, this isn't a situation in which the company can get a passing grade with the public because a passing grade means you fix the leak and clean up the mess, and that's simply impossible in a short period of time. I don't feel bad for BP, though -they were horribly irresponsible in drilling the well in the first place, their irresponsibility killed 11 men, and they deserve whatever comes their way. It's a shame for smaller shareholders and pension funds that invested in BP, but that's the way it goes when you're depending on stocks for the money you live on.
Pit Row
(1) You never, ever scrimp on well design and drilling execution, no matter how far behind schedule you are or what it costs.
(2) We've learned a lot about capture systems and how to deploy them if you have a situation like this, where you need to let the oil flow but also need to keep it out of the water;
(3) Several new techniques have been developed to corral the oil and use reverse osmosis oil/water separators to retrieve the oil from the ocean, such as Kevin Costner's invention;
(4) Using dispersants really just makes it harder to corral the oil and we shouldn't do that;
(5) When drilling in deep water, wells should be drilled in pairs so one could be used as a relief well for the other in case of a blowout (field development always entails multiple wells anyway, so it's just a matter of coordination to drill in pairs);
(6) The deepwater industry has no future if it appears incompetent in dealing with things like this. With the stakes being so high, the development of better management and repair systems will become the next big exploration push.
(7) Ultimately, we have to wean the country off of oil and move it toward natural gas/electric vehicles as a first step, coupled with lifestyle changes that simply require less travel for mundane daily events like employment.
It's a shame that we have to have something like this to wake up and smell the coffee, but it's always like that. We continued bad farming practices unil the Dust Bowl; we continued bad shipping practices and single-hull tankers until the Exxon Valdez; we continued dumping industrial waste into rivers until Love Canal. We only seem to react to disaster, we never seem to forsee disaster and head it off. But at least we DO react.
The learning curve on this blunder is going to be very costly to all of us.
There are two types of technology. There is the type where a bunch of people decide things are correct, because they have came up with a quantum math equation that proves it to be so, even though it's never put into place to either pass or fail. Then there's the type of technology that is put to the test and it either works, or it doesn't..
This is a fine example of our capabilities when it comes to real technology.
Different product, same greedy people.
And it should stay that way. I have no problems with companies making good profits, but I do have a problem when they gouge. Especially when the gas comes from a field that is owned by the federal government or us taxpayers.
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