Gulf coast oil spill

[tw]

Originally Posted by gvidas

How much would the Deepwater Horizon have been pumping, if all things were perfect, per day? ...
How large is the deposit / reservoir of oil that is being tapped?

Deepwater Horizon is a drilling rig. It does not pump oil. They were in the process of moving out - the process of capping a completed oil well. Another platform would have taken over to pump oil.

I believe my previous post listed the estimated size of that well and estimates of how much is being released daily.

[busterb]

Ther might be some answers at The Oil Drum?

[xoxoxoBruce]

Thanks, Buster. 50 to 100 million barrels in that hole.

[gvidas]

Thanks BB. Great link.

To answer my questions:

1) Similar wells seem to produce roughly 40,000 barrels/day (+/- 2-5k) at peak production. I haven't really come across a coherent discussion of productive oil flow vs. hypothetical absolutely unchecked oil flow, but it is pretty clear that 70,000 b/d would be an extremely productive well.

2) via xoB, "50 to 100 million." (It's somewhere in the 400+ comments to the post linked above; great reading, kind of hits the full spectrum of the arguments.)

As an aside, one significant complicating factor that is discussed in threads on The Oil Drum attempting to estimate the size of the spill, but that I haven't really come across anywhere else (MSM, here, etc), is that the well is spewing a mixture of both natural gas and crude oil. If you're strictly concerned with an oil slick coming to shore, your volumetric estimates need to account for what that ratio is -- which is unknown, but apparently quite high at this particular well/deposit. Said volumetric estimates are also complicated because a particle velocity analysis needs to somehow distinguish between particle acceleration due to gas expansion and particles just accelerating out of the pipe.

I'm finding my internal, personal guess trending towards something more moderate since I read through those comments. But I'm more convinced than ever that BP is deliberately obscuring all information about the whole damn thing.

[xoxoxoBruce]

But that expansion coming out of the pipe is legitimate, the stuff isn't going to get smaller in volume again, so what they observe in the video is real volume. I think these guys are probably right.

But I'm more convinced than ever that BP is deliberately obscuring all information about the whole damn thing.

What makes you think they know? BP is a big operation, but much of what they do is contracted out, and those contractors aren't going to tell BP any more than they have to. They're all covering there asses too.

[gvidas]

Originally Posted by xoxoxoBruce

What makes you think they know? BP is a big operation, but much of what they do is contracted out, and those contractors aren't going to tell BP any more than they have to. They're all covering there asses too.

Yeah, maybe more than anything what strikes me is the reluctance to admit what they don't know. I accept that this is pretty deeply entrenched in (corporate) culture. But they're throwing up a lot of weird delays that don't make sense in today's media world: after the first containment dome failed, they took a 48-hour breather to decide what to do next.

By way of comparison, the Times Square Car Bomb fiasco resulted in an arrest in 53 hours. It's not that a lot of important auxiliary work wasn't being done: they've cleared a bunch of wreckage, and at 5,000' it makes sense if things move a little slower.

But, in terms of the 'body language' of a PR campaign, these few weeks of BP trying to manage the fallout has felt very crude and blatant. The assessment which rings most true to me is that they are making a bunch of distracting noise while doing the only thing that has an established shot at working: digging relief wells to plug the whole thing.

I think overall, that's where my interest lies: the specifics of how much is spilling, when will it stop, how much will it affect things, etc-- all that is pretty much whatever it will be. I don't eat seafood, I don't live anywhere near the gulf coast. But how we perceive information intrigues me, and, particularly, the changing face of what it means to 'be transparent' or to share information. I think delaying things, releasing limited information (a few 60 second clips from their ROVs? why not a few hours, crowdsource that shit; etc) does BP a PR disservice. But they might have gotten away with it 5 years ago. That's an interesting change to me.

And, at the same time, there seems to me to be a (bipartisan) trend towards moral outrage coming to outweigh logical, direct interpretations of law: tea partiers and ecoterrorists have similar trajectories, in a way. So it's social and cultural consequences, maybe, that I'm after. After the Exxon Valdez adventure, the initial punitive damages were set at one years' profit. That didn't stick, but it raises the question: what sort of ecological disaster is significant enough to put a multinational corporation on the scale of BP or Exxon out of business? How do you begin to draw that line?

[TheMercenary]

Originally Posted by gvidas

And, at the same time, there seems to me to be a (bipartisan) trend towards moral outrage coming to outweigh logical, direct interpretations of law:

Political posturing in an effort to gain favor for the next election.

tea partiers and ecoterrorists have similar trajectories, in a way.

Not even close, apples and oranges.

So it's social and cultural consequences, maybe, that I'm after. After the Exxon Valdez adventure, the initial punitive damages were set at one years' profit. That didn't stick, but it raises the question: what sort of ecological disaster is significant enough to put a multinational corporation on the scale of BP or Exxon out of business? How do you begin to draw that line?

You can't and will not be able to put a large multi-national out of business. If it is destruction of the company you are after it is not going to happen, the best you could hope for is that it would be swallowed up, in business terms, by another company, and business would go on as usual. But is that the goal? Is that the end we want? No. I don't think so.

