OT-Will BP survive the lawyers?

Is that a fact?!?

Or just another opinion?

Do you even know who Ms Born was?

I heard once...

In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, theory and practice are often quite different!

Fact.

Yes, I watched that Frontline.

She's a smart and tough lady. She was right. But hardly anyone recognized it until after the collapse.

That's the point. You never know which one of the "sages" is right until after the fact. Then we all say, "why didn't everyone in power recognize this??"

Because it might not have been Born who was right. She could have been a footnote to Alan Greenspan.

Calculation of overburden pressure is not some rule of thumb based on generalitiese And if stuff does not pass high school physics, it is very suspect.

That said I looked around on the internet and found that normal formation pressure is .465 psi per foot of depth. Or for a well

You can have abnormal formation pressure, but not higher than the overburden pressure. It just is not possible. So accept it or not.

=20 Dan

That much is not hard to understand.

What I don't understand -- and I'm not going to try to understand it at this point, because other things that need my time are pressing -- is how ANY pressure can be greater than the overburden pressure. In other words, I don't understand what formation pressure is, nor do I understand some of the other issues that appeared when I took an initial look at all of this.

It's just going to have to be one of those metaphysical mysteries for me.

A multi-trillion dollar market that just "sprang up", than nobody knows a thing about how it works, or what's going on inside the magic money machine? Completely unregulated. Completely undocumented. And large enough to take down the world's financial markets...

It was the Goose that laid Golden Eggs. Greenspan and his croonies didn't WANT to look inside.

What's to worry about???

Fools and thieves.

I don't think it was quite that extreme. There was a fundamental, philosophical belief that the market would regulate itself. Greenspan believed it; most of the neo-liberals believed it; and the rest of us just believed *them*.

For what little it's worth, I never did. I started screaming as soon as stock futures started trading on New York exchanges, back in the '70s. I said it would turn financial markets into a gambling den.

But it wasn't because I had deep insights into finance. I hardly know how it works. I just believed that most people involved are greedy and amoral, and would exploit it in some way that would not be good for the rest of us. I count quite a few of them among my friends and acquaintences.

Meantime, a lot of people who *do* know, including one I know who is now a corporate treasurer and was, back in the '80s, quite an expert on hedging, and who wrote about it, convinced me that they knew what they were doing. I still hated the idea of it, but I couldn't argue intelligently against it.

And that, I think, is where most of us were. Relatively few people had a sense of how fragile it all was. Very few knew what was behind those derivatives.

Free-market capitalism can be a bitch, eh? d8-)

They had all the anwers. They read Hayek and Milton Friedman. They knew everything. Ron Paul still believes all of it.

Thieves, maybe. But most of them have most of the money. They weren't fools.

I was thinking Thieves - and the fools who believed them (us)...

Ok, I'll buy that.

snip

So, in that respect, were the self professed experts (Greenspan, Levitt, Summers) thieves or fools?

Greenspan and Summers are ideologues. They drank the neo-liberal (New Classical; libertarian; Hayekian; Austrian School; Friedmanesque) Koolaid. In other words, they believe that markets will ALWAYS clear, that they will ALWAYS self-correct, and that they will ALWAYS produce the lowest prices. I don't know that much about Levitt.

Another word for such people is "true believers." There are other words, but I can't repeat them here.

The approximate weight of water is 8.35 PPG. According to BP they were using 16 PPG mud to control well pressure and had lost circulation problems nearly all the way down. At least that was what one of the drilling guys said in an e-mail.

Hydrostatic pressure? If so it is usually figured as 0.433 Lbs/Ft. "Normal Formation Pressure", which, as you say, is calculated as 0.465 Lbs/ft is simply a pressure that should exist is there is nothing very attractive down there. At best a pumping well and very good chances of such low formation pressure that you will not get much oil migration.

If you are drilling with 16 PPG mud it is an indication that bottom hole pressures are in the neighborhood of 15,000 psi. However this can be misleading as you can have high pressure zones well above the bottom that require the 16 PPG mud to control while there may be nothing going on down below at the bottom

The trouble with trying to second guess the BP well is that no one but BP really knows what was going on unless they were somehow reading all the well data, that BP, if anything like the rest of the oil companies, doesn't make public. The story's about the centralizers, for example. Centralizer use is very dependent on how straight the hole was. If there was any incline then likely more centralizers may be used. But, was there a tendency for the string to stick at some point that might indicate differential sticking, thus a formation that is weaker on one side of then hole and mud pressure was forcing the string against the side of the hole. This might indicate the need for more centralizers. What does the well log show? Is it a nice straight, round hole or was there a bunch of places that washed out leaving voids as big as a house? That might effect the number of centralizers used.

The image of BP, who is paying around a half million a day for the charter on the rig, plus all the third party contractors equipment and people, tubulers, consumables, stand-by vessels, and all the other costs associated with a big off-shore drilling program, probably approaching 3/4 of a million dollars a day, throwing it all away for a few 25 dollar centralizers, seems highly unlikely.

Another point to remember is that much of the techniques used in deep water drilling were first used by BP who is considered, in the trade, as one of the leaders in deep water drilling technology.

Cheers,

John D. Slocomb (jdslocombatgmail)

Ed, in the two lines directly above your comment I mention that I looked for the data and all I could find was references to high pressure in articles that sounded bogus. Therefore I did the back of the envelope calculation which seemed to confirm my hunch. I bow to your superior research skills, but that's all I could come up at the given moment.

Ok.

Bummer, guess they don't want you to watch the full thing for free. I've tried repeatedly, Part two is part of part one, got into 3 and not sure if I missed some and then off it goes, and 4 is not available. Really good stuff.

I was all excited that you posted that cause I could use some interesting things to watch and forgot about Frontline, now it looks like they don't want you to watch, got to buy it, like I want to watch it over and over. Come on they could put in some advertisement or something.

SW

Did you try the button in the upper right? Try this: