from NOAA
Is There a Feynman Fix for the Leaking Well?
[Via Dot Earth]
Can explosions be used to seal the leaking pinprick in the seafloor?
[More]
There are some interesting suggestions here. Innocentive is working to help route some of these to the right people. There are also a couple of nice links to information about blowout preventers: one from the Times written recently and one from an industry site written in November.
The latter, while giving a nice background on the development of blowout preventers, also mentions the company that was managing the current rig. Transocean had lower revenues in a quarter last year than expected. It said that this was due to blowout preventer issues on their deep water rigs:
Steven Newman of Transocean addressed the issue during an earnings conference call a few months ago. “The deepwater segment of the fleet, which is the 4,500 – 7,500 ft segment, 16 rigs in that fleet was the largest underperformer in Q2. We had a couple of human error incidents on drill floors on a couple of those rigs, and we had a handful of BOP problems; nothing that I would characterize as systemic or quarter specific. We did a deep dive on each one of those incidents. We’ve identified the root causes. We are going back to address them in our management system so they don’t happen again. They were anomalies.”
Makes one wonder just what the anomalies were?
And this has happened before. Almost exactly 30 years ago, a similar accident happened on a Mexican rig in the Gulf of Mexico (see photo). The rig collapsed and the blowout preventers did not work. Ixtoc 1 leaked oil at similar rates to the current leak for almost a year with about 5 million barrels of oil being released. And it was only in 160 feet of water, reachable by divers.
The US had 2 months to prepare before it hit our coast and it appears that much of it was kept from our shores.
NPR not only has some more but there is also a comment providing a lot of detail about the entire drilling process. From Barry Hexton:
Amazing the amount of digital BS being spewed on what happened, who’s at fault, ad nauseum. On the “what happened’ front, it will only be until BP and Transocean publically outline what procedures were used and what they believe well conditions were at the time of the explosion before any real information can be discerned. I know everyone wants or expects a ‘simple’ answer but deepwater drilling is not “simple”, it involves many detailed technical procedures and equipment, and the elements have to be looked at as a whole and not individually. [More]
There are a lot of possibilities but the pressures that are involved are phenomenal. The oil at depth may be greater than 10,000 psi. Containing that pressure requires a lot of sophisticated mechanics.
