Louisiana deep oil drilling disaster

[Ed Jewett]

Also, the incident seems to lend a new dimension to the term "deep politics". What is evident is massive long-term "winking" or collusion between government and business to the extreme detriment of sentient life forms. As someone who has studied and was qualified in NIMS incident command and exercise design, I am horrified by the ineptitude of the government's response to this "incident".

[Peter Lemkin]

Also, the incident seems to lend a new dimension to the term "deep politics". What is evident is massive long-term "winking" or collusion between government and business to the extreme detriment of sentient life forms. As someone who has studied and was qualified in NIMS incident command and exercise design, I am horrified by the ineptitude of the government's response to this "incident".

....ugh.....what 'response'?!...as far as I can see/hear/read there has only been spin and non-response..... With what little history we have left, this will go down as one of the iconic bits of 'the end of humankind' and much of life on Earth, methinks. Coming in the same month as the 'invention' [sic] of artificial lifeforms I fear we are near the abyss...with too few willing to even back up, let alone find a new way 'forward'. I hope I am wrong. I fear I am not. [there is no real 'governance', only corporate and oligarchic interests] the interests of ordinary people and most lifeforms are 'discounted' and 'bundled' into derivatives.....hot: [i.e. selling LIFE 'short']

[Ed Jewett]

Deepwater Horizon survivors allege they were kept in seclusion after rig explosion, coerced into signing legal waivers

• Slideshow:Gulf Coast Oil Spill
  

[URL="http://news.yahoo.com/blog"]
[/URL]


Fri May 21, 5:20 pm ET
According to two surviving crew members of the Deepwater Horizon, [COLOR=#366388 ! important][COLOR=#366388 ! important]oil [COLOR=#366388 ! important]workers[/COLOR][/COLOR][/COLOR] from the rig were held in seclusion on the open water for up to two days after the April 20 explosion, while attorneys attempted to convince them to sign legal documents stating that they were unharmed by the incident. The men claim that they were forbidden from having any contact with concerned loved ones during that time, and were told they would not be able to go home until they signed the documents they were presented with.
Stephen Davis, a seven-year veteran of drilling-rig work from San Antonio, told The Guardian's Suzanne Goldenberg today that he was held on a boat for 36 to 40 hours after diving into the Gulf from the burning rig and swimming to safety. Once on a crew boat, Davis said, he and the others were denied access to satellite phones or radio to get in touch with their families, many of whom were frantic to find out whether or not they were OK.
Davis' attorney told Goldenberg that while on the boat, his client and the others were told to sign the statements presented to them by attorneys for Transocean — the firm that owned the [COLOR=#366388 ! important][COLOR=#366388 ! important]Deepwater [COLOR=#366388 ! important]Horizon[/COLOR][/COLOR][/COLOR] — or they wouldn't be allowed to go home. After being awake for 50 harrowing hours, Davis caved and signed the papers. He said most of the others did as well.
Davis' story seems to be backed up by a similar account given to NPR by another Deepwater Horizon crewmember earlier in the month. Christopher Choy, a roustabout on the rig, said that the lawyers gathered the survivors in the galley of a boat and said, "'You need to sign these. Nobody's getting off here until we get one from everybody.' ... At the bottom, it said something about, like, you know, this can be used as evidence in court and all that. I told them, 'I'm not signing it.' "
Choy said that once he was finally allowed to get off the boat, he was shuttled to a hotel, where he met up with his wife. At the hotel, representatives from Transocean confronted him again and badgered him to sign the statement. Exhausted, traumatized and desperate to go home, Choy said that he finally relented and signed.
Choy's lawyer, [COLOR=#366388 ! important][COLOR=#366388 ! important]Steve [COLOR=#366388 ! important]Gordon[/COLOR][/COLOR][/COLOR], is incensed over what transpired in the hours after the explosion. He, along with other attorneys for Deepwater Horizon workers, is trying to get the documents voided by the courts.
"It's absurd. It's unacceptable, and it's irresponsible," Gordon told NPR.
— Brett Michael Dykes is a national affairs writer for Yahoo! News.


http://news.yahoo.com/s/ynews/20100521/s...ews_sc2191

[Ed Jewett]

Cleaning oil-soaked wetlands may be impossible
By MATTHEW BROWN (AP) – 9 hours ago

