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by DoYouEverWonder » Fri May 07, 2010 7:18 pm
Ding, ding, ding we have a winner.No_Baseline wrote:At the very least, this "blowout" is criminally negligent.
Damn skippy.
Didn't the Supreme Court rule just this past January that corporations are to be considered 'personhoods' ? well then, time to start jailing the felons.
by 82_28 » Fri May 07, 2010 7:40 pm
No_Baseline wrote:At the very least, this "blowout" is criminally negligent.
Damn skippy.
Didn't the Supreme Court rule just this past January that corporations are to be considered 'personhoods' ? well then, time to start jailing the felons.
by chump » Fri May 07, 2010 10:44 pm
by DoYouEverWonder » Fri May 07, 2010 11:24 pm
chump wrote:Has anyone seen pictures of where the leak is coming from - Other than this one here?
...
Not really much there though. I've watched it 3 times now and I can't tell what's going on. Somebody's gonna hafta splainit to me. Where are the other leaks? I have yet to see pictures of the actual well head.
by AmyRose » Sat May 08, 2010 12:06 am
For Immediate Release, May 7, 2010
Contact: Kierán Suckling, (520) 275-5960
MMS Approved 27 Gulf Drilling Operations After BP Disaster
26 Were Exempted From Environmental Review, Including Two to BP
Salazar's "Moratorium" on New Drilling Permits Allows Continuation of the Same Flawed
Environmental Exemption Process that Allowed the BP Catastrophe
TUCSON, Ariz.— Even as the BP drilling explosion which killed eleven people continues to gush hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil per day into the Gulf of Mexico, the U.S. Department of Interior’s Minerals Management Service (MMS) has continued to exempt dangerous new drilling operations from environmental review. Twenty-seven new offshore drilling projects have been approved since April 20, 2010; twenty-six under the same environmental review exemption used to approve the disastrous BP drilling that is fouling the Gulf and its wildlife.
“The MMS has learned absolutely nothing from this national catastrophe,” said Kierán Suckling, executive director of the Center for Biological Diversity, “It is still illegally exempting dangerous offshore drilling projects in the Gulf of Mexico from all environmental review. It is outrageous and unacceptable.”
The MMS became embroiled in controversy when it was revealed on May 5, 2010, that it exempted BP’s offshore drilling plan from environmental review by using a loophole in the National Environmental Policy Act meant only to apply to projects with no, or minimal, negative effects such as construction of outhouse and hiking trails. The controversy deepened when it was revealed that MMS exempts hundreds of dangerous offshore oil drilling projects in the Gulf of Mexico every year.
Two of the newly approved—and environmentally exempted—drilling operations were awarded to BP despite the fact that the new plans are based on the exact same false assertions about oil rig safety and the improbability of environmental damage even of oil spill occurs:
BP drilling plan approved April 6, 2010 (this is the one that exploded):
“2.7 Blowout Scenario - A scenario for a potential blowout of the well from which BP would expect to have the highest volume of liquid hydrocarbons is not required for the operations proposed in this EP.”
BP drilling plan approved May 5, 2010:
"II.J. Blowout Scenario - Information not required for activities proposed in this Initial Exploration Plan."
(see table below for further comparison).
“It is inconceivable that MMS could look out its window at what is likely the worst oil spill in American history, then rubber stamp new BP drilling permits based on BP’s patently false statements that an oil spill cannot occur and would not be dangerous if it did. Heads need to start rolling at MMS.”
In response to the environmental exemption scandal, embattled Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced yesterday that he had banned approval of new offshore oil drilling permits. The public, of course, assumed he was halting the approval of drilling plans and environmental exemptions since they are the heart of the MMS scandal. Today, however, the Interior Department acknowledged that environmental exemptions and drilling plans have not been halted. Salazar is allowing those flawed drilling approvals to proceed and is only halting the issuance of a last technical check off that does not involve any environmental review.
