Posted on 07/18/2010 7:34:15 PM PDT by Flavius
The US government has ordered BP to report on a "detected seep" and other "anomalies" near the Gulf of Mexico oil well as experts monitor the seabed for cracks after the months-long gusher was capped.
(Excerpt) Read more at google.com ...
Start Excerpt
Dear Mr. Dudley, My letter to you on July 16, 2010 extended the Well Integrity Test period contingent upon the completion of seismic surveys, robust monitoring for indications of leakage, and acoustic testing by the NOAA vessel PISCES in the immediate vicinity of the well head. Given the current observations from the test, including the detected seep a distance from the well and undetermined anomalies at the well head, monitoring of the seabed is of paramount importance during the test period.
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So if that is really General Allens letter, seepage is a fact. And you will probably never see it on a public squiddy (ROV). My guess - They blew a hole into a second higher up reservoir area and are now filling it up. That matches perfect with the pressure anomalies. That higher up reservoir area was empty because it seeps. While this is not the worse case scenario, it does create one big cluster puck. IMHO.
Seepage will cause the seabed to liquefy rendering the confining clay around the driven conductor (the wellhead foundation) unstable. It is called piping flow and the instability created by this is the same reason a filter blanket is used in dam construction to relieve seepage and prevent piping flow from eroding the dam.
Shutting in this well is a disaster in the making. The casing is failed, holed or suspect. The risks and horrible consequences of a broach are too great to have risked shutting in. It needs to be produced. It should have been produced to the Nakika pipeline system two months ago.
BP are idiots of the highest order. Whomever is consulting to them is being ignored or just as inept as they are.
Good job BPutz, it isn’t good enough that you have destroyed the offshore oil industry... you have to make it still worse.
Damn fools.
Unless it has been leaking all along and all that is being seen is the flowing wellhead pressure. Entirely possible.
The pressure would rise until the fracture gradient at the leak is reached and the flow reaches steady state at the back pressure of the fracture gradient. If the leak point is low enough this will persist until the zone that is accepting the leak becomes charged with oil and gas, the pressure exceeds the fracture / overburden pressure and a broach cascades to the surface or the next zone further up in the strata. Saw it in the South China Sea... on another BP disaster that never got any press because it was all gas.
And you sir are probably pretty close to being right.
They are probably seeing the invasion of gas into upper strata on the shallow seismic already.
That is a possibility. The seep was just a natural one. Been then before they started drilling even. But what are the odds ? Any geologists what to comment ? Perhaps to accurately determine the odds we need the precise distance between Maconda and seep.
The shallow seismic that should have been done to clear the location before drilling would have picked up any shallow hydrocarbon accumulations. These are called shallow hazard surveys and we do them because shallow hydrocarbons are hard to manage before the pressure string / BOP is connected. They are almost always biogenic gas and fizzy water of little consequence. Shallow water flows on the other hand cause foundation problems but are not an environmental hazard.
So they must be monitoring the flow volume through the seep ? Or can they do that accurately ?
Nope. If there is a seep and if they are monitoring it Qualatative measurement is all they can hope for.
IF, and this is a big if, they knew the size of the exit hole in the casing the volume could be estimated from the pressure and opening relationship. Just a choke equation IF they knew the pressure and the size of the hole.
They haven’t been able to do this in the past even when they had a hole of known size (the riser) and pressures upstream and downstream of the hole so I doubt they can now. Missed some great opportunities to get solid data when they joyfully whacked the riser off.
These people should never play chess because they can’t figure out more than one move at a time.
How could this scenario complicate the Relief Well operation ?
Dynamic kill, the ultimate goal of the relief well(s), requires the ability to shut-in against the remaining pressure (what the mud doesn’t provide). A broach would prevent that pressure from being applied for one thing.
This however, is one of several problems with the relief well operation. I doubt they have yet figured out how they are going to get that 16 ppg dual gradient kill mud to turn the corner in a 14.5ish ppg fracture gradient single gradient relief well.
Of course, they have the best minds in the world working on this project so the rest of us that have been doing this sort of thing for the last three decades can’t possibly tell them anything they don’t already know.
Could they try a top kill simultaneously with a bottom kill ?
I think the seep is the same as the “bubble” Suttles reported this morning. They were trying to capture some of it to check for hydrocarbons. I get the feeling from the Allen letter that he’s trying to clear the decks so that there’s no delay on test results getting to him and no stalling if those results are positive. Later in the letter he told them to be prepared to reopen the choke line without delay.
I’m not sure I see the “conflicts” on this issue that the media’s speculating about. Suttles was very careful not to get into the position of being the advocate for a different position from the government’s. He even ducked being characterized as hopeful. I think there’s a lot of communal nail-biting going on.
FYI - Leaking has increased in base area of 3 Ram Stack. Looks like a Silver Hydraulics Line is leaking from areas along the line. It rings around the base. They need to fix this if it controls the Rams.
Last update on leaking 3 Ram Stack. The sludge appears to be a life form. Possible sponges. They appear in about 10 areas on the new 3 Ram Stack. A fast grower anyway. Need better high resolution images. The Hydraulics leak is a real problem however.
Sandwich kill, possibly so. However, with a loss zone / underground blowout / broach it is hard to develop the friction pressure needed to kill the blowout. This is why so many of us did not favor the top kill to start with...it has the serious potential of damaging he wellbore early and makes the dynamic kill harder or maybe impossible.
If the sum of the fracture pressure + fracture propagation pressure at the kill flow rate + mud hydrostatic are greater than the reservoir pressure it is possible to dynamically kill the well. There is another however, this has to be done without broaching to surface. If that happens it is game over.
The problem with the top kill or bullhead kill is that it supercharges the zone where the mud goes. Without a way to shut the well in (they didn’t have this when they did the top kill) the well will predictably flow back and once more unload the kill mud and continue to flow. It is just about impossible to bullhead kill mud and not have a flowback without some way to shut in and allow the supercharge to become distributed into the far field of the reservoir.
On May 7 (I believe that was the date or close to it) BP asked for a peer review and they were told by every industry expert they invited that the top kill and junk shot were not only a waste of time... they were bad ideas that could lead to serious compromise of the wellbore integrity and maybe even a broach. They were also told a bunch of other things that they didn’t do like the need to install a capping stack early in preparation for hurricane season flow back facilitation.
Recall that there were questions about the top kill and where the mud went since they were not able to build much pressure. Recall also that within the time frame of the top kill was when rumors began to circulate about fissures in the sea bed. Pretty good chance that the broached the well back then. Flowing and relieving the pressure (providing an easier flow path than the broach) could have allowed the broach to heal some but it would not regain the original integrity.
One of the ideas of blowout management is to not do anything stupid that would leave the damaged well in worse shape than it is already. It is no time for hail mary operations. The mechanical asset in the wellbore is mostly finite and loss of competence is usually irreversible.
Some knothead from AC213 called an hour and a half ago and I still have not gone back to sleep. Leave it to some prune picker to screw up my sleep.
Was not following the situation during the previous Top Kill. Too busy. This is all new to me, but I find it very fascinating. Have a lot of new respect for the professionals in your field. Understand what you are stating and it is definitely a difficult task. Will try to get some sleep on it myself.
ya think so?
Contributions at the front door, waivers at the back door.
I haven’t seen the Wells transcript yet, but the reporting on Allen’s comments seems to indicate he’s going for another 24 hours.
I saw those same drips around that joint on the new cap.
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