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/arti...gD9FS2VR00

###

(Reuters) - The oil slick that has started sloshing through marsh grass at the southern tip of the Mississippi Delta gives coastal Louisiana a glimpse of what it fears may be its future.
U.S. | Green Business | Gulf Oil Spill
In the last few days, acres of oil have penetrated low-lying islands at the point where the river rolls into the sea, forming a dark red band at the bottom of the roseau cane.
Thick black sludge blocks at least one inlet, and a much larger area off the coast glistens with a rainbow sheen dotted with oil globules, suggesting that more will reach land soon.
"This is what we hoped wouldn't happen but we knew would happen," said Andy Nyman, associate professor of wetland and wildlife ecology at Louisiana State University.
Energy giant BP, accused by the U.S. government of falling short in providing information about the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, was forging ahead on Friday with efforts to contain the crude gushing from one of its undersea wells.
The sight and smell of a slick in fragile wetlands and the ecologically-rich Delta adds urgency to efforts to contain a disaster sparked a month ago when an explosion sank a rig, killing 11 workers, and ripped open the well.
It also casts doubt on a prediction by BP's Chairman Tony Hayward this week that the leak would have only a modest environmental impact.
At the same time, it calls into question the effectiveness of the miles of booms arranged in the water by BP, federal and local authorities in a bid to protect the coastline.
At Blind Bay Louisiana and elsewhere, oil has drifted under or over the booms onto land. Elsewhere, some of the worst-affected islands were entirely unprotected.
In and of itself, the affected area represents just a fragment of the southern tip of the Delta and is dwarfed by the network of waterways that stretch around 100 miles 160 km inland.
But the slick could have an exponential impact on sport fishing, which is a lifeblood of small villages like Venice, Louisiana, and threatens commercial fisheries.
Fishermen and boat owners said they feared what they saw was simply the beginning.
"This could get 100 times worse than what it is today," said fisherman Carey O'Neil, who knows the area intimately as he grew up at an encampment that can only be reached by boat.
RACE TO FIND ANSWERS
Now that oil has begun to wash ashore in significant quantities, scientists are racing to understand its impact.
Some say they are hampered by a lack of information about dispersants, the volume of oil in the water and the extent to which oil loses its toxicity as it rises from the leak up through the water column toward the surface.
But some consequences were easy to predict, said Maura Wood, program manager with the National Wildlife Federation's coastal Louisiana restoration project.
"This is an area where tiny juveniles (marine life) will be coming in looking for a haven and nibbling on the plant stems," said Wood as she wiped oil from her gloves after collecting a sample in a bottle.
"So this can start to move up through the food chain. Toxics start to magnify as bigger fish eat the little fish and that's a real concern," she said.
Even if time in the warm Gulf waters and dispersants make the oil less poisonous, it will still likely smother the marsh grass, exposing the matrix of sand and roots that forms the islands, said environmentalists.
"Once these plants die there is nothing to hold the mud and then it becomes open water. Once that happens it's really hard to get that to come back," said Randy Lanctot, executive director of Louisiana Wildlife Federation.
Many residents say they are bewitched by the beauty of the Delta, a vast maze of canals, islands and river channels where brown pelicans skim low across waters abundant with fish.
Right now, the area is at the epicenter of a political storm over the spill and its consequences, with extensive news coverage and frequent visits by the governor and other state politicians.
Yet many residents say their biggest fear is for the months ahead when the oil is still washing ashore but national attention has turned elsewhere while.
(Editing by Ed Stoddard and Philip Barbara)


http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE64K0XT20100521

[Peter Lemkin]

The MSM rarely does anything useful, but here is one small effort:

May 17, 2010
CBS "60 Minutes" interview with Deepwater Horizon survivor

CBS "60 Minutes" ran a compelling interview Sunday, May 16, with Mike Williams, one of the last crewmembers to escape the Deepwater Horizon. inferno.

Mike Williams was the chief electronics technician in charge of the rig's computers and electrical systems.

Among other things he says that, four weeks before the explosion, the blowout preventer (BOP) was damaged.

A key BOP component is a rubber gasket at the top called an "annular," which can close tightly around the drill pipe.

Williams says, during a test, they closed the gasket. But while it was shut tight, a crewman on deck accidentally nudged a joystick, applying hundreds of thousands of pounds of force, and moving 15 feet of drill pipe through the closed blowout preventer. Later, a man monitoring drilling fluid rising to the top made a troubling find.

"He discovered chunks of rubber in the drilling fluid. He thought it was important enough to gather this double handful of chunks of rubber and bring them into the driller shack. I recall asking the supervisor if this was out of the ordinary. And he says, 'Oh, it's no big deal.' And I thought, 'How can it be not a big deal? There's chunks of our seal is now missing,'" Williams says.

This is just one of several troubling disclosures in the "60 Minutes" interview.

In the second part of the interview, "60 Minutes" asked eminent offshore drilling safety authority Professor Robert Bea, for his take on Mr. Williams' story.

[Ed Jewett]

"... Unfortunately, Obama has elected to sit on his hands for over a month, and only then call a commission together to look into the true impact of the gusher in the Gulf of Mexico that threatens to be a disaster like few before, both within the United States and internationally. How he wishes to explain his 4 weeks not doing much of anything at all to the people of Louisiana, Alabama, Florida, Cuba and Mexico is hard to envision.

The modus operandi prevalent in Washington, to let the well-to-do culpable police themselves, whether they be Goldman Sachs or BP, carries an enormous political risk. And rightly so, because there is no indication anywhere to be seen that says this line of -in-action is in the best interest of the people who put their trust in the man.

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs may stammer some incoherent syllables on what the law does and does not allow the president to do, but none of that will amount to zilch once nobody can deny any longer that 10 or 20 times as much oil has been leaking, and still is, than both BP and the American government have been claiming all the way back to April 20.

Obama himself should have been on site from the earliest possible moment, taking advice from the best people he could find in the entire world, just in case BP was not telling the truth (for which it had great incentives), and just in case a worst case scenario would unfold when it came to closing the leak.

Exactly in the same way that he has shown while dealing with the financial quagmire the nation, and indeed the world, is sinking ever deeper into, Obama has proven one thing to everyone who cares to look and listen: He is not a leader. He simply lacks the qualities and the instinct required for the position. Which is a shame, for his voters, his followers and the nation as a whole; nonetheless, it's time to stop kidding ourselves...."

