Oil Spill?

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wudnhed

wudnhed

Member
Joined
Nov 14, 2006
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2,680
Location
Brawley, CA, USA.
Do any of you live or work around the gulf coast? Is the oil spill as bad as the news makes it sound? I'm just heartsick about it. I worry about all the effects it is having on people, animals, etc. etc. etc.

I know when we had the Easter earthquake (7.2 or 3) the media made such a big deal of it. Yeah, we were rockin' and rollin' but had little damage around our valley due to our strict building and earthquake codes. Mexicali, Mexico (20 miles from us) had much more damage but they have very little if any building codes and do substandard construction (no offense intended).

If any of you have first hand info, please post.
 
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We haven't seen any signs of as yet down in SWFL. I believe the gulfcoast of LA has unfortunately, like they need another problem.
 
Having lived in British Columbia for several years, I have seen the damage of the Exxon Valdez and it was incredible. There is still globs of tar that appear out of nowhere and it's been 20 yrs since that happened. I fear we will never ever know the true scope of the current disaster, other than the common sense that we average citizens have which tells us or at least me that the Valdez was just a pin prick compared to this monster. The hole in the ground is only 7" in diameter. Nobody knows how much oil is coming out of that pipe per hour. What I know is that they tried pumping heavy mud, something like 50,000 barrels worth over 2 days. In my brain that is 25,000 barrels a day into the hole, but that was not enough pressure to stop the oil from coming out...you have 1 mile of ocean and several miles of earth pushing on that oil so it's coming out with some serious pressure I would imagine. Anyhow..so if 25000 barrels a day can be pumped into the hole and that isn't enough to stop it, then wouldn't that suggest that more than 25000 barrels are coming out of the ground in a day? Now they originally said only 5000 barrels were coming out, but then when they put in the pipe to catch some, it was pulling out 5000 barrels a day and that was only 20% of the total volume. Something fishy with their numbers. if 25000 barrels in is not enough to stop it, and 5000=20%, well there has to be more than 25000 coming out in a day, so they are not catching 20% of the spill in their pipe. If the well is spilling out more than 25000 barrels a day. The Valdez held 250,000 barrels of oil. So at minimum, this well has to be spitting out a Valdez every 10 days, but likely every 7-8days, and it's been 40 days or more now. This is going to be a deadly blow to the Gulf and the East coast of the US for decades, as well as parts of Mexico and South America and all the islands in between. The storm surges will bring oil way inland too, destroying inland waterways and lakes and marshes. It's an unfathomable nightmare that concerns me deeply. I curse at what we have done. Not the drilling, but the way we handle it. I don't understand why we haven't blown out this well many weeks ago. We do not need to nuke it. we have huge bombs that are not nukes, like the Mohab. Killing all the fish and life in the immediate area is of little concern over the big picture here..heck all those fish in the immediate area are dead now anyhow. If this was Russia, they would have blown it up the next day. I bet even the Canadians would have blown it up at least within a week. We live in an insane world and we are helpless to do anything about it.
 
Jeff
Blowing up the remain's of the BOP sound's like a plan.Not a good one but still a plan.Do you really think they have run that one by all the expert's.I have worked and been involved in the oil field all my life.Blowing up the BOP will only get you more oil than what is gushing out now.
 
The mud and cement was a bad idea from the start. Oil is less dense than either of them, so will just push through before they can set up. Now Southern Red clay might have worked to slow it long enough for the cement to set, but you ain't going to "pump" southern red clay.


I'm hoping for the people whose livelyhoods are on the line, that this turns out to be not as bad as I think it will be.
 