Under Salazar’s “moratorium”, the environmental review process will continue to be completely undermined in the exact same manner as in the BP oil spill.
“Salazar is playing a cynical shell game, making the public think he stopped issuing the faulty approvals that allowed the disastrous BP drilling to occur, when in fact he has given MMS the green light to keep issuing those very same approvals,” said Suckling. “The only thing Salazar has stopped is the final, technical check off which comes long after the environmental review. His media sleight of hand does nothing to fix the broken system that allowed what may be the greatest environmental catastrophe of our generation to occur.”
“For Secretary Salazar to allow MMS to exempt 26 new oil wells from environmental review in the midst of the ongoing Gulf crisis shows an extraordinary lapse of judgment. It is inconceivable that his attention is apparently on providing BP with new environmentally exempted offshore oil wells instead of shutting down the corrupt process which put billion of dollars into BP’s pocket and millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.”
by chump » Sat May 08, 2010 1:16 am
Reply by Thomas G. Cherry on May 5, 2010 at 3:57pm
Again, as a novice, the RIG site lists THREE BOPS or SBOP. There were two Duals and one single, which I thought made a total of 5. Don't quite understand HOW you could have more redundancy. As to the Accoustic, I have not read anywhere that they had been tested at the 5000 ft depth. In addition, the ROVERS have actually repaired the hydraulic leaks and also worked directly on the BOPS.
What I am trying to understand....how big an opening (in square inches) would it take to leak 200K GPD.
If I understand the physics, the well had a pressures of 10K PSI (+/-). The water at that depth, based on what I have read, has a pressure of 2K PSI (+/-). This leaves a Delta P of about 8K.
I have read various fluid flow velocities (ft/sec) for fluids (oil). The first one is 20 FPS @ 3K. What is the velocity of the oil, estimated, at 8K. It seems to me that there may be as little as 1 square inch of opening from the well...versus (based on 7" pipe) 38 square inches. It would seem that the well is effectively 95+% CHOKED or Shut Down.
Could someone with some REAL engineering background explain how large the actual opening (the leak size) is? And, HOW you calculate that?
Please forgive this retired engineer's curiosity, I am just trying from a engineering and physics perspective to understand WHAT they are dealing with and the size (opening) of the leak.
There is also, based on what I read, a MAJOR concern about the abrasiveness of the oil (picking up rock, cement, whatever) and whether it is actually eroding the BOPS (assuming is has partially closed). Therefore, the leak will increase as the erosion increase.
by smoking since 1879 » Sun May 09, 2010 9:35 am
by chump » Sun May 09, 2010 9:40 am
by DoYouEverWonder » Sun May 09, 2010 10:05 am
by DoYouEverWonder » Sun May 09, 2010 10:58 am
by chump » Sun May 09, 2010 12:38 pm
Safety fluid was removed before oil rig exploded in Gulf
The investigation into what went wrong when the Deepwater Horizon exploded April 20 and started spilling millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico is sure to find several engineering failures, from cement seals that didn't hold back a powerful gas bubble to a 450-ton, 40-foot-tall blowout preventer, a stack of metal valves and pistons that each failed to close off the well.
There was, however, a simpler protection against the disaster: mud. An attorney representing a witness says oil giant BP and the owner of the drilling platform, Switzerland-based Transocean Ltd., started to remove a mud barrier before a final cement plug was installed, a move industry experts say weakens control of the well in an emergency.
When the explosion occurred, BP was attempting to seal off an exploratory well. The company had succeeded in tapping into a reservoir of oil, and it was capping the well so it could leave and set up more permanent operations to extract its riches.
In order to properly cap a well, drillers rely on three lines of defense to protect themselves from an explosive blowout: a column of heavy mud in the well itself and in the drilling riser that runs up to the rig; at least two cement plugs that fit in the well with a column of mud between them; and a blowout preventer that is supposed to seal the well if the mud and plugs all fail.