An excerpt from

Saturday, May 22, 2010
May 22 2010: As goes the nose, so go the toes

http://theautomaticearth.blogspot.com/2010/05/may-22-2010-as-goes-nose-so-go-toes.html

[Ed Jewett]

Robert Bea resurfaces

to our advantage
Gas surge shut well a couple of weeks before Gulf oil spill
By The Times-Picayune
May 10, 2010, 10:31PM
This story is by David Hammer and Mark Schleifstein
Petty Officer 2nd Class Scott Lloyd / U.S. Coast Guard
A Coast Guard rescue helicopter crew documents the fire aboard the offshore drilling rig Deepwater Horizon while searching for survivors April 21.
Powerful puffs of natural gas, called kicks, are a normal occurrence in many deep-ocean drilling operations.
But one intense kick of natural gas caused the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig to be shut down because of the fear of an explosion just weeks before a similar release succeeded in destroying and sinking the platform and sent millions of gallons of oil on a collision course with Louisiana and the rest of the northern coast of the Gulf of Mexico.
Shortly before the accident, engineers argued about whether to remove heavy drilling mud that acted as a last defense against such catastrophic kicks, and the decision to replace the mud with much lighter seawater won out.
Those are some of the new details gathered by Robert Bea, a University of California at Berkeley engineering professor better known in New Orleans as co-leader of an independent team of scientists that conducted a forensic investigation of the causes for the failure of levees and floodwalls during Hurricane Katrina.
Times-Picayune archive
Robert Bea, center, a University of California at Berkeley engineering professor, is better known in New Orleans as co-leader of a team of scientists that investigated the failure of levees and floodwalls during Hurricane Katrina.
In an effort to piece together the cause of the region’s most recent calamity, Bea has been gathering statements, transcripts and other communications from about 50 people since the accident, including workers on the rig, engineers who worked with the rig from onshore locations, and engineers and oilfield workers who have been active in drilling for decades.
“As the job unfolded, … the workers did have intermittent trouble with pockets of natural gas,” said one statement sent to Bea. “Highly flammable, the gas was forcing its way up the drill pipes. This was something BP had not foreseen as a serious problem, declaring a year earlier that gas was likely to pose only a ‘negligible’ risk. The government warned the company that gas buildup was a real concern and that BP should ‘exercise caution’”.
A second statement said, “At one point during the previous several weeks, so much of it came belching up to the surface that a loudspeaker announcement called for a halt to all ‘hot work’, meaning any smoking, welding, cooking or any other use of fire. Smaller belches, or ‘kicks,’ had stalled work as the job was winding down” in the days before the accident. Bea said he could not name the people who gave the statements or reveal their positions.
Chilling image of explosion, chaos on rig
The material paints a chilling image of the violent force of the rig explosions and the chaos that ensued as rig workers tried to escape spewing mud, seawater and methyl hydrates in the form of icy slush. That same type of frozen natural gas blocked BP’s attempts during the weekend to control the well leak with a huge box lowered 5,000 feet to the sea floor.
Back on April 20, the slush forced its way to the rig, shot 240 feet in the air and heated into a gas that quickly ignited into fireballs, Bea’s witness accounts say. Among those tossed asunder by the explosions were BP officials who were on the rig to celebrate a seven-year spotless safety record.
Bea also said the statements he has gathered back up a report last week by The Times-Picayune about the questionable choice made by oil giant BP, rig owner Transocean and others to remove heavy drilling mud that was supposed to help tamp down destructive gas kicks.
The witness statements add to the story’s clarity just as the Coast Guard and Minerals Management Service begin hearings Tuesday at a Kenner hotel to try to determine what went wrong. The civil courts may provide another vector for understanding the accident, as lawyers continue to file suits against BP, Transocean and other companies connected with the Deepwater Horizon. Among the defendants in those suits: Halliburton, a contractor responsible for installing key cement barriers that were supposed to keep gas out of the well in the first place, and Cameron International, the manufacturer of the blowout preventer valves that were supposed to be a last-ditch way to shut off the well, but failed.
Risk assessment questions raised
Bea believes the narrative he is creating raises serious questions about the risk assessments used by BP and the Minerals Management Service, the federal agency charged with determining whether the drilling plans were adequate.
‘The same trail of tears led to Katrina … and it’s showing up here again,’ professor Robert Bea says.
They failed to address what’s called “residual risk,” those things that planners don’t think will fail. And in doing so, they underestimated the risk in ways very similar to the engineers who designed New Orleans’ levee system, Bea said.
“BP fell into the same damn trap, and they were not engineering; they were ‘imagineering,’” he said. “Risk analysis continues to mislead us because we’re only looking at part of the risk.
“The same trail of tears led to Katrina, to the Massey Big Branch (coal) mine disaster, and it’s showing up here again,” Bea said.
“For me, the tragedy of Katrina was floating bodies and the homes and businesses that were destroyed,” he said. “This time, it’s different. Certainly the people on the rig were killed and the pieces of equipment were destroyed, but like Katrina, there’s another non-voting population getting hurt this time and it is those marine animals that are our equivalents.”
Frequent gas kicks reported
Bea said he has spent more than 200 hours reviewing first-hand reports of the Deepwater Horizon’s operations. A constant theme was that gas kicks were more frequent in this oilfield than others the crew had worked on, and members were concerned.
The situation was particularly tense a few weeks before the accident, when the exploratory drill had made it down the 5,000-foot riser pipe from the rig to the sea floor and penetrated more than halfway down to the oil that awaited some 18,000 feet below that.
“One gas kick that occurred as they got toward the bottom of the hole, approximately 10,000 feet below the sea floor, was such a large gas kick that they had to shut down operations,” Bea said. “They were concerned about spark sources (on the rig at the surface) so they had to shut it down, because there was so much gas coming out of the rig and they were afraid of the explosion.”
Deposits of oil are not in underground caverns; they ooze in the pores of a sponge-like layer of rock, along with natural gas in both gaseous and the crystallized hydrate forms. But the hydrates also exist throughout the drilled rock formations, and like the oil below, they exert upward pressure when a drilling operation opens a path to the surface.
In the incident that forced Deepwater Horizon to shut down drilling temporarily, workers in the rig’s drilling mudroom stabilized the situation by putting a heavier form of “mud,” actually a mixture of clay and chemicals, into the drill-pipe as a counter-balance, pushing down against the upward pressure of the gas, Bea said.
