Oil Slick Getting Real Serious

[bottomfeeder]

Critical Factors
1. Loss of Integrity of the 9 7/8" x 7"
casing created a path for
hydrocarbon (HC) influx
2. Unrecognized well conditions
Influx unrecognized - Integrity test failed
to identify communication with the
reservoir
Operations allowed HC influx to enter
and move up the well bore - well
became capable of flowing
Response failed to control the well
3. BOP & Emergency Systems failed
to isolate the HC source
4. Gas Plume Ignited

http://energycommerce.house.gov/documents/20100527/BP.Presentation.pdf

Here's a good example from a layman's pov.

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6531#comment-634209

Interesting:

Idly – Lost circulation is an event. It doesn’t necessarily imply a specific set of underground conditions. LC just means all the mud pumped down the drill pipe doesn’t return to the surface. Why it didn’t return is an interpretation. The mud might have squeezed out of a failed cement shoe at the bottom of the previous casing run. It might have been pumped into a porous sandstone reservoir because the pressure of the mud exceeded the pressure in that sandstone. The LC could have been in a fault plane that fractured a shale. In this case the pressure of the mud might not have been greater than the rock pressure: fractured shales take mud very easily.

As others have mentioned the difference in mud weight between LC and having a DW well kick can be very small…maybe just 0.2 or 0.3 lbs. What makes drilling with such a slim margin more difficult is the ECD…effective circulating density of the drilling mud. The mud weight might be 16.5 ppg. But when I have the mud pumps on it add pressure to the bottom of the as if I had 16.9 ppg in the hole. So the well might not kick when the pumps are on (formation pressure is 16.6 ppg compared to my ECD of 16.9 ppg). But when I turn my pumps off to add another section of drill pipe the ECD is now 16.5 ppg (less than the reservoir pressure) and the well begins to flow. That’s why you always check for flow when you turn your mud pumps off. This is exactly why it was so critical for BP to monitor mud returns when they began displacing the riser. As they replaced drill mud with seawater the ECD at the bottom of the well decreased greatly…far below the reservoir pressure. That means if the csg shoe failed there was a 100% certainty that the well would flow oil/NG. And when it began to flow it would have to push the mud out of the well to reach the surface. Had they seen the mud flowing back with the pumps off they could have shut the well in. That doesn’t mean activate the BOP…just shut of all the return valves. If those valves held they could have pumped a kill pill down and returned the ECD to a safe level and stopped the flow of oil/NG. But that doesn’t always work. If those valves had failed they still could have gone to the BOP. There were a minimum of two safety checks between preventing the blow out and what we see today in the GOM.

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6531#comment-634579

miss -- Could certainly be an option to start a relief well when you start a new drill. But how would the relief well be less risky than the primary? IOW, what if the relief well blows out? Also, how deep do you drill the relief well? The primary could blow out at 3,000' or 28,000'.

Another way to consider your idea: drilling a relief well with the primary means drilling twice as many wells as would be normally done. If regs and procedures are not changed then you've just doubled the possibility of another major blow out/spill.

THE critical question is how did the well blow out. If the story is correct it was due to displacing the heavy mud in the csg/riser with seawater before the cmt was properly tested. A judgment call. A very easy fix there: change the rules for testing cmt jobs before you displace. And how do make sure operators follow the new rule: independent third party observers on board. An insignificant cost compared to the price of a typical DW well. And even after the cmt failed and the oil/NG started flowing up BP could have still prevented the blow out had they known the well was kicking. And how hard is that to know that? Very easy and done dozens of times every day on all the other DW wells currently drilling in the GOM. You monitor the mud when you turn off the mud pumps. I know this sound stupidly simplistic but you just measure how much mud you have in the mud pits. If the oil/NG begins to flow it has to push the mud out of the hole. If you turn a faucet off tite and the water continues to flow out of the spigot do you think you might suspect a problem? We can debate till the cows come how the judgment of displacing the riser/csg given what was known at the time about the qualityof the cmt. And neither side of that argument will change their positions. That wasn’t the proven sin by BP. THE sin was not monitoring the mud returns. How much money did BP save by not insuring that the personnel responsible for watching the mud returns were doing their job? Not one damn penny. I’ve been on DW rigs when a well was in its last stage. A great rush to shut down, pack up and get on the boat. I’m sure those hands responsible for keeping an eye on the mud returns weren’t kicking back in the galley with a cup of coffee. They were busting their butts rigging down and not paying attention. And why pay attention? They were told the cmt was tested and all was safe. Another easy fix: mandatory monitoring the mud returns AT ALL TIMES. Cost? Completely insignificant. Last January I drilled an 18,000’ well in S. La. There was one hand responsible for watching mud returns. Did I trust him 100%? No…I had a second hand monitor him. Good enough, eh? No…when ever we turned the mud pumps off my company man made that 30 yard walk to double check the mud returns. Cost to my company for this redundancy = $0.

