The effort to place a containment dome over a gushing wellhead was dealt a setback when a large volume of hydrates — crystals formed when gas combines with water — accumulated inside of the vessel, BP’s chief operating officer said Saturday.
CNN’s wire story just ran. The new is bad, though not entirely unexpected, since nothing like this has ever been tried before.
UPDATE: I would note that if BP or any other major thought 1) this type of disaster was conceivable and/or that this dome strategy was particularly plausible, then they would have pre-built and pre-positioned one in the Gulf years ago (see BP calls blowout disaster ‘inconceivable,’ ‘unprecedented,’ and unforeseeable).
BP has not given up on the dome:
Gas hydrates are lighter than water, and as a result, made the dome buoyant, Doug Suttles said. The crystals also blocked the top of the dome, which would prevent oil from being funneled to a drill ship.
The dome was moved off to the side of the wellhead and is resting on the seabed while crews work to overcome the challenge, Suttles said.
“What we had to do was pick the dome back up, set it over to the side while we evaluate what options we have to actually try to prevent the hydrate formation or find some other method to try to capture the flow,” he said.
Two options officials are looking at are heating the dome or adding [methanol] to dissolve the hydrates, he said.
Brad Johnson at Wonk Room has more:
Suttles, clearly chastened by this setback, had a much less confident tone about containing the leak than he had at previous press conferences, such as the one attended on Wednesday by the Wonk Room when he announced the cofferdam was being shipped out to the disaster site. “It’s very difficult to say whether solutions will work,” he admitted.
The methane hydrates “” natural gas that under the extreme pressure and low temperatures of the ocean floor is in a semi-frozen state “” have also been implicated in the oil rig explosion, according to rig worker testimony acquired by the Associated Press. The liberal blog FireDogLake was the first media source to discuss the role of hydrates, noting a presentation from November, 2009 by Halliburton, who was responsible for cementing the Deepwater Horizon well, that warned of blowouts caused by hydrate destabilization:
Destabilization of hydrates during cementing and production in deepwater environments is a challenge to the safety and economics.
Suttles also admitted that David Rainey, BP’s VP for Gulf of Mexico exploration, was on the rig celebrating its safety record when it blew up. Although 11 workers were killed, Rainey and the other BP employees on the rig safely escaped the inferno.
Hard to believe the tragic irony/hubris:
- Is BP the Goldman Sachs of Big Oil? CEO Hayward says to fellow executives: “What the hell did we do to deserve this?” Let’s see: How about a spotty safety record, insistence on voluntary ‘trust me’ self-regulation, a drilling plan that ignored key risks, and failure to use best shut-off technology to save a few bucks?
Previous in TP Climate Progress
Language Intelligence: Lessons on persuasion from Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln, and Lady Gaga
Yikes!
As Homer’s Odysseus illustrates for us, it’s wise to maintain some humility when dealing with Nature. Next time, let’s not do things (such as drilling 5,000 feet deep in the ocean) that we assume will be entirely safe and foolproof until we are darn sure that they are entirely safe and foolproof, even in light of inevitable human foolishness.
Yikes! I hope these folks can figger somethin out, qwik.
Jeff
And Speaking of Human Foolishness
I can’t help but add:
Apparently, according to today’s papers, the financial authorities and gurus haven’t figured out what happened on Thursday to cause the trillion-dollar hiccup in the financial markets. And, we (humans) are the ones who programmed those trading systems. If we can’t even figure out the problems in things that we ourselves create, we should “step back” and do some deep self-examination before taking huge gambles regarding the future, with respect to Nature, don’t you think?
Jeff
Note — they discussed adding methanol, not ethanol.
Aren’t there materials which can collect the oil, but leave water through membranes? An underwater balloon like device or parts of it? This is connected with pumps collecting the oil.
What i mean …
http://img219.imageshack.us/img219/4649/oilspillwtroilseperatio.jpg
Surely capping the well – with a far larger conical funnel-with-a-stopcock, stabilized under many bargeloads of ballast before the stopcock is slowly closed, -
is a far simpler and more reliable option than trying to capture the well’s oil output and pipe it to a barge, along with the (entirely predictable) methyl hydrates ?
Was somebody trying to offset some costs via the refining and sale of bargeloads of oil ?
Regards,
Lewis
I think the sealing is done with creating a second bore hole?
Otherwise if the oil spill could be shut down at current location, would be the best method.
With two kilobars of isostatic force bearing down on the reservoir, the sea floor wellhead pressure is a mighty 18,000 PSI, and methane hydrate freeze-out from abrupt adiabatic cooling should have been foreseen.
That it was not lends an element of oily black comedy to this abyssal scene- it’s the Kuwait Oil Fires minus the flames and the convenient villain to blame.
Sure as crude is heavier than air, it’s lighter than salt water, and bound to travel further afloat than the short lived soot plumes of the Gulf War inferno.
Lewis, the oil is coming up at a very high pressure – several thousand PSI or more. Sealing a dome with that kind of pressure – a mile down through some nasty currents – just isn’t going to happen.
That said, I’d love to learn how they cap it by drilling another well bore into it. How does one just “pump cement” into a well with a few thousand PSI of pressure flowing (up to) 100,000 barrels (4.2 million gallons) a day?
Fortunately there are petroleum engineers with far more knowledge and experience than we, and they’re doing their best.
A Long Time: A Large-Diameter Conduit
Although it has been a very long time since I’ve practiced engineering, nevertheless, this problem is solvable, it’s all (as usual) a matter of will and money.