‘Uh oh’
A transcript Bea collected from a witness says the companies were confident enough they had a lucrative oil source that they decided to convert from an exploratory well to a more permanent production well, a process that requires them to apply a metal and cement casing to the well hole. They chose casing 7 inches in diameter, Bea said, and that was further sealed with cement pumped in by Halliburton. Bea said his sources reported that Halliburton was using a “new” kind of cement for the seal, something the scientist said made him say, “Uh oh.”
“The cement is infused with chemicals and nitrogen, and those chemicals and nitrogen form a frothy cement that is like shaving soap sprayed from a can,” Bea said. “It was put in there because of the concern about damage or destruction of the seals by methane hydrates.”
The crew on the Deepwater Horizon waited 20 hours for the cement job to cure before opening a key valve at the wellhead so they could place a final cement plug about 5,000 feet down the well. Bea gives Halliburton credit for writing “many excellent papers” in the past two years about the challenge of setting cement seals in the presence of large amounts of methane hydrates, which the Deepwater Horizon crew encountered in spades.
“Because of the chemicals they’ve added, they think the cement can cure rapidly,” Bea said.
But Halliburton’s awareness of cementing’s challenges did not stop the cement from failing in the Deepwater Horizon’s well. The chemicals they added for the curing process also create a lot of heat, which can thaw the methane hydrate into the gas that causes dangerous kicks, Bea said.
“I call that ‘Uh oh’ again,” he said.
A heated debate described
One of Bea’s witness transcripts describes in detail a heated debate among BP, Halliburton and Transocean officials as they are about to add the final cement plug to the well, 5,000 below the wellhead and 10,000 feet below the rig. They argued about whether to set the plug with drilling mud still in the well and riser, or if they should do it with lighter sea water there instead.
Michael DeMocker / The Times-Picayune
A cloud of smoke that could be seen for over 25 miles rises over the gulf as fireboats try to extinguish the blaze on the Deepwater Horizon. Robert Bea said the first explosion occurred in the mud pit room, where drilling mud is mixed and stored. The two engineers ion that room were killed instantly, Bea said.
As The Times-Picayune reported last week, Bea’s witness claims the decision was made to displace the heavy mud barrier with water before the final plug was set in order to finish the job more quickly.. The crew was planning to temporarily abandon the well, and before leaving, they would need to remove the riser and the blowout preventer, a massive stack of valves and slicing rams that are supposed to shut off the well in case of an emergency, and some time later another operation would re-tap the well to extract its riches.
The mud in the riser would have to be replaced with salt water before the crew could take the final step of removing the blowout preventer, or else polluting mud and chemicals would spill into the sea, angering environmental regulators. But based on Bea’s witness, who describes the debate on board the rig and with officials in Houston, there was still a question about whether to replace the mud before the final plug was set.
“The debate comes back that it’s been pressure-tested, the coast is clear, so they will displace the upper 10,000 feet of heavy mud and replace it with salt water,” Bea said. “This is a crucial step, and the reason it’s crucial is if the seal at the bottom is fine, it’s OK, but if it’s not OK, we’re screwed. We don’t have enough pressure (from mud) in the column anymore to fight the reservoir (gas and liquid) pressure.”
Bea says it’s unclear how far down the well the crew managed to get the final cement plug before the destructive blowout. But he said it’s clear the process was under way because an important valve in the blowout preventer stack, called the annular valve, was open to allow the plug assembly pipes through. Once the well’s lining or bottom plug was breached, the gas had a 10,000-foot path clear of both mud and shut-off valves all the way to the water’s surface.
‘A geyser of water’
Three witness reports gathered by Bea describe what happened next. “A geyser of water” shot 240 feet into the air, he said, followed by “gas that spills out in the moon pool area, onto the drill deck and begins spreading. They can smell it, they can see it, but in this stage it does not ignite. It looks like ice slush, and they can see the gas emanating from it.”
The next thing workers on the drill floor saw was mud, the three accounts say. The workers know there’s trouble because the mud can only be coming from 10,000 feet down, not from the riser where it can block a gas kick, Bea said.
“At this point, calls come from the rig asking for more mud,” Bea said the transcripts show. “I’m certain these radio calls will ultimately be traced and produced. This is at 7 p.m.”
The reason nothing ignited initially is that the 21-by-93-foot moon pool, a well in the center of the drill ship, is carefully designed to remove any sources of sparks. But in the mud room and the galley and elsewhere, there are pumps with exposed metal parts. Soon, the gas did ignite when it came in contact with those, Bea said, and the descriptions in the transcripts are dramatic.
Bea said that the first explosion occurred in the mud pit room, a room where drilling mud is mixed and stored in big bins. The two engineers responding to requests for more mud in an attempt to control the runaway well were killed instantly, he said.
That explosion also blew out the wall leading to the galley, where a party was being held.
“The party is to celebrate the Transocean Deepwater Horizon going for seven years without an accident,” Bea said. Present were several BP engineers or executives, who traveled to the rig for the celebration, he said.
‘Here’s where I broke down …’
“The explosion hurls them against the other wall” of the galley, Bea said. “Here’s where I broke down when I read it…. It describes bodies being broken, necks gashed and people bleeding, and now everybody’s in the dark. People are screaming for help. People are busy helping their comrades get to two lifeboats.
“People in the lifeboats are screaming, ‘We’ve got to get out of here!’ but the lifeboats aren’t full,” Bea said. “The doors slam and they drop the (lifeboats), and as they do, they can see some of their colleagues jumping into the sea. They can see their outlines because the rig is burning behind them.
“Back on the drill floor, all hell has broken loose. Explosions are propagating from the mud pit room back toward them,” Bea said. “At that point, one transcript that’s obviously been an observer heading toward the lifeboats says the drill floor disappears in a ball of flame. And at that point, the three on-board transcripts stop.”
Bea said the concluding paragraph from one of those observing the explosion summed up the depth of the failure.
“In order for a disaster of this magnitude to happen, more than one thing has to go wrong, or fail. First, a shitty cement job. The wellhead packoff/seal assembly (the equipment directly below the blowout preventer that connects the lower pipe casing to the preventer) while designed to hold the pressure, is just a backup. And finally, the ability to close the well in with the BOP somehow went away,” the witness said.


Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)

• no wonder the rig explosion survivors were taken to that hotel in Kenner
  
• british petroleum has spent 350 million so far
  
• up to 4 million gallons of oil spilled
  

~ by maringouin on Tuesday, May 11, 2010.

[Peter Lemkin]

Little known to the public, but known in the oil industry and environmental sciences - these are deposits below the sea bottom of a solid form of methane in a clathrate structure with water. It is estimated that there are HUGE deposits of it, but to date NO ONE has figured out a safe way to deal with it. It is under enormous pressure and when the pressure is released it turns from solid [or slush] into a gas and often to usually will spontaneously explode! Deposits of this substance can be small to medium-sized, but absolutely ENORMOUS deposits of it have been found. In fact, one theory is that one of the great die-offs in the geological record may very well have been a natural release of one such GIANT pool of methane hydrate, altering the atmosphere enough to cause climate change and subsequent die-off of many life-forms.....and now humans want to play with this stuff. In fact, when this crew had the first hint of any in their deposit, they should have shut it down....but greed won the day....and is still winning the 'day' and ruining the planet. Capitalism just doesn't work any more - less so when totally unregulated [except in faux fashion by the capitalists themselves]! :bootyshake: :flute:

Here is a non-technical article on the subject:
Did Deepwater Methane Hydrates Cause the BP Gulf Explosion?
Strange and dangerous hydrocarbon offers no room for human error
by David Sassoon - May 19th, 2010 in AADE, BP, Cementing, Charles Paull, DOE, Gulf Oil Disaster, Halliburton, Methane Hydrates, Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, NETL, Transocean


The vast deepwater methane hydrate deposits of the Gulf of Mexico are an open secret in big energy circles. They represent the most tantalizing new frontier of unconventional energy — a potential source of hydrocarbon fuel thought to be twice as large as all the petroleum deposits ever known.

For the oil and gas industry, the substances are also known to be the primary hazard when drilling for deepwater oil.

Methane hydrates are volatile compounds — natural gas compressed into molecular cages of ice. They are stable in the extreme cold and crushing weight of deepwater, but are extremely dangerous when they build up inside the drill column of a well. If destabilized by heat or a decrease in pressure, methane hydrates can quickly expand to 164 times their volume.

Survivors of the BP rig explosion told interviewers that right before the April 20 blast, workers had decreased the pressure in the drill column and applied heat to set the cement seal around the wellhead. Then a quickly expanding bubble of methane gas shot up the drill column before exploding on the platform on the ocean's surface.

Even a hardened steel pipe has little chance against a 164-fold expansion of volume — something that would render a man six feet six inches tall suddenly the height of the Eiffel Tower.


Scientists are well aware of the awesome power of these strange hydrocarbons. A sudden large scale release of methane hydrates is believed to have caused a mass extinction 55 million years ago. Among planners concerned with mega-disasters, their sudden escape is considered to be a threat comparable to an asteroid strike or nuclear war. The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a Livermore, Ca.-based weapons design center, reports that when released on a large scale, methane hydrates can even cause tsunamis.

So it is not surprising to anyone who knows about the physics of these compounds that the Deepwater Horizon rig was lost like a waterfly crumpled by a force of nature scientists are still just getting to know.

Number One Deepwater Drilling Issue

SolveClimate contacted scientists at the Colorado School of Mines, Center for Hydrate Research, who focus on the fundamental science and engineering of methane hydrates to gain further insight. They did not want to speculate on the role that methane hydrates could have played in the BP disaster, but they were willing to provide a basic understanding of the nature and behavior of these familiar but little understood substances.

"Gas hydrates are the number one flow assurance issue in deepwater drilling," Carolyn Koh, an associate professor and co-director of the Hydrate Center, told us in an exclusive interview.


She explained that the oil and gas industry has a lot of experience with methane hydrates, because they have to be kept from forming in pipes or they will clog the lines, stop the flow of oil, and pose a danger. Drillers use inhibitors such as methanol to keep the hydrates from crystallizing inside drill rigs operating at great depth, where conditions for methane hydrate formation are ideal.


This film clip of an experiment conducted on the ocean floor near the Deepwater Horizon drilling site demonstrates how quickly and easily methane hydrates can form. It was conducted by the Gulf of Mexico Hydrates Research Consortium aboard the Seward Johnson in September 2006. The voices of the scientists conducting the experiment are clearly audible.

