Pretty easy to kill the camera with mud and concrete.
“It is a tale … full of sound and fury; signifying nothing.”
BP could have fixed this if they were willing to spend billions of dollars. They were not.
maybe it’s just me, but this all seems like just one, big soap opera. It’s entertainment. If this was the Bush administration, the eyes would be bugging out of the talking heads and the veins bulging in the scwrawney necks upon which those talking heads sit.
maybe it’s just me, but this all seems like just one, big soap opera. It’s entertainment. If this was the Bush administration, the eyes would be bugging out of the talking heads and the veins bulging in the scwrawney necks upon which those talking heads sit.
Way to keep your boot on their throat, Ed.
This angst over a video feed is idiotic. Maybe I am wrong, but my guess is that this process will probably raise so much sediment there is no way you could see anything anyway. At least not enough to tell if the process was successful. It might be days before it settles down enough to tell.
Funny, but I felt the same way about Congress' back room dealings when they rammed Socialized Health Care down our throats.
Dear Hypo-Demo-crites: Let’s see the tapes of your televised health-care “solution” hearings [so what, if they’re graphic?].
Ed Markey can get lost. This top kill is very high stakes and could make it worse. The experts don’t need Congressional publicity hounds playing sidewalk superintendent
This whole “video feed” thing is ludicrous to begin with. I don’t care if BP kills the feed altogether.
Just my opinion.
vaudine
Much ado about nothing. Markey is flapping his jaws for the camera and for the benefit of his good friends at Code Pinko who are out protesting naked and smeared with oil. May they all catch pneumonia in this unusually chilly May.
A couple of points...
1. If the top kill procedure works, there will be little to see except the lessening of the flow of oil. As I understand it, the drilling mud and other material will be injected through fittings on the BOP, so nothing will be visible, certainly not a bunch of sediment.
2. If sediment does get stirred up, that is not a good thing, and no camera would see through it anyway. In any case BP has better things to do here than monitor the Congress-cam.
3. Sawing off the riser is a method being discussed that may be attempted if the top kill fails. That will take an entirely different production to set up for and will likely take additional time as well. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the top-kill that is about to be initiated.
From what I have read on this, mainly via the excellent links Earnest-on-th-beach has provided here at FR, I believe that this top kill procedure has an excellent chance of succeeding. There is all kinds of hype over this at the moment because this has never been tried this deep, but despite the demonizing of BP, Halliburton, and others, the very best and most qualified people in the business are working this problem, and any one of them knows more about how to control this than any liberal lip flapper in Congress.
Ed Markey needs to shut his communist piehole and stay out of the way of the professionals.
Why not also have a live video feed of every room in the Capitol building, the White House, and every government agency?
Maybe we’ll get lucky and Markey will volunteer to swim down with the camera to film it himself.
There are two possibilities:
1. They can somehow shut off the flow through the BOP before they attempt a top kill.
2. They cannot shut off the BOP.
Assuming #2, the fluid they pump into the kill and choke lines will initially follow the flow of oil and gas UP through the BOP. This will continue UNTIL they have established enough flow through the choke and kill so that the mud starts pushing the oil and gas back DOWN the wellbore. At this time, the leak from the BOP will be essentially made up of drilling fluid(mud).
This will be the case until there is enough weight of mud in the wellbore (in addition to pressure through the choke and kill tubes) (MINUS the flow of mud through the leaking BOP) to overcome the 15,000psi pressure from the oil/gas reservoir. Once that stasis is achieved, they can cement the well.
BP presumably does not want to show the drilling mud flowing from the top of the BOP, for an uncertain period of time, with media/political idiots yapping about it without any knowledge of the process.
DG
The live feed is impressive, I expected a murky image, it’s clear as a bell.
Boy you’d think they could just position a pipe over that and siphon much more of it.
It's always so nice to hear Mr. Science speak out.