For example, rather than this cone-thing being shaped to funnel the oil “down” into a relatively small-diameter pipe, through which the oil would (ideally) flow to the surface, the present problems should be able to be solved by using a much larger diameter conduit all the way from the top of the capture chamber (which needn’t be shaped down to a small diameter) to the surface. In other words, rather than using a pipe of X inches diameter from the top of the chamber to the surface, build a conduit of 20-foot diameter (just to pick a number for illustrative purposes) all the way from the capture chamber to the surface, thus avoiding any small diameter or “pinch points” throughout the entire journey.
Such as thing is definitely do-able. No magic to it. It’s just expensive and will take some time. But, if you have many crews working in parallel on the sections of this large-diameter conduit, it could easily be done. Just a matter of money, but still much less expensive than the damage that will otherwise be done.
The conduit (from the catching mechanism at the bottom, all the way to the surface) could be put in place one section at a time, as quickly as possible.
Also, if freezing crystals are anticipated to be a problem even in the case of a 20-foot diameter conduit (which I’d doubt, but even so), then the conduit could be built as sections of concentric conduits. In other words, the center conduit could be 20-feet in diameter, and that could be put inside a larger outer pipe (e.g., of 26-foot diameter), allowing warm or hot ocean water or other fluid to be circulated, purposefully, in the space between the outer wall of the inner pipe and the inner wall of the outer pipe. Done correctly, this could help keep the temperature of the inner fluid high enough so that crystals would not form in amounts large enough to plug the whole thing. Also, if necessary, even an inner pipe (of small diameter) could go down the center of the whole thing, carrying warm fluid to help manage the temperature of the whole thing to adequate levels.
Although I’m not qualified to figure out, or indicate, the details, it seems to me that a very-large-diameter conduit could be built, one section at a time, to result in a large conduit from the catching mechanism all the way to the surface, where the oil/mixture could be collected. If the sections are sunk and connected, one at a time, and if they aren’t pumped out until other liquid flows in (i.e., if they are never in a state such that the pressure from the ocean could collapse the walls), then the whole thing would be workable.
It’s all a matter of cost. The present “attempt” seems to have involved funneling the flow into a rather small-diameter pipe. That plugged and also provided spaces where these crystals could accumulate. A much larger-diameter conduit, from bottom to top, should resolve that. It’s just a matter of expense. The time for such a thing to be constructed could be managed by having multiple crews (ten, fifty, a hundred?) building sections in parallel.
The folks working on this could undoubtedly figure this out. The task is not technically impossible. It’s all a matter of money. How much money is BP willing to spend in order to save much larger damages down the road? The government (and expert engineers) should be insisting on, and assisting with, solutions that will work.
Why can’t ExxonMobil, Chevron, Halliburton, Shell, Conoco-Phillips, the military, and others contribute engineers, welders, and so forth to this effort, to get the job done??
Make the diameter larger! That’s the concept. Get with it. If all considerations are taken into account, that should work. (I think.)
Certainly, MIT folks and Cal Tech folks and Berkeley folks and etc. etc. etc. could figure this out. It’s just a matter of will and cost. Release those constraints, and you’ll have a solution.
Think of a very big straw!! Very big straws don’t get plugged up by small chunks of ice cream in your Root Beer Float, do they? As long as the liquids are pumped from (i.e., off of) the top, they’ll flow up from the bottom. Use Nature’s own forces. We just need to build a large-diameter conduit.
Cheers,
Jeff
And …
By the way, if you build a large-diameter conduit from the floor to the surface, then (if it helps) you could also have connections at various depths to smaller-diameter off-take lines to help remove the oil/mixture as it flows up and keep the whole thing moving. I’d draw a picture if I could figure out how to post it, but (for me) that’s the much harder part.
Cheers,
Jeff
Jeff. First you are talking a mile of structure free standing in some current and sea conditions.
For another take how about a large, (mile? in diameter floating Dam similar to containment booms and then just position it over the surface eruption. Then skim out of that surface pool. Rough seas will on doubt hamper those effort but ships with dynamic positioning can handle rough conditions. The oil makes it up on its own. As currents shift the whole could shift as well.
For what it’s worth, my take is that we can do no more than be spectators at a slow-moving train wreck. There is no stopping it. There is no remediation. What’s more, it is a metaphor, as alluded to by Al Gore’s article linked to on an earlier post here at CP, for the plight of our planetary ecosystems from the much vaster, if less dramatic, impacts of emissions from burning oil products.
I feel like I am watching a bunch of puny, ineffectual and petty moths frantically struggling to escape being fatally singed by the flame they are helplessly attracted to.
http://witsendnj.blogspot.com/2010/05/calculating-cost.html
Jeff, with the greatest respect, even if we could fabricate a large enough straw (remember, the well head is a mile under water), it is going to take months and require construction methods that, themselves, may not even be feasible. What you might want to contemplate – and I don’t suggest this lightly – is what it is going to cost if we lose the viability of the Gulf of Mexico. No fishing. No seafood. No tourism. No coastal communities in Florida, Louisiana, Alabama, and Texas. Not now. Not for a thousand generations. At the end of the day, this mess is going to cost more than the GDP of the UK. The only silver lining is that it will shut up that fuqtard TVMOB once and for all.
I was pretty disappointed to hear reference to this while hopping in an out of NPR range this evening. I was puzzled to read that there was no circulating heat system inside the “cofferdam” (the silo shaped thing previously referred to as a dome) because from what I read this would be an essential part of this process to prevent this freezing/frozen hydrates crystal problem, which is a function of the depth.
Bloomberg news reporting that the relief well is proceeding faster than anticipated, and that they are currently at 9,000 feet (which would be extraordinary if that means 9,000 feet below the seabed. Not much less extraordinary if 9,000 below sea level as that would be 4,000 below seabed).
