Offshore Oil Drilling and the Oil Rig Disaster in the Gulf

[keywest09]

So far so good lots of tourist and people going out on the water here in Key West, Florida.  Fishing, snorkeling, diving.  So if you want to come down for the Holiday or anytime please come on down.  Also, if you go to any seafood restaurant down here the seafood is fine.  Seems Miami media has been putting out not to eat the seafood down here.  Well, that is not true Seafood is just fine.

[JC]

Published on Friday, May 21, 2010 by CommonDreams.org
Boycott BP

by Robert Weissman

Why?

Because BP must pay.

Eleven oil workers are dead. One of the largest oil spills in U.S. history continues to worsen. BP's oil gusher at the floor of the Gulf of Mexico may be 100 times worse than BP first estimated (and 20 times worse than the company presently claims). 100 times!

BP's oil gusher is now threatening coastal lands in Louisiana and is almost certain to destroy fisheries and the livelihoods of people who fish and shrimp in the Gulf, or rely on the Gulf for tourism business. The giant plumes of oil deep underwater will exact an unknown toll on sea life. And the spreading oil may even wind up in currents that eventually take it to the U.S. Eastern shores.

BP CEO Tony Hayward is sanguine about the whole problem. The Financial Times quotes him saying, "I think the environmental impact of this disaster is likely to have been very, very modest."

A boycott will send a message to BP that its shoddy oversight of this project and its history of environmental and worker safety violations is unforgivable. Take the BP Boycott Pledge, and commit not to buy gas from BP for at least three months. Go here: www.beyondBP.org

BP cares desperately about its public image. This is the company that has sought to rebrand itself as "Beyond Petroleum." BusinessWeek estimates the BP brand as worth $3.9 billion -- the highest among oil companies. "Not even an Alaskan oil spill or an explosion at a Texas refinery has put a dent in BP's strong [brand] performance," said BusinessWeek in 2006. This time must be different. A boycott will express the organized consumer anger that BP so fears.

This is a company that should fear the public's wrath, for the Deepwater Horizon blowout was a preventable disaster. While much remains unknown, there is mounting evidence that BP could have averted the catastrophe. BP made a conscious decision not to install a $500,000 safety device that could have prevented the blowout. There is good reason to believe BP's contractors on the Deepwater Horizon made multiple mistakes leading up to the disaster, but it is ultimately BP's job to make sure its contractors are exercising sufficient care. And Mike Williams, the chief electronics technician on the Deepwater Horizon, told 60 Minutes that BP pressured its contractors to skirt other safety measures that might have prevented the disaster.

All this from a company that made $14 billion in profits in 2009 -- a bad year. First quarter profits in 2010 were over $6 billion.

After the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon, Tony Hayward reportedly asked why bad things keep happening to BP.

But this is not a case of bad things happening to good people. BP has one of the worst environmental and safety records of any oil company operating in the United States. BP has pled guilty in just the last few years to two crimes and paid more than $730 million in fines, penalties and settlements for environmental crimes, willful disregard for workplace safety and energy market manipulation.

BP sometimes says it will pay for the harms caused by the spill, but at other times hedges what it may be willing to do. There will be litigation and fines, and BP won't have the final say on what it wants to pay. In any case, cash compensation for economic harms caused -- while necessary -- doesn't bring back destroyed ecosystems and does little to mitigate the company's culpability for not preventing the blowout in the first place.

The only good that can come out of the BP disaster is if it forces the United States to fundamentally reorient energy policy. As a matter of simple common sense, the Obama administration should reverse its new policy and stop offshore drilling expansion. More fundamentally, BP's oil gusher is yet another reminder of the need for a massive shift away from fossil fuels and to investments in efficiency and renewable energy. The disaster also emphasizes how crucial it is to hold Big Oil accountable. The BP boycott is a way to start.

There are no "good" oil companies, but BP is a particularly bad and irresponsible actor. Consumers should make it pay. Take the BP Boycott Pledge: .

Robert Weissman is the president of Public Citizen.