The clip shows with remarkable clarity a robotic arm maneuvering a clear tube over a stream of hydrate bubbles
emanating from a crater on the sea
floor. Within minutes, gas trapped in the tube begins to form a visible solid — a white ice matrix — thanks to the extreme cold and pressure of the ocean depth. When the tube is inverted, the hydrate, less dense than seawater, floats out of the tube, dissociating into its components, gas and water.

Oil and gas drillers encounter far greater volumes of methane hydrate than the gentle stream of bubbles escaping from a small fissure that are shown in the film.

Amadeu Sum, an assistant professor at the Colorado School of Mines and also a co-director of the Hydrate Center, explained that methane hydrates can be encountered by drillers in the deep ocean where methane hydrates are trapped in sediments beneath the ocean floor.

Vast Deposits in Ocean Sediments

Professor Sum explained gas and oil flow up the pipe together in normal drilling operations. These hydrocarbons occur naturally together in conventional drilling operations. The deepwater of the Gulf of Mexico, and other places where methane hydrates exist, present drillers with special safety challenges.

For one thing, methane hydrates are believed to exist in vast deposits underneath the ocean floor, trapped by nature in ocean sediments. Deepwater drillers could find themselves drilling through these natural hydrate deposits.

Professor Sum said geologists know much less about these hydrate-bearing sediments than conventional ocean sediments, and that there is "little knowledge of the risks" of drilling into them.


The Deepwater Horizon rig was drilling in Block 252 of an area known as the Mississippi Canyon of the Gulf, thought to contain methane hydrate-bearing sediments, according to government maps. The platform was operating less than 20 miles from a methane hydrate research site located in the same canyon at Block 118.

From the sea floor a mile down, the Deepwater Horizon rig had penetrated another 18,000 feet — almost another five miles down — into the earth's crust with pipe.

According to the National Academy of Sciences, which published a bullish report on the energy potential of methane hydrates,

"Industry practice is to avoid methane-bearing areas during drilling for conventional oil and gas resources for safety reasons."


Professor Sum explained that because "with oil there is usually gas present," it is possible for methane hydrates to form in the pipe even when not drilling through hydrate-bearing sediments. The pressure and cold of the deepwater create conditions that encourage gas flowing into the pipe to form hydrates, and if the rate of crystallization is rapid enough, the hydrates can clog the pipe.

The cofferdam that BP lowered over the broken pipe gushing oil to contain the spill was almost immediately clogged by methane hydrates, which formed spontaneously. Gas escaping with the oil from the well, when trapped in the steel structure with cold water under great pressure, rapidly accumulated into an ice-like matrix.

Documented Explosive Hazard

In a book about methane hydrates, which Professor Koh co-authored, brief mention is made of a case in which methane hydrates caused a gas pipe to rupture on land, leading to loss of life.

Two workers were attempting to clear a line in which a hydrate plug had formed. The authors say that "the impact of a moving hydrate mass" caused the pipe to fail. The explosion caused a large piece of pipe to strike the foreman, killing him. The book then quotes from the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers Hydrate Guidelines to describe proper procedures for safely removing a hydrate plug in a pipe on land.

SolveClimate was not able to find more detailed public documentation of this incident in Alberta, but mention is made in an article in a publication of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, a federal research center associated with the Department of Energy, of a different unspecified incident on a drilling rig.

"Forces from methane hydrate dissociation have been blamed for a damaging shift in a drilling rig's foundation, causing a loss of $100 million," the article reports.


Although public discussion of damage from methane hydrate accidents appears to be minimal, the danger is well-recognized within the industry. Last November, one Halliburton executive gave a presentation before a meeting of the American Association of Drilling Engineers in Houston, titled "Deepwater Cementing Consideration to Prevent Hydrate Destabilization."

It recognizes that the cementing process releases heat which can destabilize methane hydrates, and presents something called Cement System 2 as a solution to the problem. One of the graphs shows that the system doesn't achieve gel strength for four hours.

Yet according to an eyewitness report broadcast on Sunday on 60 Minutes, BP managers made the decision to decrease pressure in the well column by removing drilling mud before the cement had solidified in three plugs Halliburton had poured.

When a surge of gas started shooting up the well, a crucial seal on the blowout preventer at the well head on the ocean floor failed. It had been damaged weeks before and neglected as inconsequential by Transocean managers, according to the CBS news broadcast, even after chunks of rubber emerged from the drilling column on the surface.

According to the Associated Press, the victims of the Deepwater Horizon explosion said the blast occurred right after workers "introduced heat to set the cement seal around the wellhead." It is not known if Halliburton was employing Cement System 2, and testifying before the Senate last week, a Halliburton executive made no mention of methane hydrate hazards associated with cementing in deepwater.

A Promising Substance

Professors Koh and Sum are concerned that a focus on the dangers of methane hydrates in deepwater drilling will obscure their promise as an energy solution of the future. They are conducting research in the laboratory to create methane hydrates synthetically in order to take advantage of their peculiar properties. With their potential to store gas (both natural gas and hydrogen) efficiently within a crystalline structure, hydrogen hydrates could one day offer a potential solution for making fuel cells operate economically. Still at the fundamental stage, their work on storage is not yet complete enough to apply to commercial systems.

At the same time, there is an international competition underway to develop technology to harvest the vast deposits of methane hydrates in the world's oceans. Japan has joined the US and Canada in pursuit of this energy bonanza, motivated by the $23 billion it spends annually to import liquefied natural gas.

