Hey Knuck....

Damn...


all this brings to mind a movie I remember seeing in the 60's --


http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0059065/

That was an amazing transformation. She looked great!!! Did you see what I am talking about?

I think he r-u-n-n-o-f-t.

If it were true, which I don't know one way or the other, maybe we should put a big nice yacht right over the well and send some of BP top brass there for some vacation time.

yeah, stunning!!! we need to all chip in and make this stuff widely available

Methane is just plain old natural gas and you expect it in a well - heck, that's what you want to produce, along with oil - but very high pressure gas is difficult to handle. I understand that Exxon began drilling into this formation and stopped because they were concerned about their ability to hold back gas.

Having said that, when they were drilling the Macondo well, they were drilling with 16#/gallon mud, which isn't particularly heavy and they were balancing the formation pressure with that. It wasn't until they began replacing that mud with sea water (about 8.5#/gallon) that the well blew out. That would seem to imply that the formation pressures weren't all that extreme. As far as methane being released from the sea floor, that's actually a natural occurance - and at that sea depth, it'll mix with sea water and freeze into hydrate where it will be trapped unless the water warms up enough to release it.

From what I've heard about this well and BPs idiotic efforts to save a nickle here and a dime there, they are faced with a really sorry casing job which will make things more complicated, but if they can pump enough heavy mud into the well to get it stable again - basically, refill it with heavy mud that has worked in the past to control the well (since they no longer have a riser to the surface to hold mud, they'll have to use something heavier than 16#), then they can cement the hell out of it and that should work. They're going to have to keep heavy fluids in it though, because the crappy casing job will not tolerate much pressure. BPs lousy well design complicates things, but this should be a fairly routine kill with the relief wells; of course, you never know until you try. We'll see in a month or so. In the meantime, I understand they're going to try yet another capture system that has a higher capacity. The capture systems have been pathetic - every one of them have been greatly undersized, possibly due to BPs ongoing dishonesty about how much oil is escaping.

Once they have the Macondo well killed, they'll begin producing the formation with the relief well, which will decrease the well pressure. if it really is very high pressure, they're going to have to have a really sophisticated casing and well design, but in a worst-case scenario, they'll cement it shut too.

Hey, who cares about science, lets trust in god and oil companies instead!