So, I guess i should bring some degreaser a deck of cards, and leave the fishing gear home when we go to the keys later in the summer........
 
snowman56 said:
Jeff
Blowing up the remain's of the BOP sound's like a plan.Not a good one but still a plan.Do you really think they have run that one by all the expert's.I have worked and been involved in the oil field all my life.Blowing up the BOP will only get you more oil than what is gushing out now.
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While I agree that I am no expert and sure don't know anything about a pipe in the ground, I do know that blowing up wells has been done hundreds of times in the past. It was a common practice on land to do so, and it has been done in deep water. The Russians actually mini nuked a gusher way down in deep water and that was that. The Mohab is very similar to a nuke but non nuclear. The explosion is so intense that it will immediately collapse the pipe and fuse the pipe and the ground for 3 blocks around it into a solid sheet of glass. This has happened before, it is documented and it has been stopped by blasting. It is the only logical conclusion I can come up with as nothing else seems to make any sense other than BP wanting to salvage any oil they can from the hole to help pay for their damages, knowing full well that they will are not responsible for the entire bill of damages. There is a cap as to how much they have to spend and they are not far from reaching that already...unless of course Obama decides to raise or remove the restitution cap on oil companies. Hmmm...that would be a good idea, and yet if you look at his Campaign fund trail BP is near the top of the pile...they have words for situations like that and I'm not about to type them. :wink:
 
workinforwood said:
While I agree that I am no expert and sure don't know anything about a pipe in the ground, I do know that blowing up wells has been done hundreds of times in the past. It was a common practice on land to do so, and it has been done in deep water. The Russians actually mini nuked a gusher way down in deep water and that was that. The Mohab is very similar to a nuke but non nuclear. The explosion is so intense that it will immediately collapse the pipe and fuse the pipe and the ground for 3 blocks around it into a solid sheet of glass. This has happened before, it is documented and it has been stopped by blasting. It is the only logical conclusion I can come up with as nothing else seems to make any sense other than BP wanting to salvage any oil they can from the hole to help pay for their damages, knowing full well that they will are not responsible for the entire bill of damages. There is a cap as to how much they have to spend and they are not far from reaching that already...unless of course Obama decides to raise or remove the restitution cap on oil companies. Hmmm...that would be a good idea, and yet if you look at his Campaign fund trail BP is near the top of the pile...they have words for situations like that and I'm not about to type them. :wink:
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Sorry Jeff. No well has ever been blown up, or collapsed or pipe fused or nuked. End of story.

Tom
 
Just a small comment on the gusher, if the had followed the procedure set up to cement the well in, they wouldnt be in this position of creating a disaster of this magnitude. The mud should have been left in the pipe so that the pressure on top of the oil was enough the allow the cement to set up, but they let out the mud prior to injecting the cement.
 
Ok, so I am wrong that it has ever been done before, I just made it all up along with the hundreds of news articles dating all the way back to the 1970's. The Russians did not do this 5 times already.

This being just one lonely source article
http://www.oil-price.net/en/articles/use-nukes-to-contain-the-oil-spill.php

That is just one of thousands of articles that you can research online about what has not happened already. Perhaps all the thousands of hits are lie's, that's possible too, but it does seem odd to me that there is that many stories out there for it to not be true. Like I said, I know nothing about oil spills, but this sounds logical to me over any other option I have ever heard of.
 
M.O.A.B. (The Mother of all Bombs) Massive Ordinance Air Burst. This bomb is the largest non-nuke bomb in the arsenal! It is a Fuel/Air Bomb, the entire weight of the bomb is a compressed gas that is disbursed in to the air by a small charge above the ground! No Air-----No Boom! In 'Nam they were used to clear Huey landing zones A.K.A. Cookie Cutters.

DaveA
 
No air, no bomb..makes sense to me...no MOAB under the sea then..so lets nuke that sucker and get on with the cleanup. Heck...I'll take care of this situation myself..I just need 50 million dollars in government stimulus money to get started. :biggrin:
 
Jeff
If you get the 50 mill let me know i can hook you up with plenty of unemployed roughneck's that have solved all the world''''''s problem's sitting in beer joint's drinking bud.
 
I have never been on an oil rig in my life, but it is hard to be from Oklahoma and not know at least a little bit about the industry. I also have a very close friend that is a Derrick hand, and another close friend that is a "worm".