In the case of the Deepwater Horizon, Scott Bickford, a lawyer for a rig worker who survived the explosions, said the mud was being extracted from the riser before the top cement cap was in place, and a statement by cementing contractor Halliburton confirmed the top cap was not installed...
Mud could have averted catastrophe
If all of the mud had still been present, it would have helped push back against the gas burping up toward the rig, though it might not have held it back indefinitely
BP declined to answer questions about exactly how far along they were in the process of closing the well head 5,000 feet below the Deepwater Horizon rig when the explosion occurred.
But Halliburton said in a statement that it had completed pouring cement that lines the well 20 hours before the blowout. After that cement lining is done, the federal Minerals Management Service requires at least two prefabricated cement plugs to be placed at the bottom of the well and farther up, with mud packed in between. Halliburton's official statement shows there was still one more cement plug to be inserted.
"Well operations had not yet reached the point requiring the placement of the final cement plug which would enable the planned temporary abandonment of the well, consistent with normal oilfield practice," the Halliburton statement said.
Lawsuit disputes Halliburton statement
But Bickford's client, who was working immediately next to the drill floor at the time of the explosion, claims the rig operators had already started pumping mud out of the riser. Bickford said his client, whose identity he wants to protect for now, will allege human error in the decision to start removing the mud barrier before the well was totally capped...
by chump » Mon May 10, 2010 5:25 pm
AP: Oil Blowout Preventers Known to Fail
Investigation Into Cutoff Valves Like One in Gulf of Mexico Spill Show Repeated Failures, Weakened Regulations
Cutoff valves like the one that failed to stop the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster have repeatedly broken down at other wells in the years since federal regulators weakened testing requirements, according to an Associated Press investigation.
These steel monsters known as blowout preventers or BOPs - sometimes as big as a double-decker bus and weighing up to 640,000 pounds - guard the mouth of wells. They act as the last defense to choke off unintended releases, slamming a gushing pipe with up to 1 million pounds of force.
While the precise causes of the April 20 explosion and spill remain unknown, investigators are focusing on the blowout preventer on the Deepwater Horizon rig operated by BP PLC as one likely contributor.
To hear some industry officials talk, these devices are virtually foolproof.
But a detailed AP review shows that reliability questions have long shadowed blowout preventers:
• Accident reports from the U.S. Minerals Management Service, a branch of the Interior Department, show that the devices have failed or otherwise played a role in at least 14 accidents, mostly since 2005.
• Government and industry reports have raised questions about the reliability of blowout preventers for more than a decade. A 2003 report by Transocean, the owner of the destroyed rig, said: "Floating drilling rig downtime due to poor BOP reliability is a common and very costly issue confronting all offshore drilling contractors."
• Lawsuits have fingered these valves as a factor in previous blowouts.
It is unclear why the blowout valves on the Deepwater Horizon didn't stop the April 20 blast that killed 11 workers and has sent millions of gallons of oil spewing into Gulf. Interviews with rig workers conducted as part of BP's internal investigation into the explosion indicate that a methane gas bubble escaped from the well and expanded quickly as it shot up the drill column, a series of events that included the failure of the blowout preventer and explosion of the rig.
Since then, the minerals agency has been inspecting offshore rigs and platforms to verify testing of these valves and check emergency exercises. On Friday, a senior agency official told the AP that regulators had been comfortable that the valves were reliable - until the blowout.
"Based on the record, we have felt that these were performing the job they were supposed to perform," Deputy Director Walter Cruickshank said. "This incident is going to make us re-examine that assumption."
He said new procedures and rules may be needed, including certifying blowout preventers by an independent group of experts. He also said the agency may revise its peeled-back testing requirement of 1998, when it replaced a weekly regimen with biweekly pressure tests.
Congress plans hearings that will consider BOP reliability. "The safety valve is not so safe," said U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash. She said the industry knew this kind of part sometimes fails, but it acted as if it couldn't.
After the accident, BP CEO Tony Hayward said of blowout preventers in general: "It's unprecedented for it to fail."