The purpose of the relief well is I gather to pump in cement but there is also some talk of doing what is sometimes called a “junk shot” I gather, using golf ball sized rubber chunks to seal the entire area. It’s akin to plugging leaks in your car’s radiatior using coarse black pepper I guess.
I’d like to see NASA engineers on this, though fact is that they don’t work in this field, and there is a lot of expertise out there if BP is tapping into all of it. Given the situation we all want them to do something RIGHT NOW, and I am not accusing them of doing things to appear to be doing things, rather than doing things that will work, but… I’m puzzled.
This is a bad set back. I hope they’ll try introducing an oxidizer soon to break down the oil in the vicinity the spill. Sinking sacks of ammonium nitrate with lit flares attached might do the job. We’ve got lots of ammonium nitrate and can can make more easily.
Sodium percarbonate is probably easier on the environment though.
This sucks.
Not that I know what I’m talking about – but I’d like to know if BP is more concerned with ‘saving’ as much of the oil as possible as opposed to stopping the leak as soon as possible.
For example, is there a procedure that would shut off the oil at the well head – today – but would render the entire oil field unusable – as in a complete loss? There’s certainly billions (tens of billions?) of dollars of oil in the well.
Good point. I think it would mean render that particular well useless, but would not preclude accessing the oil at some other point in their little lease block. But I would think that they’d have to file a new plan with Minerals Management Service. Not sure if that is covered under the moratorium or if moratorium is just on new leases.
Should have both wells, original blowout well, and relief well.
If I were them I’d wait a bit before doing that(!!!!) but that would depend on whether someone else was going to access that oil first from somewhere else, since I think the lease areas are little squares, something that geology doesn’t conform to.
I’ve read that the purpose of the second well is to relieve some of pressure at the gusher so its uncontrolled flow will be reduced. The second well’s output is expected to be controlled and pumped into tankers.
But things can go wrong. What if the second well explodes from methane hydrates? Two gushers with close to twice the output of the first?
Hi. In response to earlier messages.
This would not need to be “free standing” in the sense of being able to hold its own weight, of course. All the way up and down, it could be connected via cables to floats on the surface, and parts of it could also be connected to cables to anchoring devices on the bottom in order to help it stay in place. Think of those super-tall TV towers that are held in place by cables all around. And, of course, in water, the thing would be lighter (so to speak) than it would be if it were in the atmosphere.
So, by using “tie lines” to the surface and to the bottom, and by engineering the connections between sections in a way that would give the thing some flexibility, the whole thing would be very do-able, technically speaking. As I say, just a matter of cost and good engineering.
Of course, submarine and shipping traffic would have to be kept away from that area, and I don’t see this as the long-term fix (which must necessarily involving plugging the well itself). But, as a way of solving the “plugging” and buoyancy issues related to the recent attempt, a larger diameter conduit, from the collection device to the top, and without as much of a constriction in diameter, would be the solution, at least as it relates to that sort of approach.
Of course, engineers would need to figure out the ideal range of diameters. If you make the diameter too darn large, you waste money needlessly and you might end up with a fluid flow so slow that the oil itself would gel up and solidify to a degree that would, perhaps, stop the flow entirely. So, you don’t want the diameter too large. But, on the other hand, you need it plenty large enough so that there are no constrictions where the frozen crystals could plug the whole thing and no places where they could accumulate and cause buoyancy problems.
If you have an understanding of the oil’s viscosity and related properties, and an understanding of the crystals, and the pressures at top and bottom, and estimates of the flow rate, then you can figure out (and even model) the best range of diameters for such a thing. The main question (apart from those sorts of considerations) is whether some sort of temperature-management might be necessary. In other words, can the whole thing work with just a large-diameter conduit. Or, would it need to involve the concentric conduits, in order to help manage temperature, as mentioned earlier? Someone could figure that out.
With flexible joints between the sections, and via the use of tie lines to floats and to bottom-anchors, the whole thing could work and the question of “free standing?” would not be an issue. The main questions would involve the best diameter, the question of whether the thing would need to have some temperature-management element, and the question of “how quickly can we build it?”, realizing that the answer to that question largely involves how many people the oil companies and government would dedicate to the task.
One consideration: If the means of plugging the well are “guaranteed” and if that will take a shorter amount of time than building the large-diameter straw, that’s one thing. In that case, just plug the well asap. BUT, if our ability to actually plug the well is uncertain, then doing something like this, ASAP, even if it will take a month or so, would perhaps be wise, unless better ideas are available. As far as I can tell, this approach is entirely technically feasible, I think. It’s just a matter of cost. That said, if someone thinks that it’s not even technically feasible, or that it’s not likely to work, then please let me/us know. Diameter, flow, , fluid properties (viscosity, etc.), pressures, and temperatures are the main considerations. A combination of those will do the trick. It’s a matter of cost and time.
Cheers,
Jeff
Whoa, I just found something interesting, maybe. I was poking about via google because I was interested in answering my own question, namely who else has current or future access to this Macondo field in the GoM. I found a file which is BP’s application to MMS of March 2009. Doesn’t mean MMS gave them what they asked for. (pause to snicker)I was looking at/skimming the html version so not all clear yet.
But BP was applying to drill TWO wells in that block, possibly and if they had kept to proposed schedule, would have completed the first one last year.
Seismic mapping covered all the seafloor features of this lease block, but only half of it re subsurface mapping (which half I wonder, the right one or the wrong one?)
BP says (p.14) did not expect to encounter those HS gases/hydrates, but this appears to be based on wishful thinking, since they also say: “3.2.2 Classification – Pursuant to Title 30 CFR 250.490(c), BP requests a determination that Mississippi Canyon Block 252 is located in an area where the absence of H2S has been confirmed.”
There’s a reference to Texaco mapping for 5 wells in this block also, back in 1998 (So now I’m really confused).