[finehoe]

This video, done in 2008, on oil drilling is very funny and in light of the current oil spill, it is also eerily accurate. 'Orwell was an optimist' is this guy's tag and he supports 'manifest lubrication'...enjoy.
http://<object%20width="480"%20height="385"><param%20name="movie"%20value="http://www.youtube.com/v/XlknUU_X_0Y&hl=en_US&fs=1&"></param><param%20name="allowFullScreen"%20value="true"></param><param%20name="allowscriptaccess"%20value="always"></param><embed%20src="http://www.youtube.com/v/XlknUU_X_0Y&hl=en_US&fs=1&"%20type="application/x-shockwave-flash"%20allowscriptaccess="always"%20allowfullscreen="true"%20width="480"%20height="385"></embed></object>

If you don't see the video use this link:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XlknUU_X_0Y&feature=player_embedded

[Timkin]

This is just a thought.....  I have no idea how large of an area this well is , but assuming the platform is not on top of it still ...  Fabrication of a large ( very large )  Cone -shaped funnel with a large outlet attached to it ( to curtail the icing effect caused by the sea water, and piping and suction coming from above , SEEMS to me to be an approach.. BP seems to be making little , at best , progress with stopping this thing .. I know some similar box was attempted...but I think a funnel shaped device might work better as the fluid would have less resistance to the walls of the container , than in the square box  they attempted to use.  I have my doubts about cement of any other substance being a long term fix for this problem .

[samiam]

FYI
currently most of the effort is going toward training people and staging equipment. As well as training and refining the process for civilian boat owners to recover the oil that is coming toward shore. The government has neather the manpower or equipment to handle a spill of this magnitude.
(BP is currently leasing vessels of opportunity from the local population) 

[JC]

I think they should drop a NEWKeler bomb on that junk!

[samiam]

Also there are no experts for this type of oil spill as it has never happened before. Its sad to say but the only people that have a clue how to stop this is the company that drilled the well.

[samiam]

This is just a thought.....  I have no idea how large of an area this well is , but assuming the platform is not on top of it still ...  Fabrication of a large ( very large )  Cone -shaped funnel with a large outlet attached to it ( to curtail the icing effect caused by the sea water, and piping and suction coming from above , SEEMS to me to be an approach.. BP seems to be making little , at best , progress with stopping this thing .. I know some similar box was attempted...but I think a funnel shaped device might work better as the fluid would have less resistance to the walls of the container , than in the square box  they attempted to use.  I have my doubts about cement of any other substance being a long term fix for this problem .

From what I understand that icing is caused by high pressure natural gas expanding into a lower pressure area.

[Timkin]

true...and my thought is the exiting hole of the funnel should be rather large....24 inches or more in diameter.. and subsequent attached pieces of piping .. I would hope at this size ,even with ice forming , oil could be brought up much more effectively. If it could be attached to come to nearly the surface, the temperature of the water should help to deice .. Im just throwing thoughts out there...

[finehoe]

Documents show BP chose a less-expensive, less-reliable method for completing well in Gulf oil spill
By Kevin Spear, Orlando Sentinel

11:55 AM EDT, May 23, 2010

Oil company BP used a cheaper, quicker but potentially less dependable method to complete the drilling of the Deepwater Horizon well, according to several experts and documents obtained by the Orlando Sentinel.

"There are clear alternatives to the methods BP used that most engineers in the drilling business would consider much more reliable and safer," said F.E. Beck, a petroleum-engineering professor at Texas A&M University who testified recently before a U.S. Senate committee investigating BP's blown-out well in the Gulf of Mexico.

He and other petroleum and drilling engineers who reviewed a log of the Deepwater Horizon's activities obtained by the Sentinel described BP's choice of well design as one in which the final phase called for a 13,293-foot-long length of permanent pipe, called "casing," to be locked in place with a single injection of cement that can often turn out to be problematic.

A different approach more commonly used in the hazardous geology of the Gulf involves installing a section of what the industry calls a "liner," then locking both the liner and a length of casing in place with one or, often, two cement jobs that are less prone to failure.

The BP well "is not a design we would use," said one veteran deep-water engineer, who would comment only if not identified because of his high-profile company's prohibition on speaking publicly about the April 20 explosion aboard the Deepwater Horizon or the oil spill that started when the drilling rig sank two days later.

He estimated that the liner design, used nearly all the time by his company, is more reliable and safer than a casing design by a factor of "tenfold."