According to a Bloomberg News article called "Japan Mines Flammable Ice, Flirts with Environmental Disaster," the Japanese trade ministry is targeting 2016 to start commercial production, even as a Tokyo University scientist warned against causing a massive undersea landslide that could suddenly trigger a massive methane hydrate release.

The U.S. has a research program underway in collaboration with the oil industry, authorized by the Methane Hydrate Research and Development Act of 1999. The National Methane Hydrates R&D Program is housed at the National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) of the Department of Energy.

The National Academy of Sciences provided a briefing for Congress last January on the energy potential of methane hydrates based on its report which asserts that "no technical challenges have been identified as insurmountable" in the pursuit of commercial production of methane hydrates.

In the wake of the BP oil disaster, SolveClimate attempted to contact Dr. Charles Paull of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, the lead author of the report. He was unavailable for comment, attending an international workshop on methane hydrates research in New Zealand from May 10-12, and according to his assistant, out of email contact.

[Ed Jewett]

Sunday, May 23, 2010

The Big Picture: Why Was Deepwater Drilling Allowed in the Gulf, And Why Is It So Hard to Stop the Oil Gusher?



It is obvious that the government failed to properly ensure that BP used adequate safety measures, that BP and their contractors were criminally negligent for the oil spill, and that the response by them and the government has been to cover up the problem. See this.
But why are oil companies being allowed to drill so deeply under the Gulf in the first place? In other words, why has the government been so supportive of deepwater drilling in the Gulf? Without understanding what is really driving events in the Gulf, we cannot understand the big picture.

Oil Is Considered A National Security Issue
The answer - as Roger Anderson and Albert Boulanger of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory note - is that there is a tremendous amount of more oil deep under the Gulf, and that the United States government considers oil drilling in the deep waters of the Gulf as a national security priority:

The oil and gas industry and the United States government both face tremendous challenges to explore discover, appraise, develop, and exploit vast new hydrocarbon reserves in waters deeper than 6000 feet in the ultra-deepwater of the Gulf of Mexico. Yet these new reserves of hydrocarbons are needed to offset the economically detrimental, long-term decline in production from within the borders of the United States

***

If successfully developed, the new play concept would fill an essential gap in the overall strategic defenses of the United States by decreasing the gap that results in the nation's dependence on foreign oil and gas reserves in this volatile and hostile, post 9/11 world. However, the successful production of oil and gas from this new carbonate play concept requires much more cost-efficient evaluation and appraisal technologies than exist today to economically conduct exploration, appraisal, and development activities. These new technologies must be developed before production can be practical in the ultra-deepwater operating environment.... The Ultra-Deepwater and Unconventional Gas Trust Fund of the DOE has as its mission to cut costs and time-to-market not incrementally, but radically, so that the United States can optimally utilize these strategic hydrocarbon reserves. The DOE, with extensive industry,academic and non-governmental assistance, developed an Offshore Technology Roadmap ...,

***

The U. S. Energy Bill of 2002 has allocated significant resources to fund innovative industry, academic, and national laboratory research initiatives to develop the new technologies necessary to explore and produce these new ultra-deepwater reserves economically. The purpose is not only to impact the national defense, but also to regain our international technological leadership in the deepwater, recently lost to the Brazilians, Norwegians, and Europeans.

***
Congress, never a big friend to energy interests, has acted to create the Ultra-deepwater Trust Fund that would add an astounding $200 billion by 2017, if successful at developing the new production technologies required.

So the Department of Energy and Congress have committed to development of the deepwater Gulf oil reserves in the name of national security.

But let's take a step back and ask why the government considers oil a national security priority in the first place?
Well, the U.S. military is the largest consumer of oil in the world. As NPR reported in 2007:

All the U.S. tanks, planes and ships guzzle 340,000 barrels of oil a day, making the American military the single-largest purchaser and consumer of oil in the world.
If the Defense Department were a country, it would rank about 38th in the world for oil consumption, right behind the Philippines.

As Reuters pointed out in 2008:

U.S. military fuel consumption dwarfs energy demand in many countries around the world, adding up to nearly double the fuel use in Ireland and 20 times more than that of Iceland, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.

And as I summarized last year:

Sara Flounders writes:
By every measure, the Pentagon is the largest institutional user of petroleum products and energy in general. Yet the Pentagon has a blanket exemption in all international climate agreements.

***
The Feb. 17, 2007, Energy Bulletin detailed the oil consumption just for the Pentagon's aircraft, ships, ground vehicles and facilities that made it the single-largest oil consumer in the world.
***
Even according to rankings in the 2006 CIA World Factbook, only 35 countries (out of 210 in the world) consume more oil per day than the Pentagon.
***
As I pointed out out last week:
Professor Michael Klare noted in 2007:

Sixteen gallons of oil. That's how much the average American soldier in Iraq and Afghanistan consumes on a daily basis -- either directly, through the use of Humvees, tanks, trucks, and helicopters, or indirectly, by calling in air strikes. Multiply this figure by 162,000 soldiers in Iraq, 24,000 in Afghanistan, and 30,000 in the surrounding region (including sailors aboard U.S. warships in the Persian Gulf) and you arrive at approximately 3.5 million gallons of oil: the daily petroleum tab for U.S. combat operations in the Middle East war zone.

And in 2008, Oil Change International released a report showing that etween March 2003 and October 2007 the US military in Iraq purchased more than 4 billion gallons of fuel from the Defense Energy Support Center, the agency responsible for procuring and supplying petroleum products to the Department of Defense.

Indeed, Alan Greenspan, John McCain, George W. Bush, Sarah Palin, a high-level National Security Council officer and others all say that the Iraq war was really about oil.