Blowout potential (not separated out for wells A and B) is given as 162,000 per day (doesn’t state gallons, but presumably). Worse case planning generally goes up to 300,000 apparently lord help us.
It’s a 7.4 mB file.
http://www.gomr.mms.gov/PI/PDFImages/PLANS/29/29977.pdf.
Indeed, Injection Too
Indeed, if a large-diameter, sectioned, “big straw” conduit is used, as roughly described in earlier comments, then another tactic becomes available. At appropriate points along the way up, fluids could be injected (via lines that are attached to the outside of the conduit and are connected to nozzles entering the conduit) in order to reduce the viscosity of the oil/mixture, as needed. As long as the conduit doesn’t have its own leaks — i.e., it’s a closed environment — you’d just be injecting fluids into a crude oil mixture that you’re going to collect at the top anyhow. So, such injected fluid, used to adjust the viscosity of the oil mixture as it rises through the conduit, will not get into the environment.
Thus, if you create such a large-diameter, sectioned, flexible (at the connections between sections) conduit, you can build it in a way that allows injections in each section, to use as needed. Fluids of various sorts could be injected to help manage viscosity and/or temperature, and the entire flow from bottom to top could be facilitated and “managed” in this way. If the thing is built correctly, with all these considerations in mind, it would provide engineers will all sorts of ways to manage and facilitate the oil mixture’s flow from top to bottom. The key things are having a large-enough diameter, building the thing in sections, using tie lines to floats and to anchors, and building it in such a way that allows viscosity and/or temperature management at each stop of the way. Then, draw (pump) the mixture from the upper end of the conduit, and make sure that the bottom is sealed around the leaks.
Again, this (it seems to me) is entirely technically feasible. It’s a matter of cost. If we place a high value on the environment (as we should), and if we don’t have better ideas, it’s something that we should consider and perhaps do.
Cheers,
Jeff
Correction: In my previous message, I meant at each STEP of the way (that is, in each section), not “at each stop of the way”. The point, of course, is to avoid “stops” in the flow of fluid up.
Sorry. Cheers, Jeff
Wendell Berry: ““The technological determinists have tyrannical attitudes, and speak tyrannese, at least partly because their assumptions cannot produce a moral or a responsible definition of the human place in Creation….Where does the confusion come from? I think it comes from the specialization and abstraction of intellect, separating it from responsibility and humility, magnanimity and devotion, and thus giving it an an importance that, in the order of things and in its own nature, it does not and cannot have.”
(Warning: Pure speculation based on too little actual knowledge follows.)
If the problem is cold, why not install a heater? Think a large sized immersion coil like that used in water heaters. Feed it via flexible cables fed by an appropriate number of shipboard generators.
Once the flow is started won’t the methane hydrates flow up the pipe and into warmer depths? The freezing problem might be more an issue of leaving the hydrates in place within the dome for several hours, allowing them to cool and freeze.
Oil coming up from far inside the Earth’s crust should be warm/hot, should it not?
Dunning-Kruger effect
To Bob Wallace at 24. The oil is not deep into the hot part (I believe that’s called the mantle, not crust) anyhow the ocean at a mile down is really, really cold. And yes, as these hydrates rise towards the surface they warm. But the cofferdam thing is down there at 5,0000 (up to about 4940 or so) feet.
The angle of the roof of the capture chamber is too little (from the horizontal) — that is, the slope inward should be much, much more gradual; and the diameter of the opening at the top is far too small; and the diameter of the pipe/hose up is too small. “Open it all up”, so to speak.
In making the sectioned, large-diameter, “big straw” that goes from the capture chamber to the surface, use existing (large-diameter) sections of thick steel pipe, if available. In other words, if they make thick steel piping of (just to pick a number) twelve feet in diameter, and if they make those in 40-foot lengths, then you’d need “only” 125 segments to reach 5,000 feet. So, you’d need roughly 125 connection/joints: those would be the parts to engineer solidly, carefully, and flexibly: the connections between the lengths of large-diameter pipe.
The pipe sections would need to be very strong, of course, but (keep in mind that) the pressure differential between the ocean outside and the fluid inside is NOT the same as the water pressure at that depth in the ocean. Instead, it would be the pressure differential between the water on the outside of the pipe and the “head” of oil/mixture on the inside of the pipe. So, my guess is that there are existing large-diameter thick-steel pipes (made for other purposes) that should be available for this sort of thing? You connect them together (with carefully-made connections, for this purpose), you put entry points/nozzles in each one (allowing you to connect hoses from the outside that could inject fluids to manage temperature and viscosity, as needed), and (if necessary) you could weld reinforcing girders on the outside of each one. And, you put connections on each one that could (on some segments) be connected via cables or bungee thingies (to use a technical term) either to floats on top or to anchors on the bottom, depending on the segment. The connections between the lengths of pipe are the key things that must be engineered very well. Cables could be run (up and down on the outside) to help connect the whole length together. Basically, it’s a big large-diameter steel straw, made out of sections of large-diameter steep piping. There’s an easy creative way to lower the thing down into the water, as you add new pieces on top. (It takes a bit of thinking to figure that one out.)
So, the whole thing is do-able, I think. If you can do it mostly with readily-available stuff (large-diameter, thick steel pipe, in standard lengths; girders for reinforcement; cables to help in the “stringing” of the whole thing; standard nozzles; and so forth), then most things would be “off the shelf”, and perhaps the only parts of this thing that would have to be custom-made — and carefully engineered — would be the 125 connection/joint pieces to connect one segment of steel pipe to the next in a way that would be strong, yet flexible, and that would not leak.
Anyhow, in my view, it’s all do-able. It’s just a matter of will and of good engineering.