I’ve tried to keep my criticism of BP on the light side since we’re still many months away from confirming the stories we’ve pieced together. But when the BP hand invoked the 5th to avoid self incrimination my attitude changed significantly. No more Mr. Nice Guy. I’ve sat in those meetings in the company man’s office on a rig and watched these technical debates. I’ve heard the “we don’t want to piss the office folks off” argument more times then I can remember. I’ve been told not to report my analysis because it would only up set someone. I’ve had my written reports tossed in the trashcan while I stood there and watched. I’ve been run off more than one job because I wouldn’t “be a team player”.

BP wants to hide behind the 5th…OK. But as far as I’m concerned I free to offer my very personal and very prejudiced feelings on this matter.


http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6531#comment-634452

History repeats itself. I'm not a fan of Rachel Maddow, but she did a good job here:




http://www.incidentnews.gov/incident/6250

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6531#comment-634288

[bottomfeeder]

It looks as if the cap is doing absolutely nothing.

http://bp.isevil.org/

[bottomfeeder]

I found an explanation for what's currently happening.

The Top Hat Seal

For a number of reasons the top hat seal is NOT a pressure seal. It is designed to try to
keep seawater out, not to keep oil in.

Any water that can get in at the bottom of the top hat will form methane hydrates and
probably block up the pipe. If that happens as they are beginning to start a slow flow it
just means another setback.

But it is much more likely to happen when there is substantial flow going up the line and
they are starting to “pull suction”. At that point there is a high flow rate and the “water
hammer” effect of suddenly stopping a mile long slug of oil and gas could easily start
tearing the equipment apart, probably at the top hat or onboard the ship so it becomes a
safety issue not just another failure.

The top hat is not designed to take any significant pressure, certainly not the pressure
that could result from sealing to the BOP so that pressure must be able to escape - through
the seal area. Even 1,000 psi would blow the top hat apart and there is potentially about
9,000 to 13,000 psi at the BOP

And at this point I think they are scared enough of the integrity of the well head and BOP
connection that they don’t want to have any pressure build up which would happen if you
sealed the top hat to the flange.

There are other safety issues that are solved by not having a solid seal.

1. The rig must be able to shut off the flow on deck at any time and the resultant flow has
to go somewhere - which is out the top hat seal

2. The rig must be able to pull away from the well at any time in an emergency and just
raising the top hat off the BOP solves this problem.

Flow to the Surface

The flow to the surface is through a drill pipe from the top of the top hat. The drill pipe
should be able to flow between 20,000 to 30,000 bpd or more if it was 100% oil – NO PUMPS
NEEDED. With gas in the flow the amount of potential flow is even greater. In any case the
processing system on the ship cannot handle as much as the pipe can transport.
The oil is about 0.85 specific gravity. If the drill pipe was filled just with oil the
buoyancy of the oil will raise the pressure at the surface to close to 400 psi. If filled
with gas the pressure would be about 2,000 psi.

The problem won’t be to get the oil to flow but to keep it from flowing too fast. They will
throttle (choke) the flow back to get the volume they are comfortable with and then pipe the
oil and gas, still under some pressure, into a separator vessel where the pressure will be
reduced and the gas will go to the flare to be burned and the oil will go into a storage
tank.

The product flowing from the bottom will be a mixture of oil (with dissolved gas), NGLs and
super-critical methane gas. Hopefully there will be no water as that can really mess things
up. During its journey to the surface, and through the processing system there will be a
number of changes as gas dissolves out of the oil, the methane goes from super-critical to
gas, some of the NGL will turn to gas and all the gas will eventually expands about 150
times before it hits the flare.