Yet the AP review turned up instances where preventer seals have failed outright, obstructions have blocked them, or valves simply weren't designed for the task. Sometimes there were blowouts.
The control systems also have proved goof-prone. When a worker accidentally disconnected a blowout preventer at one rig in 2000, federal regulators recommended changes in the control panels. Later that year, a worker at a rig off the Louisiana coast was making those very changes when he accidentally pushed the wrong button - and unlatched the valves; the ensuing blowout released 8,400 gallons of crude.
The government has long known of such problems, according to a historical review conducted by the AP. In the late 1990s, the industry appealed for fewer required pressure tests on these valves. The federal minerals service did two studies, each finding that failures were more common than the industry said.
But the agency, known as MMS, then did its turnaround and required tests half as often. It estimated that the rule would yield an annual savings of up to $340,000 per rig. An industry executive praised the "flexibility" of regulators, long plagued with accusations that it has been too cozy with the industry it supervises.
Laurence Power, of Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen, Scotland, an engineering teacher who has studied these valves in offshore oil wells, said he has "not been able to see their logic" for reducing the frequency of testing.
In 1999, right after that rule change, an MMS-commissioned report by a research group identified 117 blowout preventer failures at deepwater rigs within the previous year. These breakdowns created 3,638 hours of lost time - a 4 percent chunk of drilling time.
In 2004, an engineering study for federal regulators said only 3 of 14 new devices could shear pipe, as sometimes required to check leaks, at maximum rated depths. Only half of operators accepting a newly built device tested this function during commissioning or acceptance, according to the report.
"This grim snapshot illustrates the lack of preparedness in the industry to shear and seal a well with the last line of defense against a blowout," the report warned.
Two years later, a trade journal's article still noted that shearing preventers "may also have difficulty cutting today's high-strength, high toughness drill pipe" at deep wells.
The special cutting preventers were blamed in 1979 for the biggest peacetime well spill in history, when about 140 million gallons of oil poured from a Mexican well in the Gulf.
Questions about reliability hung heavily but were mostly unspoken Thursday at a Houston conference on offshore oil rig technology. Shown a spreadsheet of problems with blowout preventers, Transocean technology manager John Kozicz said, "We know that - but they don't happen frequently."
Even Transocean's Earl Shanks, lead author of the 2003 study reporting "poor BOP reliability," now views blowout preventers as "very reliable." But he did acknowledge problems in the complex electronic and hydraulic tangle that activates and controls the devices. At Deepwater Horizon, he said, "Something went wrong - and we don't know what."
Cameron International, which made the Deepwater Horizon preventers, has acknowledged that these lumbering emergency stoppers need lots of upkeep. "You have to maintain it," CEO Jack Moore told investors last year. "You have to replace the mechanical and rubber elements."
Cameron International did not respond to AP questions about reliability. But it has had to face such questions in court.
A 2008 federal lawsuit claims its faulty blowout preventers contributed to a well blowout. The suit makes the same claim about other valves installed at the rig but made by Hydril.
A Hydril Pressure Control representative said he couldn't be quoted by name under company policy, but he defended the safety of his company's preventers. Asked about the lawsuit, he said, "It is a matter of litigation, and we have denied the allegation and strongly believe in the merits of our case."
by chump » Tue May 11, 2010 11:48 pm
Kenner, Louisiana (CNN) -- A "black rain" of drilling fluid and a roar of escaping gas erupted from the doomed Deepwater Horizon shortly before the explosion that sank the oil rig, the captain of a nearby ship testified Tuesday.
Alwin Landry's supply vessel Damon Bankston was alongside Deepwater Horizon at the time of the blast. Landry said the first sign of trouble was when drilling "mud" -- a mixture used to pressurize and lubricate the drills -- began falling onto the stern of his ship.
"We essentially closed the wheelhouse doors. I went to the port side, and I looked out up at the derrick. That's when I see the mud coming out of the top of the derrick," Landry told investigators Tuesday.