Cheers,
Jeff
lizardo – When you drill thousands of feet into the Earth you encounter hot. I believe that the BP well is about 18,000 feet down. (Below the bottom of the ocean.) The relief well that they are drilling is about 9,000 feet at the moment.
And, remember, the oil/etc. that has been gushing out for the last couple of weeks has not been coming up as chunks of ice. Only when the methane was contained on the very cold ocean floor for a period of hours did it apparently freeze up.
“For every 100 meters you go below ground, the temperature of the rock increases about 3 degrees Celsius. Or for every 328 feet below ground, the temperature increases 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit. So, if you went about 10,000 feet below ground, the temperature of the rock would be hot enough to boil water.”
http://www.energyquest.ca.gov/story/chapter11.html
What do you do with the pressure once you get the oil to the surface, there would be no way to control the flow as near as I can tell The gas is what engulfed the rig in the first place. Without a controlled release you have not accomplished anything. Capping your “straw” will in turn blow out any flexible joints as the inside pressure is still significantly higher than the outside and more so the closer to the surface.
Brad, you’re wrong when you say that the folks running the operation don’t plan to use ethanol. In fact, I strongly suspect they’re using it tonight. :)
Sarcasm break: http://fakescience.tumblr.com/post/576451712/how-do-we-get-oil
@ steve bloom – boom boom!
While scrounging for every last drop of oil, some methane hydrates melt causing a disaster.
Dr Hansen, in his book “Storms of my Grandchildren”, warns that burning all the fossil fuels we can scrounge up will cause global methane hydrates to melt causing worldwide disaster. According to Hansen the methane hydrate “gun” has fired many times in past warmings and is now sadly fully loaded.
If it is true that humanity won’t act until it sees some climate “Pearl Harbours”, hopefully this disaster can at least serve as a powerful symbol of misery to come.
Following Barry’s comments, methal hydrates are either a major problem or an opportunity. As the sea temperature rises they will bubble methane into the atmosphere and accelerate warming. If they can be harvested they can be burned as fuel, but as yet there is no feasible economic method of capture given the depth that they are at.
Wait, I’ve just read BP are trying to capture methyl hydrates by lowering a big dome over a useless oil well!!
To Leif, Comment 30
You need to “draw off” both the liquid and any gas from the top as it emerges from the top of the large-diameter straw. You can have a big holding area (that has big berms and doesn’t allow flow into the water, of course) for the oil and pump that off at a suitable rate, but you may (I’m not sure) have to have some sort of flexible dome or tent or big plastic-bag-like-thing to capture the gas and flow it, or compress it, off to an appropriate tank, compressed storage, or processing system. In other words, you’d need to capture the gas as it emerges from the top of the straw, rather than letting it all flow into the atmosphere. To do this, you’d need to do it in a way that avoids an explosion, of course, by maintaining an Oxygen-free environment in the bubble or ten thing that captures it.
Or/and, if you’re smart, there may be a way to “draw off” much of the gas or lightest fluid components of the mix on its way up, by having draw-offs at suitable points along the main straw coming up from the bottom. That part would require some thinking. It’s too early for that this morning, and I haven’t even had coffee yet.
But, where there’s a will, there’s a way. Except for the “doing it in deep water” part of this whole thing, these various dynamics are the same as — or not that dissimilar to — the flowing and pumping and processing dynamics that the industry has to deal with all the time. The flow of viscous fluids. Viscosity management. The sizing of pipes. The separation of light gas from liquid, at appropriate pressures. The capturing or (hopefully not) flaring of excess gas. Gas processing and compression. And so forth. The main unique task is the building of the long segmented large-diameter “big straw”. But consider: The oil industry routinely constructs, and manages, smaller-diameter pipes from ocean floor to ocean bottom: How else would they get the oil from bottom to top if the well worked? And, the industry has built large pipelines on the ground of hundreds or thousands of miles long. In a refinery, there are miles and miles of pipelines. The lines from docks to refineries are often long. The oil industry builds BIG THINGS. Building a one-mile-long large-diameter flexible “straw”, out of segments of large-diameter thick steel pipe, with appropriate connectors, would not at all be an impossible task: just one requiring the will and some good engineering. Indeed, what they’ve done so far seems to have been bad engineering: by using a small-diameter outlet at the top of the collection chamber, and hoping to use a small-diameter line from the bottom to the top, they created an approach that gets clogged by crystal formation and related building-up of muck. They did that because they were hoping to avoid the need to build something bigger and more costly. Well, sometimes shortcuts don’t work. If you don’t want clogging, use a larger diameter, and give yourself flexibility to inject fluids into the upcoming mixture, periodically, to manage temperature and viscosity, if or as necessary. They were just trying to take quick (understandably) ineffective shortcuts (not so understandably), “hoping” they would work. Well, perhaps they can figure out the task, somehow, even using the existing small-diameter approach. They need to find a way to avoid the clogging. But, one way “for sure”, I would think, is to use a larger “throat” and a reasonable large diameter conduit all the way up. No more garden hoses. Get serious, people.
Cheers,
Jeff
Wait… what if the relief well blows up? Then we’ll have oil volcanos at two different places.
First of all.
Like many others who are posting here, I too have a considerable engineering background.
As I do, I easily agree with the solutions being brought up here. The problem is, my engineering background is not in the petroleum business and as it is not, why should I have to be expending my time trying to solve a problem petroleum engineers should have long ago resolved?
When you consider the fact that Toyota recently had to recall thousands of vehicles that had accelerator problems and then you consider the disaster in the Gulf was exasperated by a faulty blow out valve, does this mean that thousands of blowout valves should be recalled?
Think about this.