This oil spill has been the topic of the hour for us for weeks now, And my friends have what i think would actually be a viable solution, or at least beter than anything attempted as of yet.

I agree with my friends when they say that blasting this thing is a bad idea. There is more than just oil coming out of that hole, which is a big part of why the "dome" didn't work. There are things going on down there that we could never understand, gasses becoming crystals and other weird happenings.


My Roughneck buddies all agree that the best way to deal with this is to try to get the pipe as close to the surface as possible. To do this, they would take some HUGE pipe (around the 10 or 15 foot diameter) and slam it into the ground around the spewing pipe. Keep attaching more and more pipe until it reaches the surface. Then they could easily pump the contents of the giant pipe out and deal with it in a more controlled environment. They would still probably leak some oil, but it would be a much smaller amount.

With the pressures of the Ocean, and the Methane and all the other stuff going on, I don't think "Nuking" it would be a good idea. In fact, I cringe every time anyone says the word "nuke". To me, Nuking it would be like hunting deer with a bazooka. It would do more damage than good.

If we keep resorting to the mentality of "We can't fix it so let's just throw a nuke on it", then soon we will be neighbors with Pluto, Or we will get MUCH MUCH closer to the sun, in which case the sun would surely burn off all the oil (and everything else).
 
As Ron said, there is a lot of Methane Hydrate at the bottom of the gulf. Break it loose and it will float to the surface and melt, releasing a lot of methane into the air and possibly sparking a fireball that may put the nuke to shame.
 
I'm no expert either but I've wondered since this first happened why didn't they put a perimeter of those floaty things around this thing when it first happened? Whatever happened to the coast guard burning off the oil? Why is it taking the government 18+ days to give the Lousiana governer his answer about the berms.

Hturnings
 
Hturnings said:
I'm no expert either but I've wondered since this first happened why didn't they put a perimeter of those floaty things around this thing when it first happened?
Hturnings
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First, BP failed to install a deep hole shut off valve -- a fail-safe device that might have averted the spill.

Secondly, BP violated the law by drilling to depths of 22,000-25,000 feet instead of the 18,000 feet maximum depth allowed by its permit --a practice that may well have contributed to this catastrophe.

Thirdly, it was proposed during the Nineties by the Minerals Management Service (before the people at that agency were replaced with friendly-to-oil-interests personnel and became merely a lackey of Big Oil) that there be an acoustical regulator -- a remotely triggered dead man's switch at the sea floor wellhead -- installed that could have prevented this disaster.

But politics were involved, with many oil industry interests having had huge influence over past Washington administrations, with politicians with deep ties to the oil industry being in charge. Naturally, the mandate to install said switches was never made. Instead it was made optional for the oil companies to do so.

Acoustic switches are required by law for all offshore rigs off Brazil and in Norway's North Sea operations. BP uses the device voluntarily in Britain's North Sea and elsewhere in the world as do other big players like Holland's Shell and France's Total.
 
why dont they drill a relief hole next to the other one that they can pipe and relieve some of the pressure enough to where they can cap the first hole. but hey im no expert
 
I'm with Ron. 10 foot diameter culvert pipe, set over the wellhead and extending to the surface. Sounds too simple, but couldn't fail any more than what has been done so far.
 
I live on the gulf coast ( about 20 miles from Gulf Shores Alabama) and though i havent seen any oil yet I know it will be here soon. Remember this when you cant get your seafood any more. The red snapper season just started June 1 and that has been closed now. So much for the fishing season and all the wildlife and ocean life we lost and will lose.I have a motel room booked in Panama City beach that my family goes to every year and i dont know if i will be able to snorkel or lay on the beach and get some sun. Should I cancel? Or should I help the vacation economy as much as i can and just show up any way and just sit in my room and wacth the oil lap up on shore? This thing is a disaster for everyone involved .The people who make there livelihood from the seafood industry,tourism, tourists , animals ,fish, ocean going mammels, fowl,plankton, things that feed off of plankton. You get my drift. The after effects may well be with us for your childrens childrens generations if not longer. And we may lose wildlife that can never be replaced.The more i think about it the madder i get. And my vacation doesnt mean a thing to what i will lose in the big picture of the world and its creatures. Sorry but i needed to vent. Hugo
 