But that engineer and several others said that, had BP used a liner and casing, it would have taken nearly a week longer for the company to finish the well â€" with rig costs running at $533,000 a day and additional personnel and equipment costs that might have run the tab up to $1 million daily.

BP PLC spokesman Toby Odone in Houston said the London-based company chooses between the casing and liner methods on a "well-by-well basis" and that the casing-only method is "not uncommon."

Investigators and Congress have already homed in on a series of suspected instances of recklessness or poor maintenance aboard the Deepwater Horizon â€" looking, for example, at why the well's blowout preventer failed. Those instances, taken together, may have weakened the rig's defenses and fueled the April 20 explosion on the rig, which killed 11 workers and caused the biggest offshore-drilling spill in U.S. history.

Many of the experts interviewed by the Sentinel for this report, including Beck, would not directly criticize BP's choice of well design because some site-specific factors might still not be publicly known. But those experts provided extensive details about, and insight into, the company's chosen approach for completing the well versus the alternative method that's more commonly used by drillers in the Gulf.

Several other major companies active in the Gulf of Mexico, including Shell, Chevron and Marathon, declined to comment on their well designs.

"We're confident that the incident is being thoroughly investigated and findings will be communicated across the industry to prevent such events from occurring in the future," said Shell spokeswoman Kelly op de Weegh in Houston.

Formidable

Hunting for enormously rich deposits of oil and natural gas in deepwater regions of the Gulf of Mexico entails some of the most formidable drilling in the world. And BP's ill-fated Macondo exploratory well had more than its share of trouble and warning signs, according to the rig's activity log, or "well ticket."

Drilling began last year on Oct. 7, in water 4,992 feet deep and nearly 50 miles southeast of the tip of Louisiana's Mississippi River delta.

The first 4,023 feet of drilling was done by the rig Marianas, owned by the Switzerland-based Transocean Ltd. But a month later, that rig was damaged by Hurricane Ida and towed to a shipyard. Transocean's Deepwater Horizon, fresh from drilling a record-deep well elsewhere in the Gulf, arrived to take over by early February.

The rig, weighing about as much as the 900-foot-long Titanic and considered one of the most capable drilling vessels in the world, almost immediately encountered some of the problems for which the Gulf is known.

Beneath the Gulf's seafloor is a mush of sand, shale and salt in formations that are geologically young, unsettled and fragile. Coupled with that are layers of sand that hold crude oil and natural gas under high pressure.

For rigs such as Deepwater Horizon, drilling a Gulf well means working between a dangerous rock and a risky hard place.

While boring into the Earth's crust, a rig pumps a chemical slurry called "mud" down the center of the drill pipe. The mud exits through the drill bit in a blast that washes cuttings out of the freshly cut hole and back up to the rig.

Mud plays another critical role: It often weighs significantly more than seawater, and so it serves as a kind of liquid plug that can hold pressurized reservoirs of natural gas and crude oil within their formations.

If oil and gas show alarming signs of wanting to "kick" up and out of the well, as they did twice on Deepwater Horizon â€" once temporarily and later catastrophically â€" drillers can call for a heavier mud.

In many of the world's petroleum regions, heavier mud will counteract the threat of a blowout. In the Gulf of Mexico, however, it can and often does make matters worse.

Pumping heavy mud into a deepwater well in the Gulf runs the risk of fracturing fragile layers of sand and shale. If that happens, mud can quickly vanish into subterranean voids and leave a rig increasingly defenseless against a blowout.

"The deepwater Gulf of Mexico is an especially challenging place to drill," said John Rogers Smith, a professor in Louisiana State University's department of petroleum engineering.

Geology won

The classic and potentially perilous duel for drillers in the Gulf is to maintain a mud weight that keeps pressurized gas and oil underground but doesn't crack open fragile formations.

According to the Deepwater Horizon's well ticket, that struggle defined almost every foot of progress made by the rig â€" until the Gulf's geology finally won.

In late February, the rig was losing mud in a weak formation, according to the well ticket. Among the variety of tricks drillers have at their disposal when that happens, the most reliable is to continually reinforce a well with permanent sections of casing or with liner and cement. Deepwater Horizon did that nine times.

In early March, the rig experienced a double dose of trouble, according to the well ticket: The pressure of the underground petroleum temporarily overwhelmed the mud, triggering alarms on the rig. At nearly the same time, the rig's drill pipe and drill bit became stuck in the well.