Given that the nature of the circumstances leading up to this disaster could happen anywhere at a moments notice and blowout valves have never been tested under actual environmental conditions, I am compelled to ask just when my expertise in engineering alternative energy homes will be taken as seriously as the faulty expertise of petroleum engineers?
http://bluecollarindustrialist.blogspot.com/2010/05/is-it-too-big-to-fail-or-is-it-global.html
Oops / Correction / Easier Than I Thought
Oops. Now I’ve run a few simple numbers. The diameter of the pipe up, necessary to do this, is nowhere near as large as my earlier comments indicate.
Depending on a number of factors (that practicing engineers could understand), the diameter necessary might be in the range of 5 inches. For now, let’s say somewhere between 4 inches and a foot. So, segments of strong piping are certainly readily available.
The trick, then, is this (in keeping with the concepts already mentioned, but requiring much less of a diameter than I originally thought):
The up-slope of the top of the capture container should be much, much, much more gradual. Indeed, the whole thing should look much more like a tall (steeply sloping) pyramid-funnel. The idea, of course, is to not have a largely flat ceiling on the thing. The thing should gradually slope (over a long vertical distance) from it’s diameter at the base up to the smaller diameter at the top of the chamber necessary to match up with the pipe’s size going up.
AND, fluid (to help manage viscosity, temperature, and flow) should be injected into the crude oil mixture down at the bottom. In other words, fluid (to manage these things) should be carried in a line from the surface down and injected into the capture chamber in a way that facilitates the mixture of that fluid with the crude oil itself, and the resulting mixed fluid will flow up through the (gradually declining diametered) capture vessel and into the segmented pipe up. And, as already mentioned, there should be injection points along the line up that would allow the injection of additional fluids (to manage viscosity, temperature, and flow), if or as necessary, at key points in the pipe up.
In other words: Steep slope (from horizontal) — gradual slope (from vertical) — in the top of the capture chamber; liquids pumped down (from the surface) to be injected into the crude oil as it initially enters the capture chamber (in order to manage viscosity, temperature, and flow); and a pipe going up with a large-enough diameter to carry the combined fluids, to allow injection of more fluids at key points, and to be large enough that nothing would likely plug things on the way up. That said, this larger diameter would still only need to be a foot or less, I think — nowhere near the ten-foot or twelve-foot diameter I was initially imagining. So, the whole thing should “not be very hard”, I think.
Cheers,
Jeff
Well, I for one have total confidence in BP’s ability to not only make their upside down dixie cup and straw pollution solution tame their oil volcano even if the BOP does erode away therefore letting the full flow of XX,000 bpd at 10,000 psi out (that would never, ever, exert any hydraulic pressure on this fantastically heavy super dome and it’s huge exit pipe) but also their proven ability to drill several miles undergound and intercept the deep end of another drilling project; piece of cake, you just have to have the proven in house technical experience, er, rented rigs and contract workers.
Really, I think this is overkill. Heck of a job BP!
I’m sure they are brainstorming the problem right now, but a successful solution will probably require very specialized knowledge.
The hydrates could apparently be melted, perhaps with hot water, chemically dissolved with methanol, or physically abraded or ground into smaller pieces and transported to the surface as a slurry. I envision something like a grinder or super weed-whacker, spinning around inside the dome, creating a slurry.
The cooling apparently comes from expansion of the associated gas content of the product? So if the high pressure could be maintained, that might keep the hydrate crystals from forming. Unfortunately, I don’t have a clue how to maintain the high pressure, other than drilling the interceptor wells.
Since this is a high priority project, perhaps they should try the shotgun approach. Pull the dome back up to the surface, and fit it with electrical resistance heaters, a physical abrasion or slurry forming system, and a chemical dissolving system with a flexible hose leading down from the surface. That way, they could perhaps solve the problem, in place, and gather data at the same time.
And then they could hope that the whole thing doesn’t blow up when they turn on the electrical resistance heaters. Hopefully, no oxidizer is present, to support combustion.
Perhaps heating the seawater down close to the dome and then piping it to the dome might be safer.
Good luck to them.
What a mess.
Oh, I’m sure that the big oil companies have supercomputer modeling capabilities. Perhaps a multiphysics model of the situation might suggest a solution?
There are programs now, like Comsol Multiphysics, that can do multiphysics modeling, but this is such a strange extreme problem I wonder if software modeling could be done in time and also be useful?
Leland, I think that the idea of injecting a fluid (or fluids) into the crude mixture as it comes out of the leak, inside the capture chamber, in order to allow the management of viscosity, temperature, etc., is a good one. I’m not sure if I would directly heat (with a heater) the mix, but injecting warm hydrocarbons/solvents would be safer, I think. And, as mentioned, the top of the capture chamber should have a much more gradual slope (from the vertical; steep as measured from the horizontal), within which fluids could also be injected. The pipe upward should have a carefully-determined diameter, and large enough to make sure that it can’t become clogged.
Also, from the pictures I’ve seen, it doesn’t even seem like they (BP) gave much thought to insulation.
I don’t have much faith, at this point, that these folks are considering all the factors carefully and trying to design something that will actually be 99% likely to work. I think that the government should ask a collection of top people from MIT, Berkeley, Wisconsin, etc. to get involved (quickly) to recommend ways to do this. From the pictures, the initial contraption seems to me as though it was almost certainly doomed to fail.