The optimum flow at any time will have to be determined by trial and error on the rig. If
they were to open it up quickly they might get lucky and obtain a stable flow quickly. The
downside of trying to do it quickly is that you could suck in water setting back the whole
process for hours or days or worst case end up with an uncontrolled flow on the ship
resulting explosion and fire with fatalities and another disaster.

So the fact that it could take a period of days to reach maximum flow is no surprise.
The oil gas ratio in the flow from the well will probably keep varying all the time and
coupled with the phase changes and gas expansion will be a continuing problem for the
processing crew on the rig. I expect that is the reason we saw daily changes in the amount
of oil recovered by the RITT.

http://www.doomers.us/forum2/index.php/topic,68178.msg1073135.html#msg1073135

[AUJarhead]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100609/ap_on_bi_ge/us_gulf_oil_spill_sketchy_plans

AP IMPACT: BP spill response plans severely flawed
VENICE, La. – Professor Peter Lutz is listed in BP's 2009 response plan for a Gulf of Mexico oil spill as a national wildlife expert. He died in 2005.

Under the heading "sensitive biological resources," the plan lists marine mammals including walruses, sea otters, sea lions and seals. None lives anywhere near the Gulf.

The names and phone numbers of several Texas A&M University marine life specialists are wrong. So are the numbers for marine mammal stranding network offices in Louisiana and Florida, which are no longer in service.

BP PLC's 582-page regional spill plan for the Gulf, and its 52-page, site-specific plan for the Deepwater Horizon rig are riddled with omissions and glaring errors, according to an Associated Press analysis that details how BP officials have pretty much been making it up as they go along. The lengthy plans approved by the federal government last year before BP drilled its ill-fated well vastly understate the dangers posed by an uncontrolled leak and vastly overstate the company's preparedness to deal with one.

Sen. Bill Nelson, a Florida Democrat, said in an e-mail Wednesday to the AP that he and Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-California, have asked for a criminal investigation of some of the company's claims.

"The AP report paints a picture of a company that was making it up as it went along, while telling regulators it had the full capability to deal with a major spill," Nelson said in an e-mail. "We know that wasn't true."

In its Deepwater Horizon plan, the British oil giant stated: "BP Exploration and Production Inc. has the capability to respond, to the maximum extent practicable, to a worst case discharge, or a substantial threat of such a discharge, resulting from the activities proposed in our Exploration Plan."

In the spill scenarios detailed in the documents, fish, marine mammals and birds escape serious harm; beaches remain pristine; water quality is only a temporary problem. And those are the projections for a leak about 10 times worse than what has been calculated for the ongoing disaster.

There are other wildly false assumptions in the documents. BP's proposed method to calculate spill volume judging by the darkness of the oil sheen is way off. The internationally accepted formula would produce estimates 100 times higher.

The Gulf's loop current, which is projected to help eventually send oil hundreds of miles around Florida's southern tip and up the Atlantic coast, isn't mentioned in either plan.

The website listed for Marine Spill Response Corp. — one of two firms that BP relies on for equipment to clean a spill — links to a defunct Japanese-language page.

In early May, at least 80 Louisiana state prisoners were trained to clean birds by listening to a presentation and watching a video. It was a work force never envisioned in the plans, which contain no detailed references to how birds would be cleansed of oil.

And while BP officials and the federal government have insisted that they have attacked the problem as if it were a much larger spill, that isn't apparent from the constantly evolving nature of the response.

Billy Nungesser, president of Plaquemines Parish, La., says there are "3,000 acres (of wetlands) where life as we know it is dead, and we continue to lose precious marshland every day."

Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., asked Interior Secretary Ken Salazar during a Senate hearing Wednesday about findings in the AP's reporting, specifically that BP's response plan included references to walruses and what Barrasso called a minimal discussion about how to stop a worst-case scenario.

Considering such obvious problems with plans already on file with the U.S. government, Barrasso wondered whether a six-month federal moratorium on offshore deepwater drilling after the spill should be lifted even that soon.

Salazar responded that he did not know the answer.

This week, after BP reported the seemingly good news that a containment cap installed on the wellhead was funneling some of the gushing crude to a tanker on the surface, BP introduced a whole new set of plans mostly aimed at capturing more oil.

The latest incarnation calls for building a larger cap, using a special incinerator to burn off some of the recaptured oil and bringing in a floating platform to process the oil being sucked away from the gushing well.

