Here's another for a Friday chuckle...
Posted on 06/17/2010 12:32:13 PM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach
Drilling on a relief well that is expected to be the longterm solution for stopping the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is ahead of schedule but still unlikely to be completed before August, Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen said Thursday.
(Excerpt) Read more at nola.com ...
Bingo!!!
I just hope this time they don’t rush and take short cuts in casing or any other steps to get it done fast enough so that the gov’t won’t threaten to nationalize all oil. Waiting until Mid August would sure be better than waiting a minumum of 3 months after that to start over again if the wells break somehow. And then who knows what kind of scenarios we’d be given and the panick people would have then.
You are right.
A drilling well is the initial drilling to find the resevoirs and study data. It is straight down to create a hole (sometimes diaganol, if a side track). After drilling, you temporarily plug and abandon.
If you like the data from the drilling well, you move to production, where you just capture the oil flowing from the well. When finsihed, you complete it (seal it).
The relief well is actually a diaganol well trying to hit the bottom of the original well and force cement upwards into the well, sealing it off.
“Immediate Solutions for the Economic and Ecological Disaster in the Gulf of Mexico”
Broadcast: June 17, 2010.
Here's another for a Friday chuckle...
Thanks, a ‘Friday chuckle’ badly needed!
We were told the well was due in August back in May. So to say it’s ahead of schedule, but still due in August... the math isn’t that hard.
Really. It isn’t that hard.
Just try to do the math. What’s 0-0?
So they start out with a “ballpark” completion date, come back with another ballpark estimate that’s in roughly the same ballpark, and that’s “ahead of schedule”? Are you being serious?
Pull the other one.
Unlikely since getting in a hurry is what got them in this mess in the first place. A whistleblower previously told 60 Minutes, there was an accident at the rig a month or more prior to the April 20th explosion:
[Mike Williams, the chief electronics technician on the Deepwater Horizon, and one of the last workers to leave the doomed rig] said they were told it would take 21 days; according to him, it actually took six weeks.With the schedule slipping, Williams says a BP manager ordered a faster pace.
"And he requested to the driller, 'Hey, let's bump it up. Let's bump it up.' And what he was talking about there is he's bumping up the rate of penetration. How fast the drill bit is going down," Williams said.
Williams says going faster caused the bottom of the well to split open, swallowing tools and that drilling fluid called "mud."
"We actually got stuck. And we got stuck so bad we had to send tools down into the drill pipe and sever the pipe," Williams explained.
That well was abandoned and Deepwater Horizon had to drill a new route to the oil. It cost BP more than two weeks and millions of dollars.
"We were informed of this during one of the safety meetings, that somewhere in the neighborhood of $25 million was lost in bottom hole assembly and 'mud.' And you always kind of knew that in the back of your mind when they start throwing these big numbers around that there was gonna be a push coming, you know? A push to pick up production and pick up the pace," Williams said.
Asked if there was pressure on the crew after this happened, Williams told Pelley, "There's always pressure, but yes, the pressure was increased."
But the trouble was just beginning: when drilling resumed, Williams says there was an accident on the rig that has not been reported before. He says, four weeks before the explosion, the rig's most vital piece of safety equipment was damaged.
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