Just one or the other of those occurrences would amount to a bad day for any rig.

Deepwater Horizon recovered, but only after losing hundreds of feet of drilling pipe â€" likely at an equipment cost of several million dollars â€" and losing nearly two weeks of rig time.

The rig then progressed an additional 4,955 feet before again losing mud to a weak formation.

By mid-April, Deepwater Horizon reached the well's total depth of 18,360 feet â€" more than 3 miles â€" where it again encountered a formation that swallowed mud.

Rig workers twice lowered measuring instruments connected to steel cable into the well. The tools should have passed smoothly to the bottom, but instead they hit obstacles near the bottom â€" more evidence of an unstable well.

Petroleum engineers who reviewed the rig's well ticket and other documents said drilling the well appears to have been more difficult than usual, though not beyond what current technology and extra care are capable of handling.

After rig workers ran the final section of casing into the well, they opted to fix it in place with cement modified to have foamlike consistency. That makes the cement lighter and less likely to fracture or break weak formations and, as can happen with overly heavy mud, drain away into underground voids.

At that point, said the big-oil engineer who reviewed the ticket, rig workers must have been "jumping for joy" at having completed a stubborn well and discovering petroleum. Based on the array of measuring instruments lowered into the well â€" and detailed by the well ticket â€" the rig had most likely made a significant discovery.

But among the several possible errors and failures involving the Deepwater Horizon well, that final cement job is widely suspected of having broken down, allowing oil and gas to erupt up into the rig. That is what apparently occurred as rig workers were pumping out the well's costly and reusable mud â€" the liquid plug â€" and replacing it with seawater.

The well ticket's last entry states: "10:00 PM 4-20-10, EXPLOSION & FIRE."

More options

Engineers interviewed by the Sentinel said it's common knowledge among drillers operating in the Gulf of Mexico that final cement jobs are rarely perfect and often badly flawed. That's a key reason, they said, why many of them rely on a liner to complete a well: It offers more options for injecting, testing and repairing cement, and so is more effective at keeping petroleum under control.

While complicated to explain, using a liner can have the additional benefit of installing extra barriers deep in the well to prevent an uncontrolled flow of gas and oil to the surface. Whether there were enough, effective secondary barriers in the BP well is likely to draw much scrutiny in coming weeks and months.

U.S. Minerals Management Service regulations leave the choice between a liner or casing to the drillers. That may change as many industry practices are examined by various investigators and task forces.

"I would expect there to be some pretty significant implications in terms of blowout preventers, regulation, redundancy, safety, those sorts of things," BP chief executive Tony Hayward said during a recent media briefing.

[Timkin]

GOD FORBID that BP  would use a device like this to help solve this problem.   Where there is a will there is a way.

[NotNow]

Hopefully, we will bring every weapon we have to bear on this spill.

[samiam]

Mr Costner Did not invent this technology it has been around for a long time. I have worked on many of them myself.


An oily water separator (OWS) is a piece of shipboard equipment that allows a vessel's crew to separate oil from bilge water before the bilge water is discharged overboard.

Bilge water is an almost unavoidable product in ship operations. Bilge water that is generated in proximity to shipboard equipment (such as in the engine room) often contains oil and its direct discharge would result in undesirable transfer of waste oil to the marine environment. By international agreement under the MARPOL convention, most commercial vessels need to be fitted with an oily water separator to remove oil contaminants before bilge water is pumped overboard.

Oily water separator equipment has been a shipboard requirement since the 1970s but recently it has become evident that oily water separators have not been as effective as had been assumed, and alleged improper operation of this equipment by crewmembers (sometimes called the "Magic Pipe") has resulted in criminal prosecutions in the United States and to a lesser extent in Europe.

One of the leading companies producing oily water separators is the Swedish company Marinfloc AB. The Marinfloc CD unit can provide a PPM level of 5 PPM without problems, and together with the Marinfloc Whitebox failsafe system it is without doubt the most efficient system available

[samiam]

They would have to be scaled up to huge proportions to be effective and would take months to build

[samiam]

Here is some more info on this technology

http://www.ussslater.org/decks/platfrm2/purifier.html