Are you starting to get the picture?
Personally, I strongly believe that it is vital for our national security - and our economy - to switch from dependence on oil to a basket of alternative energies. As I pointed out Friday:

It's not just the one BP oil rig. For example, since the Deepwater Horizon oil drilling rig exploded on April 20th, the Obama administration has granted oil and gas companies at least 27 exemptions from doing in-depth environmental studies of oil exploration and production in the Gulf of Mexico. Then there are the 12 new oil and gas drilling rigs launched in the U.S. this week.

And a whistleblower who survived the Gulf oil explosion claims in a lawsuit that BP's operations at another oil platform risk another catastrophic accident that could "dwarf" the Gulf oil spill, partly because BP never even reviewed critical engineering designs for the operation. And see this.

And Nobel prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz says that the Iraq war alone will cost $3-5 trillion dollars.

In addition, experts say that the Iraq war has [B]increased the threat of terrorism. See this, this, this, this, this, this and this.

But existing national policy is to do whatever is necessary - drilling deep under the Gulf and launching our military abroad - to secure oil.
Does the Geology of the Spill Zone Make It Harder to Stop the Oil Spill?

We also can't understand the big picture behind the Gulf oil spill unless we know the underwater geology of the seabed and the underlying rocks.
For example, if there is solid rock beneath the leaking pipes, with channels leading to other underground spaces, then it might be possible to seal the whole spill zone, with the oil - hopefully - oozing somewhere under the seabed so that it won't spill into the ocean.

If, on the other hand, there is hundreds of feet of sand or mud beneath the leaking pipes, then sealing the spill zone might not work, as the high-pressure oil gusher would just leak out somewhere else.

BP has never publicly released geological cross-sections of the seabed and underlying rock. BP's Initial Exploration Plan refers to "structure contour maps" and "geological cross sections", but such drawings are designated "proprietary information" and have been kept under wraps.

It is impossible to determine the geology from drawings publicly released by BP, such as this one:


However, Anderson and Boulanger describe the basic geology of the oil-rich parts of the Gulf in the paper described above:

Production in the deepwater province is centered in turbidite sands recently deposited from the Mississippi delta. Even more prolific rates have been recorded in the carbonates of Mexico, with the Golden Lane and Campeche reporting 100,000 barrel per day production from single wells. However, most of the deep and ultra-deepwater Gulf of Mexico is covered by the Sigsbee salt sheet that forms a large, near-surface “moonscape” culminating at the edge of the continental slope in an 800 meter high escarpment.
***
Salt is the dominant structural element of the ultra-deepwater Gulf of Mexico petroleum system. Large horizontal salt sheets, driven by the huge Plio-Pleistocene to Oligocene sediment dump of the Mississippi, Rio Grande and other Gulf Coast Rivers, dominate the slope to the Sigsbee escarpment. Salt movement is recorded by large, stepped, counter-regional growth faults and down-to-the-basin fault systems soling into evacuated salt surfaces. Horizontal velocities of salt movement to the south are in the several cm/year range, making this supposedly passive margin as tectonically active as most plate boundaries.
***
Porosities over 30 percent and permeabilities greater than one darcy in deepwater turbidite reservoirs have been commonly cited. Compaction and diagenesis of deepwater reservoir sands are minimal because of relatively recent and rapid sedimentation. Sands at almost 20,000 feet in the auger field (Garden Banks 426) still retain a porosity of 26% and a permeability of almost 350mdarcies. Pliocene and Pleistocene turbidite sands in the Green Canyon 205 field have reported porosities ranging from 28 to 32% with permeabilities between 400 mdarcies and 3 darcies. Connectivity in sheet sands and amalgamated sheet and channel sands is high for deepwater turbidite reservoirs and recovery efficiencies are in the 40-60% range.

See also this.
The BP oil spill leak is occurring in the "Macondo" Prospect, Block 252, in the Mississippi Canyon Area of the Gulf (much of the oil-rich areas under the Gulf are in the Mississippi Canyon and Fan areas: "In the central Gulf of Mexico, the Mississippi Canyon and Fan system is the dominant morphologic feature").

If the geology at Block 252 of the Macondo Prospect are like that described by Anderson and Boulanger, then it might be difficult to stop the oil gusher without completing relief wells (which will take a couple of months).
Specifically, if there are salt layers on the top of the seabed, with high porosity near the surface, and salt movement, then sealing the whole leak zone might not work.
Unless the government releases details of the geology underlying the spill site, people will not have an accurate picture of the oil spill situation. And failure to release such information may prevent creative scientists from coming up with a workable solution.

Note: The first draft of Anderson and Boulanger's paper, in 2001, stated:

No means currently exists to produce oil and gas to market from such water depths!

(emphasis in original).
In other words, while BP, its subcontractors, and the government were all negligent with regard to the Deepwater Horizon operation, it should be noted that drilling at such depths is brand-new technology.

As such, the dangers of deepwater drilling in general should not be underestimated.

[Ed Jewett]

I am not sure if there is anything meaningful here that can be excerpted from this, who this is, etc. Caveat lector.

http://monkeyfister.blogspot.com/2010/05...below.html


And viewer beware here too...

this is a video that has been posted elsewhere that, among other things, alleges a false flag attack pulled off by Blackwater.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNNUqc4yqkw
worth watching --- suggests this was an act of corporate-mil sabotage
with intel on evac plans and odd slip of the tongue by white house spokesguy

http://www.commongroundcommonsense.org/f...&p=1114432