OT-Will BP survive the lawyers?

Really? I used to work with waterjets that ran 60K psi and I noticed that the supplier of my fittings had stuff that went 150K psi. Obviously, smaller than drilling pipe and casing. Can't you scale up the walls of casing to deal with the pressures?

I think not treating the pressure issues properly was the issue.

I *hope* the relief well doesn't make the same mistakes with mudding and cementing and considers that this is a very high pressure well when setting the series of telescoping cases as they go down hole.

Wes

"Stuff" that will handle 150 kips is at the high end of workable engineering materials. To make a little waterjet out of stronger materials is one thing. To make containment and attachment fittings out of it, at that scale, is just about off the charts.

But the target pressure was 100 Ksi.

Btw. do you by into the dead dinosaur and plant life theory or do you think something else is going on below making oil? The scale of the thing has me wondering.

Wes

-- "Additionally as a security officer, I carry a gun to protect government officials but my life isn't worth protecting at home in their eyes." Dick Anthony Heller

What are you going to make the vessels and fittings out of, to tolerate 100 kips of sustained pressure? This wouldn't be some thin-walled container. Welding is probably out of the picture.

You can make lab-scale equipment that will handle it, but I doubt if you could produce something of the scale needed for this job.

They say it's dead zooplankton and algae. Maybe there's a dino in there every so often. d8-)

I have no way of knowing, Wes. Anything chemical is 'way out of my realm.

hat the supplier of

My rough calculations say that for a 4 inch id and 100,000 psi, the wall thickness would have to be about 4 inches if you used HSLA steel. And that is without any safety factor. Time for nanotubes.

Dan

supplier of

You guys seem to be forgetting that if the well head is say...100 kpsi...how deep is it and what is the water pressure at the bottom of the sea bed...some 5000 feet deep?

Gunner

One could not be a successful Leftwinger without realizing that, in contrast to the popular conception supported by newspapers and mothers of Leftwingers, a goodly number of Leftwingers are not only narrow-minded and dull, but also just stupid. Gunner Asch

Did not forget. Just ignored it because it is only about 2150 psi. Not significant compared to 100k psi.

Dan

the supplier of

The last casing set to complete the well was 7 inch. I think you can assume a safety factor of at least 2 and probably more. From what I read the 7 inch was hung off at the well head, so it extended the entire depth of the well. Calculate what the weight of the entire string of 7 inch was and how much the derrick had to support to handle that string and I'll ask my drilling superintendent buddy that the capacity of the BP rig was.

Cheers,

John D. Slocomb (jdslocombatgmail)

I think that the most obvious question would be, the geologist based his estimate on what data?

That Methane is frequently found in association with crude? Obviously as it is just another hydro-carbon.

Were other wells drilled into the formation that showed this pressure? I, at least, haven't heard of any other major blow outs that must certainly have occurred if anyone drilled into a 100,000 psi reservoir.

Where did the geologist find the seismic charts showing this gigantic gas reservoir? Certainly I've never seen a seismic printout that guaranteed that there was oil in that dome, or anticline. Can they now detect gas?

Was this report published in a peer reviewed publication? Which one, when? and if not, why not.

In the more then 20 years I worked in the oil industry I have never talked to a Reservoir Engineer or Geologist who would categorically state there is oil THERE! They all use words like "if there is it should be there"; or, "this is the most likely place".

In any event, from all I can find, BP was using 10,000 PSI as the test pressure for the well, which would indicate they anticipated much lower pressures. They were using 16 PPG mud which again indicates lower then 100,000 psi pressures and the 16 PPG mud apparently was containing the pressure as from all indications the well blew only after BP had plugged the well and was flushing the riser in preparation to moving the rig.

Cheers,

John D. Slocomb (jdslocombatgmail)

The field was well known scientifically, there is gas in all fields - breaking down of base crude into many oils and gasses.