[xoxoxoBruce]

I noticed a lot of the pictures on various websites, of every political stripe, are watermarked Greenpeace.

[ZenGum]

I think the idea is that a lot of the volume is gas rather than oil. When you watch the video you can see the oil/gas mix change every few seconds as the plume changes from black to silvery bubbles. I guess a "natural gas slick" isn't as bad as an oil slick.

New Scientist has a discussion of the amount here; the answers generally fall in the 50 to 100 thousand barrel per day range.

Right now the thing to do is stop the flow, but let us not forget: eleven people died on that rig, and the blow-out preventer was supposed to prevent that, too.

[TheMercenary]

I was sent a great PDF with some fantastic pics, and a subsequent extensive commentary. If I could figure out a way to post a link to it I would. The pics were great. I forwarded it to my friend in the UK who was an engineer on Off-shore drilling rigs for 15 years. He had some interesting comments as well as to what happened.

[tw]

Eyewitness testimony from CBS's 60 Minutes. Obviously, these failures are not accidents:
Deepwater Horizon's Blowout Part 1 of 2 and Deepwater Horizon's Blowout Part 2 of 2

[classicman]

The chief U.S. oversight official for offshore oil drilling resigned today, four weeks after a rig disaster in the Gulf of Mexico that killed 11 workers, sank the vessel and triggered leaks that have spewed millions of gallons of crude into the sea.

Chris Oynes, associate director of the offshore energy and minerals management program for the Interior Department’s Minerals Management Service, has left his job, Bill Lee, an agency spokesman, said in an interview.

Oynes left amid heightened scrutiny of the rigorousness of rig-safety inspections and mounting criticism of what U.S. Representative Darrell Issa, a Republican, described as the agency’s “too cozy” relationship with the energy industry.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced plans last week to split the minerals service into separate agencies with safety and revenue-collecting duties. The minerals agency is the largest source of U.S. Treasury funds behind the Internal Revenue Service, generating about $13 billion a year.

Link

[classicman]

Offshore drilling agency refuses to send witness to Senate oil spill hearing

The federal agency that regulates offshore oil drilling declined to send a witness to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee’s hearing Monday on the federal response to the massive Gulf of Mexico oil spill, Committee Chairman Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) said.

The committee had requested the appearance of a top official from the Interior Department’s Minerals Management Service. Lieberman’s panel is probing the adequacy of BP’s federally approved oil drilling and spill response plans.

“I regret that the MMS leadership has chosen not to appear before our committee today because they really need to be asked the same questions I am going to ask Homeland Security, the Coast Guard and BP,” Lieberman said Monday afternoon as the hearing commenced.


The Monday hearing includes Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, a top U.S. Coast guard official and BP America President Lamar McKay. Lieberman said that the committee may ask Interior Secretary Ken Salazar or an MMS official to appear at a subsequent hearing.

Salazar is testifying Tuesday before two other Senate committees about the catastrophic accident at the Deepwater Horizon offshore rig: Energy and Natural Resources, and Environment and Public Works.

Lieberman opened the hearing with an attack on federal oversight of offshore drilling. He faulted MMS for approving inadequate BP plans.

“Did our government, through MMS, require an oil spill response plan adequate to the widest range of possible dangers, including the failure of a blowout preventer?,” Lieberman said, referring to a failure of device that is supposed to cut off damaged wells. “It sure appears that they did not.”

Link

[classicman]

BP: effort to plug Gulf oil spill going as planned

COVINGTON, La. – BP started pumping heavy mud into the leaking Gulf of Mexico well Wednesday and said everything was going as planned in the company's boldest attempt yet to plug the gusher that has spewed millions of gallons of oil over the last five weeks.

BP hoped the mud could overpower the steady stream of oil, but chief executive Tony Hayward said it would be at least 24 hours before officials know whether the attempt has been successful. The company wants to eventually inject cement into the well to seal it.

"I'm sure many of you have been watching the plume," Hayward said from Houston. "All I can say is it is unlikely to give us any real indication of what is going on. Either increases or decreases are not an indicator of either success or failure at this time."

The stakes are high. Fishermen, hotel and restaurant owners, politicians and residents along the coast are fed up with BP's so far ineffective attempts to stop the oil leak that sprang after an offshore drilling rig exploded April 20. Eleven workers were killed, and by the most conservative estimate, 7 million gallons of crude have spilled into the Gulf, fouling Louisiana's marshes and coating birds and other wildlife.

"We're doing everything we can to bring it to closure, and actually we're executing this top kill job as efficiently and effectively as we can," BP Chief Operating Officer Suttles said Wednesday night.

The top kill has worked above ground but has never before been tried 5,000 feet beneath the sea. Company officials peg its chance of success at 60 to 70 percent.

President Barack Obama said "there's no guarantees" it will work. The president planned a trip to Louisiana on Friday.

"We're going to bring every resource necessary to put a stop to this thing," he said.

Link
Not sure what they could do, but the clocks been ticking for over a month.

[Griff]

I wonder what "heavy mud" is?

The humans are apparently in way over their heads on this one.