Sigh,
Jeff
Russel comments early on above that “With two kilobars of isostatic force bearing down on the reservoir, the sea floor wellhead pressure is a mighty 18,000 PSI, and methane hydrate freeze-out from abrupt adiabatic cooling should have been foreseen.” Right. Maybe even well calibrated. However reckless they have been, I cannot imagine that BP did not have a pretty good bead on this. They may have blown it on safety precautions, but if these guys can drill oil at 5000 feet down, they know the territory really, really well and, given the current stakes, have got (no offense to the engineers here) the best engineers money can buy scoping this out. I really wonder if they didn’t expect that it would fail at this depth but go ahead anyway to divert some of the heat they are getting. Better to look like you’re doing something than admit you have no solution. As for heat, am I right that they are talking about squirting hot water down in a pipe from the surface, which is to say, through ONE MILE of ocean? Maybe ethanol, but the hot water line just looks like something the PR department cooked up.
One really wonders about the release ratio of methane to oil from this wellhead. The outcome of this incident becomes more uncertain because of increasing instability at the site.
Given the calendar, and slowness/lack of progress so far, one has
to ask of any proposed highly-engineered solutions: how are they
going to endure if a hurricane sweeps by?
This discussion has jumped the shark. I have very little faith in anything BP is saying right now, and no sympathy for their plight and the actions that brought them to it, but I have confidence that they have a lot of smart people with a lot of resources devoted to finding any solution possible at this point. Some commenters on a blog are not going to make that happen any faster by waving their hands and saying “it should ((not)) be possible”.
#44, daniel: The hot water sleeve is top notch engineering. All the expanding methane, ethane, propane will result in a humongous amount of refrigeration which the hot water will cancel out. It is only a mile. Of coaxial heat exchanger. With a hundred pounds (at least) of 10,000 psi refrigerant per minute. No way they missed this calculation and their antifreeze becomes frozen.
What about sinking (and positioning) a supertanker next to the leaking riser? Isn’t a big part of the problem transporting the leaking oil 5000 feet up to the surface. So, work around the problem by putting in a ‘temporary’ – but massive holding tank next to the spill. Assumuming that the leaking oil (and gas) could be redirected into the supertankers hold, it should migrate to the top of the hold and displace seawater that could be pumped out though the bottom of the hold.
Hey, it’s time to start thinking big. The Russians apparently set off nukes on the ocean floor to solve this sort of problem in the past. Hate to see nukes come up for ‘serious’ discussion.
Ok, how about a less insane question or comment – than the supertanker above. Is there a reason why the well can not simply be re-capped with another BOP (blow out preventer)? As in cut off the riser near the sea floor (with an ROV) and then attach a new BOP. Isn’t this what is normally done on blow outs – at the surface? Of course, 5000 feet down is a different story. I’m guessing that there is grave concern of massively increasing the flow of oil by cutting about the riser.
On the plus side, maybe we’ll get a good method for hydrate mining out of this.
Hi Jeff. Hi Everybody.
I think we have some good ideas here, but whether they are workable or not will depend on some very specialized knowledge, that I don’t have, about the methane hydrate stability zone, adiabatic cooling, and so on.
One thing nobody has talked about so far on this thread is a downhole submersible pump. They put these things down deep into oil wells all the time, and some of them are engineered to be resistant to sea water. I wonder if one of these pumps could just grind up the hydrates, and then pressurize the pipe leading to the surface, minimizing hydrate dissociation and so cooling of the pipe on the way up? Some of these submersible pumps come pre-configured and ready to go, attached to the end of a flexible hose with a built in power cable.
Add a system to physically abrade the walls of the dome and dislodge the hydrates, or a means to heat the walls of the dome, or chemically dissolve the hydrate crystals, and we might be in business.
Dunno, just a thought.
Calling in, or at least talking to top experts in the field via telecons might also be a very, very good idea.
I wonder if Energy Secretary Chu will be involved? He makes good decisions, I think.
My experience with Hydrides in Methane is that when you visualize some apparatus, like from 5000 PSI to 0 PSIG over many temperatures, there is always a spot somewhere in the thing thats just right for them to form. If its slippery, and the location is vibrating, (like a vehicle in motion, you have a chance. But in little crevices they stick like shit in a blanket. Attempts to heat, chang pressure, move the formation point.
You can’t let them form in the first place, by keeping all the orifices inadiquate for them to be still enough to crystallize. So these lads have a path to atmosphere, they can reversive the flow with (hopefully) Argon, pump like mad and try again…. if there is any junk above it, any constrictions, in minutes it will freeze solid as steel if its in the magic bad spot where the ideal gass law kicks your ass.
A real longshot is to fill under it with hydrogen, and get above LEL, like 90% and them it will clear and also be non explosive until is goets but the ‘other way’ under. You can weld on the Nat gas pipline full of gas, no problem you know. As long as your on the high side in the mix.
The chances for a few different explosions are extremely high in this process. From flash pointing a blob of oil with a little NH2 in it to losing a ground when welding on the thing. Blammo.
Ahhh When they made the concrete with Nitrogen, they should have been careful to keep out atmosphere, or had protocols to stop using bad concrete. Thats why this happened in the first place obviously.
My inclination is to put my emial in the body of the article, but that is pretty much all I havce to say anyway. Again, in a heap of equipment, Boyle and Levoisier and all those guys team up on you totally. There is ALWAYS a perfect bad spot in in somewhere. If they tow it back up, they might as well weld on concrete vibrators all over it.
Very nasty. Its easy to make this worse by far; amazingly.
in plowshares nukes were used creatively, this knowledge is in existence. If you blow away all the lowest bidders subcontractor garbage down there, it will completely liberate the flow for step two. Makes it sort of easy expect for this massive horrible open issue.
Radiation even a little might bother the SUV’s too, blind the CD’s in the cameras, crash the micros.