It was the first well that deep. All others were in shallow - I believe the Chinese wells for Cuba are close to Florida and are in shallower water.

This well is offshore from the old shore that was land before the ice age ice melted off and raised the ocean level.

The wells that were sunk over the last 50 years in the gulf are not that far offshore..

I want to know why the preventer failed.

Mart> >

Well, I would like to see the source of that number. The oil is at 18000 ft, of which 5000 ft is water (1 g/cm3) and 13000 ft is rock (say 2.7 g/ cm3). From the simplistic 'column of stuff' argument, the pressure of oil (0.5 g/cm3) at the sea bottom will be .448 [psi/ft] times (5000 ft +

Why would gas be under dramatically different pressure? Rock is porous, so if it wasn't equilibrated by the simple depth-related pressure, it would diffuse away.

The articles claiming 1e5 psi tended to have alarmist titles like 'Gulf disaster could kill millions' so my BS detector needle pegged on red.

Some rock is porous and some is not. In most cases gas is found in association with oil and often is dissolved in the oil and separates when oil is brought to the surface and the pressure drops to ambient. In other cases relatively pure gas is found as a gas cap on top of an oil reservoir, or even alone or with insignificant amounts of liquids.

Mobile's field in N. Sumatra and Hufco's field in Kalimantan are both gas deposits with insignificant amounts of associated liquids.

I remember quite a long time ago (20 years ago, maybe) there was some high pressure sour gas finds on the coast of Louisiana (I think) that were plugged and abandoned since at the time there was no way to produce the levels of high pressure, corrosive, gas economically.

I think the point is that the well was completed and the rig was preparing to move off. No mention of extremely high pressure gas had been made at that time.

Another thing that seems to go unnoticed is that much of the talk about missing centralizers and amounts of cement pumped seems to be coming from the cement company who did the cement job, and possibly can be found liable if the cement job is found to have failed; almost like someone laying out the defense before the charges are made.

Cheers,

John D. Slocomb (jdslocombatgmail)

I am sure everything that happened was anticipated and predicted by the BP engineers and scientists before the event. The event happened because BP manager's minimized costs and ignored the recommendations of the engineers and scientists.

Then look for it.

Then check the facts. It's a lot easier than doing speculative calculations.

Sorry Ed, haven't seen many facts lately. Only various opinions...

:)

Then you might want to take a break from reading opinions and start looking for data.

Sometimes I can't believe that all of the engineering-oriented people on this NG are so unwilling to look for facts, but so ready to argue about opinions.

I just finished "The Warning" (PBS Frontline 2009)

But that couldn't possibly be factual, could it? :)

I don't know how to qualify the "facts" appearing in revelations about the financial disaster. There always are contrarians giving warnings. When a collapse occurs, some of them are dug up by the press, after the fact, and held up as the great sages who we should have listened to. Of course, their status gets a huge boost for a while -- until they screw up some future prediction. Alan Greenspan comes to mind.

The press does less well in identifying these sages before the fact. Too bad; that's where the real money is.

I took a course a long time ago from the chief troubleshooter at Varian. I never used any of what the course was about. It was Vacuum Tube Technology. BWO's, TWT's, Klystons's ect. But I did learn a lot about estimating and error analysis. We did thing like calculate the diameter of the wire in a 5 ma fuse. ( Given is that the wire is platinum. So you know the melting temperature. Heat loss in the center of the length will not be by conduction toward the ends. So all heat loss in the center of the wire is by radiation. etc.

But what Przemek Klosowski is saying is that if the gas was much over 15,000 psi, the pressure would have already blown the overlaying rock and water away. That is a fact. And a much more reliable fact than trying to find the source of the 100,000 psi estimate. Obviously one is not going to find that estimate with any explanation of how the estimate was made. Because if they had used reasonable methods of estimating, they would not have come up with 100,000 psi.

Calculations done with estimates of error are an excellent way of separating theories into plausible and implausible.

Dan