In other words, the on-the-fly planning continues.

___

Some examples of how BP's plans have fallen short:

• Beaches where oil washed up within weeks of a spill were supposed to be safe from contamination because BP promised it could marshal more than enough boats to scoop up all the oil before any deepwater spill could reach shore — a claim that in retrospect seems absurd.

"The vessels in question maintain the necessary spill containment and recovery equipment to respond effectively," one of the documents says.

BP asserts that the combined response could skim, suck up or otherwise remove 20 million gallons of oil each day from the water. But that is about how much has leaked in the past six weeks — and the slick now covers about 3,300 square miles, according to Hans Graber, director of the University of Miami's satellite sensing facility. Only a small fraction of the spill has been successfully skimmed. Plus, an undetermined portion of the spill has sunk to the bottom of the Gulf or is suspended somewhere in between.

The plan uses computer modeling to project a 21 percent chance of oil reaching the Louisiana coast within a month of a spill. In reality, an oily sheen reached the Mississippi River delta just nine days after the April 20 explosion. Heavy globs soon followed. Other locales where oil washed up within weeks of the explosion were characterized in BP's regional plan as safely out of the way of any oil danger.

• BP's site plan regarding birds, sea turtles or endangered marine mammals ("no adverse impacts") also have proved far too optimistic.

While the exact toll on the Gulf's wildlife may never be known, the effects clearly have been devastating.

More than 400 oiled birds have been treated, while dozens have been found dead and covered in crude, mainly in Louisiana but also in Mississippi, Alabama and Florida. On remote islands teeming with birds, a visible patina of oil taints pelicans, gulls, terns and herons, as captured in AP photos that depict one of the more gut-wrenching aspects of the spill's impact. Such scenes are no longer unusual; the response plans anticipate nothing on this scale.

In Louisiana's Barataria Bay, a dead sea turtle caked in reddish-brown oil lay splayed out with dragonflies buzzing by. More than 200 lifeless turtles and several dolphins also have washed ashore. So have countless fish.

There weren't supposed to be any coastline problems because the site was far offshore. "Due to the distance to shore (48 miles) and the response capabilities that would be implemented, no significant adverse impacts are expected," the site plan says.

But that distance has failed to protect precious resources. And last week, a group of environmental research center scientists released a computer model that suggested oil could ride ocean currents around Florida and up to North Carolina by summer.

• Perhaps the starkest example of BP's planning failures: The company has insisted that the size of the leak doesn't matter because it has been reacting to a worst-case scenario all along.

Yet each step of the way, as the estimated size of the daily leak has grown from 42,000 gallons to 210,000 gallons to perhaps 1.8 million gallons, BP has been forced to scramble — to create potential solutions on the fly, to add more boats, more boom, more skimmers, more workers. And containment domes, top kills, top hats.

___

While a disaster as devastating as a major oil spill will create some problems that can't be solved in advance, or even foreseen, BP's plans do not anticipate even the most obvious issues, and use mountains of words to dismiss problems that have proven overwhelming.

In responses to lengthy lists of questions from AP, officials for BP and the Interior Department, which oversees oil rig regulator Minerals Management Service, appear to concede there were problems with the two oil spill response plans.

"Many of the questions you raise are exactly those questions that will be examined and answered by the presidential commission as well as other investigations into BP's oil spill," said Kendra Barkoff, spokeswoman for Salazar. She added that Salazar has undertaken transformational reforms of MMS.

Rep. Darrell Issa of California, the top Republican on the House Oversight and Government Reform committee, is investigating failures by MMS that contributed to the disaster and said Wednesday during the congressional hearing that if there had been a serious effort to reform the service in the past 15 months, the "mistakes" in BP's report would have been caught.

"This is yet another example of MMS acting as a rubber stamp for industry, and industry settling for the lowest possible standard of safety at the expense the environment and economic vitality of the Gulf region," he said.

Said BP spokesman Daren Beaudo from Robert, La.: "We expect that a complete review of the regional response plans and planning process will take place as part of the overall incident investigation so that we can determine what worked well and what needs improvement. Thus far we have implemented the largest spill response in history and many, many elements of it have worked well. However, we are greatly disappointed that oil has made landfall and impacted shorelines and marshes. The situation we are dealing with is clearly complex, unprecedented and will offer us much to learn from."

