Posted on 05/08/2010 5:19:56 PM PDT by Touch Not the Cat
Icelike crystals encrusting a 100-ton steel-and-concrete box meant to contain oil gushing from a broken well deep in the Gulf of Mexico forced crews Saturday to back off a long-shot plan to contain the leak.
The latest problem for BP comes as about a half dozen tar balls are washing up on an Alabama island.
Coast Guard chief warrant officer Adam Wine said the tar balls had been collected by Saturday afternoon at Dauphin Island. He says the substance needs to be tested, but officials think it came from the oil spill.
The buildup on the specially constructed containment box made it too buoyant and clogged it up, BP chief operating officer Doug Suttles said. Workers who had carefully lowered the massive box over the leak nearly a mile below the surface had to lift it and move it to the side. Now they're trying to unplug it while they look at other solutions.
More than 200,000 gallons of crude have spewed into the Gulf since a rig exploded April 20, killing 11. The containment box, a method never before attempted at such depths, had been considered the best hope of stanching the flow in the short term.
"I wouldn't say it's failed yet," Suttles said. "What I would say is what we attempted to do last night didn't work."
The blowout was triggered by a bubble of methane gas that escaped from the well and shot up the drill column, expanding quickly as it burst through several seals and barriers before exploding, according to interviews with rig workers conducted during BP's internal investigation.
(Excerpt) Read more at knx1070.com ...
The average person has NO IDEA how alien and out of this world a mile deep is. It is totally dark, pressures beyond belief and life almost non-existent except for a few things that only exist down there. It would almost be more difficult to put a manned community a mile down than on the moon.
Working on the surface has all the advantages without any drawbacks if only the politicians had brains.
Here is the explanation of these crystals. Methane gas freezes at very low (cryogenic) temperatures, but "methane ice" can be solid up to +18C under high pressure (which is present down there.)
“Could they rig an explosive clamp to crush the pipe closed with explosives?”
I understand the Russians nuked there’s in similar situations.
I don’t understand why ice clogs up the dome yet it doesn’t clog up the hole in the pipe or wherever these three leaks are.
Melting point at STP (Standard, Temperature, Pressure)
is -297F. Hence the use of CH4 as “natural gas”.
The pressure at 5000 ft of water is 2165 psi, probably higher with the sea water column due to the increase of SpGr over “regular” water. I’ll have to figure out what the melting point is at that pressure but it is very low.
Ice nine?
For the same reason you leave a hose running in freezing weather. The flow dosen’t allow it to geather to clog the hole.
Well then, the next box that they build all they need to do is embed a heating element in the concrete, It may take awhile, but that should warm the environment down there marginally, the wild card will be what characteristics methane will exhibit as it thaws It will probably get a little lighter, so that should be taken into account. What about expansion?
"Some can effectively close over an open wellbore, some are designed to seal around tubular components in the well (drillpipe, casing or tubing) and others are fitted with hardened steel shearing surfaces that can actually cut through drillpipe.
Don't you think you owe it to your competitor to tell them they are wrong?
In any event, despite, or perhaps because of your arrogance, (I don't know whose BOP failed, but I now have a suspicion), the BOP in this case failed to do it's job.
By the way, I've worn out more joints and rotary bits than you have socks. I got tired of midnight towers and learned how to engineer...
Casing is not I repeat not drill pipe. Drill pipe has a much thicker wall than casing. Casing is used when cementing abd plugging. This is where an inherent gap in the process is acknowleged. It was during period that that methane gas bubble breached. The BOP would not have helped in any case.
LOL
exactly what i figured....velocity keeps it flowing
You forgot to close your tag. Here, let me help you with that.
< /Unix nerd>
;-P
It’s also a function of pressure.
When they say crystals is this like crystals falling out of solution in the lab?
In some ways to have this fix stalled by methane hydrates is quite ironic. Hydrates are so abundant they are be a greater energy resource than all our oil and coal deposits combined.
see this old report on methane hydrates:
http://marine.usgs.gov/fact-sheets/gas-hydrates/title.html
NO. Crystals come out of solution in a chemical due to the liquid reaching a saturation point at which it cannot carry a particular substance. Methane changes to “ice” like water changes to “ice” due to temperature.
The ocean depths involved put this site in the ultra-deep range. We are drilling here because that is where the remaining reservoirs of oil exist. (The South China sea has too many political disputes over ownership to make it practical.)
As much as we would like to think there are untapped reservoirs just waiting on federal land, the reality is that most of the hydrocarbons in those locations are in the form of tar oils (where only the bitumen remains due to erosion) or oil shale, which is really kerogen, a precursor to crude oil. (In other words, the oil shale has never been exposed to the temperatures needed to convert it to oil, and some heat source - and energy - is needed to do that.)
The liberals are busy with derisive “Spill, Baby, Spill” comments, but if this incident shuts down off-shore drilling, we are in a world of hurt. Even if we found a new reservoir within the continental United States, it would take years to bring it on-line. This is why the military highlighted the lack of investment in oil drilling in its March Joint Operating Environment report as being a threat by 2012-2015. According to that report, we could be short 10 million barrels a day, or 13 percent of global crude production by that time. And that assumed off-shore drilling would continue as usual.
Keep pulling for those engineers and technicians at BP.
Thanks. Sometimes it is hard for me to fire those synapses, when they haven’t been used for so long.
Please don’t forget the Bakken Formation of western N/S Dakota and easern Montana. Estimates are of huge amounts.
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