When he radioed the rig's bridge, Landry said, its captain told him there were problems with the well and he should move his ship away. Seconds later, he said, he heard "the percussion and the slight flash of green" of an explosion...
..."They said they pressed the kill switch, didn't know if it worked or not," he said...
...There were suggestions Tuesday of possible problems on the rig long before the explosion. The Bankston' first mate testified that he was "vaguely aware" that BP was having problems drilling the well. Paul Erickson said he had heard that the company was "having to re-drill or re-route the well." He said that the vessel made a trip to bring more mud to the rig because of a circulation problem and that he heard that the Horizon was "a difficult well, not typical."
Later, a Minerals Management Service inspector said he visited the rig on Feb. 2 and noted a loss of circulation in the drilling system. But he said three other monthly inspections generally found no problems on the rig.
Frank Patton, district drilling manager for the MMS, said they had no reports that the rig was "taking kicks," or having problems with well pressure or malfunctions of the blowout preventer.
Patton was closely questioned about BP's history of testing blowout preventers, including its blind-shear ram, which can cut the drill pipe when well pressure gets out of control. Jason Mathews, an MMS petroleum engineer on the panel, asked if Patton had BP's assurances that its blind-shear ram was operative.
Patton, who approved BP's permit to drill, said he never looks for that information in an operator's paperwork and thought that BP had not submitted that information, as required. Further, Patton admitted that most inspectors rely on data provided by the company, not on in-person inspections.
The last inspection of the Deepwater Horizon came on April 1. Eric Neal, who performed the inspection, said nothing seemed amiss...
If successful, this so-called "junk shot" option—which involves clogging the well's failed blowout preventer with a variety of objects, including golf balls, tires and tennis balls—will be covered with a layer of cement that ensures the well is never used again.
"Our number one priority is how do we shut the flow off," Kent Wells, a BP senior vice president for exploration and production, said in a Webcast posted to BP's Web site Monday. "This is an unprecedented technical challenge. We've never had a blowout at 5,000 feet."
by chump » Thu May 13, 2010 10:24 am
Hearings - Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations
Wednesday, 12 May 2010 15:30
The Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations will hold a hearing entitled "Inquiry into the Deepwater Horizon Gulf Coast Oil Spill" on Wednesday, May 12, 2010, in 2123 Rayburn House Office Building. The hearing will examine what caused the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig and the oil spill now spreading across the Gulf, in order to help prevent future incidents and inform the direction of our national energy policy.
Witnesses
•Lamar McKay, President and Chairman of BP America, Inc.
•Steve Newman, President and Chief Executive Officer, Transocean Ltd.
•Timothy Probert, President, Global Business Lines, and Chief Health, Safety, and Environmental Officer, Halliburton
•Jack Moore, President and Chief Executive Officer, Cameron
Documents
•Briefing Memo
----------------------------
Opening Statements
•Chairman Waxman's Opening Statement
•Chairman Stupak's Opening Statement
Hearing Documents
•BP - What Could Have Happened?
•BP - What We Know
•Halliburton - Last 2 hours before end of transmission
•Transocean - Daily Drilling Report, April 20, 2010
•BP - Blowout Preventer Testing Memo
•Transocean - Deepwater Horizon BOP Assurance Analysis, March 2001
•Transocean - Surface BOP Operations from Floating Vessels
•BP - Regional Oil Spill Response Plan
•Transocean - Deepwater Horizon BOP Test, Feb. 12, 2010
•Transocean - Nontank Vessel Response Plan
•Internal BP Email Regarding Negative Test Results
•Transocean - Major Accident Hazard Risk Analysis Deepwater Horizon, August, 2004
Testimony
•Testimony of Lamar McKay
•Testimony of Steve Newman
•Testimony of Timothy Probert
•Testimony of Jack Moore
Video
WMV
Part 1: Download or Stream
Part 2: Download or Stream
Additional Information
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