A key failure of the plan's cleanup provisions was the scarcity of boom — floating lines of plastic or absorbent material placed around sensitive areas to deflect oil.

From the start, local officials all along the Gulf Coast have complained about a lack of supplies, particularly the heavier, so-called ocean boom. But even BP says in its regional plan that boom isn't effective in seas more than three to four feet; waves in the Gulf are often bigger. And even in calmer waters, oil has swamped vital wildlife breeding grounds in places supposedly sequestered by multiple layers of boom.

The BP plans speak of thorough resources for all; there's no talk of a need to share. Still, Alabama Gov. Bob Riley said his shores were left vulnerable by Coast Guard decisions to shift boom to Louisiana when the oil threatened landfall there.

Meanwhile, in Louisiana's Plaquemines Parish, Nungesser and others have complained that miles of the boom now in the water were not properly anchored. AP reporters saw evidence he was right — some lines of boom were so broken up they hardly impeded the slick's push to shore.

Some out-of-state contractors who didn't know local waters placed boom where tides and currents made sure it didn't work properly. And yet disorganization has dogged efforts to use local boats. In Venice, La., near where the Mississippi River empties into the Gulf, a large group of charter captains have been known to spend their days sitting around at the marina, earning $2,000 a day without ever attacking the oil.

But perhaps the most glaring error in BP's plans involves Lutz, the professor, one of several dozen experts recommended as resources to be contacted in the event of a spill.

Lutz is listed as a go-to wildlife specialist at the University of Miami. But Lutz, an eminent sea turtle expert, left Miami almost 20 years ago to chair the marine biology department at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton. He died four years before the plan was published.

___

Contributing to this report were Associated Press writers Ted Bridis and Eileen Sullivan in Washington, Brian Skoloff in Grand Isle, La., Harry R. Weber in Houston, and Jason Bronis in New Orleans. Lush reported from New Orleans. Pritchard reported from Los Angeles.

[GH2001]

My problem is with this....


Sen. Bill Nelson, a Florida Democrat, said in an e-mail Wednesday to the AP that he and Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-California, have asked for a criminal investigation of some of the company's claims.


Cart before the horse. These things can be sorted out AFTER the spill is dealt with. Just another preemptive example of scapegoating 101 - politics at its finest.

[AUJarhead]

Agreed totally, but I feel like this whole damn clean up effort is being run by the Keystone Kops.

[RWS]

My problem is with this....


Sen. Bill Nelson, a Florida Democrat, said in an e-mail Wednesday to the AP that he and Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-California, have asked for a criminal investigation of some of the company's claims.


Cart before the horse. These things can be sorted out AFTER the spill is dealt with. Just another preemptive example of scapegoating 101 - politics at its finest.

Exactly.

What is apparent to me is the government does not do any kind of check on the information provided in the response plans. You can't have it both ways. Either the government didn't do it's job in checking this data, or if they did, then this truly is one of those "shit happens" moments that nobody could have seen coming. So, how can the government start pointing fingers when they are partially responsible in the first place?

[bottomfeeder]

Exactly.

What is apparent to me is the government does not do any kind of check on the information provided in the response plans. You can't have it both ways. Either the government didn't do it's job in checking this data, or if they did, then this truly is one of those "shit happens" moments that nobody could have seen coming. So, how can the government start pointing fingers when they are partially responsible in the first place?

The are equally to blame.

Government for they lack of oversight and drug abuse, and BP for spewing bullshit concerning the reality of the gusher.

The toxic bullshit, which began to spew from the mouths of BP executives shortly after the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig in April, has completely devastated the Gulf region, delaying cleanup efforts, affecting thousands of jobs, and endangering the lives of all nearby wildlife.

"Everything we can see at the moment suggests that the overall environmental impact of this will be very, very modest," said BP CEO Tony Hayward, letting loose a colossal stream of undiluted bullshit. "The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean, and the volume of oil we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total volume of water."

According to sources, the sheer quantity of bullshit pouring out of Hayward is unprecedented, and it has thoroughly drenched the coastlines of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida, with no end in sight.

Though no one knows exactly how much of the dangerous bullshit is currently gushing from BP headquarters, estimates put the number at somewhere between 25,000 and 70,000 words a day.

http://www.theonion.com/articles/massive-flow-of-bullshit-continues-to-gush-from-bp,17564/