ironman said:
why dont they drill a relief hole next to the other one that they can pipe and relieve some of the pressure enough to where they can cap the first hole. but hey im no expert
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They are drilling 2 relief wells. One was started on May 2 and is around 12k feet deep right now and the second one was started May 16 and is around 8,600 feet now. Still 2 months away from intercepting though.
 
I just seen this commercial for "Mighty Fix It." Claims to plug up any hole/leak even when wet. So, why not just grab a bunch of this stuff and plug the Oil hole in the gulf? After all it is guaranteed to work or your money back.

https://www.mightyfixit.com/
 
I saw the show on NGEO yesterday about the rig explosion. You see the ships, a thousand of them driving around the gulf pulling those floating ropes and sucking in the oil, but the slicks are incredibly long and wider than the boats can rope up..it's like trying to lasso a Semi Truck. That oil goes way deep too. Deeper than the net things can go. Oil floats on the surface, but when you have enough of it and it has tar and other junk in it, it's more like an ice berg than a slick. I heard one scientist saying that you might see a slick that is 1000 ft wide and a 100 ft deep...yes it is floating but it is a floating clump of tar. I remember that when I lived in BC too, because the waves would every so often bring in a little slick of oil and it would not look very big but it would deposit a massive pile of sludge that was all hidden below the surface and then they'd have to come in and dig up the entire beach and replace it with a new beach. Those massive piles of sludge still land on the shores 20 yrs later.
 
All I know is I hope some one comes up with a viable working solution fast, August will be into Hurricane season, and if the floating tar ball get's picked up in gale force winds, it will be disastrous for the entire gulf of Mexico cost line, and possibly even far up the eastern sea board on above ground blow outs you call in Red Adair and his crew stop it with in a few days, by blowing up explosives and then capping the well. Now it seems they are turning to James Cameron since he has quite a bit of knowledge about underwater robotics.
I heard they either have completed or are about to complete cutting the broken pipe on the blowout preventer so they can try again to set a temporary cap on it. This thing seems to have far more pressure than any one was expecting. Odd isn't it that Dick Cheney's Haliburton is involved with the actual cause of the explosion.
 
Hey fellows. Well I have been working in the oilfield since 1981 and still work on a drilling rig in the gulf of mexico. What BP did was against well control policy. And the OIM and toolpushers told them that they should not pump salt water into the hold to replace the heavy mud. They have just finished a cement job. Once you do a cement job, you go in and drill 10'feet of open hole and test the cement job. The cement has to hold back a certain amount of pressure to pass these test. From working with other companies plus Bp, I have seen us get a test but by just a bare margin. When the OIM was telling the company man that they shouldn't or would not pump salt water down hold and replace the mud the BP company man told them that we are paying for this rig and you will do as we say. That is what we have the pinchers for. He was referring to the BOP stack that sits on the sea floor which is equipped with three sets of rams. But the Shear rams malfunctioned. On a drilling rig you have several ways to tell before a well will start coming in. Increase in mud flow, weight loss on the bit and several other things. But by what I have heard the other Transocean employees talking there was several other things that went wrong. The Subsea person was told not to push the button to shear the pipe. He waited like a minute and pushed the emergency button which operates the shear rams but nothing happened. So as I have seen on several other jobs "money talks"..and safety was pushed to the side.
I am sure there was god knows what else that went wrong. I believe that BP should have to set aside a college fund for all the kids that are left behind. There are petition being signed to hopefully allow drilling rigs to go back to work. Shutting down drilling is not the answer. With the drilling shut down the gas prices will rise. I am sure they will reach $4 per gallon if not hight. And we can't afford to keep buying oil from overseas.
 
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