Maybe a 3.5 kT could be useful. I think the Navy is more obcessesd with national security, they don’t care about anything by there most favoritePlkill the planet love affairs. Even worse, some of the nukes useful break treaty obligations by existing. The cover story is they where repurposed in a some mad science middle of the night secret doo gooding project. That5s a fine cover story. I mean the spooks do not want to admit all the stuff they tried that is out out conformance. But this a fairly serious difficulty, I think they can be forgiven. Nuclear depth charges, etc are a long ago forbidden munition.
I worked on stuff like this a lot, and I am pretty stuck. It is very easy to make it worse.
Another one is to drop zoolites over the whole thing is incremental heaps, so each is not blown away under the other. then use some good concrete, maybe try some non-explosion enabling stuff, unlike what they used the day before Haliburton caused this.
Another one is use a small nuke to made a ‘kiddie pool’ of Woods metal and reflow a collette around the basin. It would still leak around the edges, but thpse could be fixeed with routine technology.
These are tough love approaches, funhny materials science approaches, etc.
Dropping Zoolites is like washing a big uncooperative dog one paw at a time.
All these are basd ideas BTW. The best idea is not to use bad concrete in the first place, and be sure there is mud in the stuff Methane.
If they made the real well next to it, then this would have been avoided. but that would be 400K $ a day in rental, even with a skelton crew. Sure seems like a bargain now, huh?
Oddly, if you cut huge holes out of the sides, the mtl (oil and Nat gas aka Methane) using those lower resistence orfices with reduce the flow thru the hydride plugged vent at the top. Changing the vents is a bad idea once all the rigging and logistics are in place ot use it, the sides don’t matter. The tensile / yield strength of mild steel should be enough for the big relief holes. A hole in each can be tourched and dropped on it symetrically, giving a programmable ballast withotu a loss of mass too.
The other idea is a guide chain right to the C.G. of the placement target. Threaded through the top hole, which is its C.G.in the vertical dimension.
This way it could be dropped in tens of minutes. salts could still form in that time frame easily though. Maybe weld some oblique angles side pieces so D.U. or lead could be dropped in them. Those remote submarines are pretty wimpy,10% of 200K pounds is a lot of trips though.
Back to relief holes, once its placed and the top vent is functional the robot welding can cover them up to further reduce the flow.
A lot of the ideas here replicate a real oil rig. Seemingly, that takes months to deploy. I would think if they were smart (unlikely it would appear). They would make a few similiar boxes, with the Nth ones after one intentionally unfinished and shipped to site. So while you struggle, you can prepare a next try without recycling the one thats wet.
They seem pretty dim to me in general in terms of problem solving.
Even not preparing slice points ahead of time with small area relief orifices, etc. Just dumb guys primarily.
A lot of these kind of guys are new wave computer animation technocrats. They sit in front of there Solidworks V 10 S/W and whatever it tells them, they believe. More like cartoonists then engineers. They nowdays tend to know just about nothing about simple machines, tensile strength, huydraulics, how screws fasten, etc. they just get great at working the software, which is ok when there is some based on real thinking from scratch ready to use with “FILE / IMPORT / MODEL”, but it would appear there isn’t a model in the lib yet for this…
The faith in them, as per above entries is very heartwarming for the human experience. Unfortunately it has zero to do with the pysical world, which does not react specifically to good intentions.
Fundamentally what we have here is a too-complex system collapsing.
While I admire everyone commenting here, what is being suggested above is mostly more complexity, most of it unproven and untested.
What we need as a species is not greater and greater complexity to keep our Ponzi-Pyramid Scheme of a global economy humming on harder-to-access fossil fuels, but greater simplicity including working toward being able to live on our current solar budget, not a fossil solar budget up to 450 million years old.
While doing all we can to cap, limit and clean up this spill, it is not cap-able, limit-able nor cleanable for the most part. It is a great and sad tragedy.
What we most need is to learn all we can from this and move in an infinitely more positive direction toward renewables and the most intelligent contraction in all areas.
How about when Obama goes down there he can force the US part of BP to go Chapter 10 (Bankrupt, not filing for reorg.) and let Exxon make a deal to be the executor until the emergency is over.
Not making some removable panels, provisions for that (a clevis holding down panels with a thread rod over it). Is fabulously stupid.
But not making >1 housing so ones could be tried and just disposed of as they are found inadiquate, is perfectly simply stupid. Any job shop that welds up a garbage truck after a M.V.A. could make a steel box.
Disempower the specific people. Apparently Exxon is for instance light years ahead of this dunce team in general.
It would be a crime against humanity, multiplied to leave the company intact after this too.
You better believe there isn’t going to be a dixie cup of that bad concrete available for testing to see its full of air when this is over either.
Well. its not useful but the cause is understood. They made a chromographic zeolite filter thousands of feet long in the concrete pour.
Sorting by molality, so the long chains are stuck low and the light stuff like methane, butane, propane etc get thru. When they switched to water, its less dense then mud.
Reverse columal Chromotography, used in chem labs around the world on toothpaste consistency tabletop machines. Or industrially, with usually natural Zeolites. Bothe of these effects have been understood for about 175 years.
I mean, there stuff criminally stupid, but its a higher order of stupidity then careless work. Its doing the wrong thing carefully.
The good news is there isn’t likely an unnatural mix of Methane and oil in the find. After the explosion, all the concrete is fractured so its no longer wildly sorting the ilutiant by molality.
Once you make a sort with air methane on top and oil under it, you made a bomb so forget any pipe cutting last ditch nothing.
“No hot work?” I don’t think that’s enough. Recall a diesel engine ignites oil without a sparkplug. A glowplugs just a little heater.
Ahhh better luck next time. Bad materials science, not bad workmanship.
So then its BP’s fault, or the US goverment who signs off on these stupid ideas, using a crack team of do gooders and lawyer’s. They needed a mean technocrat, and all they had were accountants it seems.
Sad!