Time To Nuke The Leak? – Part 2
quote>Matt Simmons was on Bloomberg earlier, adding some additional perspective to his original appearance on the station, in which he initially endorsed the nuclear option as the only viable way to resolve the oil spill. Simmons refutes even the latest oil spill estimate of 45,000-60,000 barrels per day, and in quoting research by the Thomas Jefferson research vessel which was compiled late on Sunday, quantifies the leak at 120,000 bpd. What is scarier is that according to the Jefferson the oil lake underneath the surface of the water could be covering up to 40% of the entire Gulf of Mexico. Simmons also says that as the leak has no casing, a relief well will not work, and the only possible resolution is, as he said previously, to use a small nuclear explosion to convert the rock to glass. Simmons concludes that as punishment for BP’s arrogance and stupidity the government “will take all their cash.” Now if only our own administration could tell us the truth about what is really happening in the gulf…
The Oil Drum (Blog) – BP’s Deepwater Oil Spill – Why the Flow Rates are Increasing
Now you will notice that this says nothing about those ideas such as that propounded by Dougr that the casing has been cracked and oil is escaping into the surrounding rock., and that the casing is becoming a lot weaker. There are two reasons for this, firstly if there was a crack, in the same way as with the BOP, then over time that would have been eaten away as oil, gas and mud flowed through it. Once a flow starts it will rapidly eat out a larger passage, as the above has demonstrated. Once that passage was created then oil flow through it to the surface would make it impossible to see what was going on around the well (look at the cloud above the BOP). In fact there are very clear pictures from under the BOP. This would seem to show that there is no oil leaking there at present. The other thing to remember is that BP are planning on using the second LMRP cap effectively as a seal on the well. They could not do that if the upper segments of the casing were damaged, and I imagine that they have enough data from the Top Kill testing to reassure themselves of that.
Comment
Let us summarize the two posts above.
Both speculate that the well casing (the pipes in the ground) might be cracked or damaged. If so, this is a very serious problem. It also means that BP might actually be telling the truth.
If the casing is cracked or damaged then oil is flowing out around the casing. They argue this is confirmed by the live video showing mud flowing from the leak. This mud is a sign of erosion, so the well hole is increasing in size and a larger hole means a larger leak. So, BP is not hiding the true size of the leak. Rather, the erosion is making it constantly increase. They also argue here that the “top kill” and “junk shot” attempts to bury the leak with mud and junk have made the situation worse as it forced more oil out of the damaged casing and increased the erosion, thus increasing the rate of the leak.
It also means the relief well will not work as the leak is literally a hole in the ground or a crack in the earth. Pumping cement or mud from a relief well into a cracked or damaged casing will just leak out the top as the oil pressure carries it out.
So, other than waiting 25 years or so for the pressure to naturally stop the leak, how does one stop this kind of leak? Two weeks ago we highlighted another Matt Simmons interview where he suggested drilling a hole next to the leak and inserting a nuclear bomb to collapse the hole. Simmons noted that this would be a low level nuke under 5,000 feet of water and possibly another 1,500 to 2,000 feet under the seabed. At this level one would not notice such a detonation even if sitting in a row boat above it. Radiation leaks would be minimal. Simmons also noted that the Russians used this method several times to stop leaks from the 1960s to 1980s. This post also highlights an early May Russian TV interview that details nuke use to stop a leak in the mid-1960s.
That said, can you imagine the political ramifications of nuking the seabed? It would be nothing short of pandemonium.
Maybe this analysis is correct, maybe not. That said, this crisis continues to search for solutions.
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June 16th, 2010 at 4:04 pm
“It also means the relief well will not work as the leak is literally a hole in the ground or a crack in the earth. Pumping cement or mud from a relief well into a cracked or damaged casing will just leak out the top as the oil pressure carries it out. ”
You are correct that if the casing leak is 1,000 feet below the sea floor, then a top kill won’t work because the drilling mud and cement plug attempt just flow out of the leak, or if the top plug sticks, the reservoir pressure will push the oil out through the casing leak.
However, I think the point of the relief well is to attach to the current casing far BELOW the current casing leak, use the relief well to divert oil and reduce oil pressure in the current casing enough that:
(A) a top-kill into the current casing using drilling mud CAN work – then plug the current casing from sea floor to below the casing leak. The current casing including the casing leak would be permanently sealed, and the relief well becomes the new well topped by a BOP and control structure.
or
(B) the relief well is used to directly plug the current casing and the relief well casing (methods unknown- intra-casing valves, bottom junk shot?), sealing all wells permanently.
Optimistic, sure, but it is hard to believe that there is simply NOTHING that a fully-marshalled, large-scale human effort could do to stop the flow other than a nuclear device. Bankrupt BP on the way to spending $100 billion to stop this before nuking the sea floor in the hopes that works and doesn’t cause more problems.
June 16th, 2010 at 5:36 pm
“At this level one would not notice such a detonation even if sitting in a row boat above it. Radiation leaks would be minimal.”
I would like evidence that the detonation would not be noticed. With 100% certainty, can you state that the seabed would not collapse if the parent material 1,000 feet below the sea floor vaporizes? Can you state with 100% certainty that water rushing into fill such a void would not create a tsunami?
When you state radiation would be minimal, what do you mean? A certain level above background radiation? How could you be so certain?
June 16th, 2010 at 5:58 pm
There was a story on Bloomberg today that said the well was only 50% cased…which means that more than likely due to poor engineering the relief well will not work…this was from a former exec @ BP now a prof in Houston…
rt
June 16th, 2010 at 6:16 pm
I wonder if a small nuclear explosion could fracture some of the pipelines or other infrastructures in the Gulf. Here’s an MMS map of leases and infrastructure in the GOM:
http://www.gomr.mms.gov/homepg/lsesale/visual1.pdf
(To view, I increased the size to 75%. You will need to study the legend at the bottom to identify items on the map.)
June 16th, 2010 at 10:56 pm
There is so much here that is unclear or unknown, from the nature of the strata to the interconnectedness of the deep reservoirs, and the potential unanticipated damage from huge shock waves through the deep reservoirs with God-knows-what effect on all the other wells in the Gulf, that talk of “nuking” the well just makes me nauseous.
We (human beings) have zero experience with using this method of closing oil wells in blowout, either on land or under a mile of ocean, where the pressures and conditions are completely different different from the only known experience at this — which was a number of Russian attempts to stop natural gas well blowouts, on land, in completely different rock. And those were not 100% successful. To expect anything remotely similar to that experience under a mile of water and even deeper under the ocean floor, with a mixture of oil and gas at insane pressures, and an unknown degree of isolation of one field from another is simply insane.
Maybe we should try nuking Simmons first, to see it it makes him emit anything more reasoned and sensible than the irrational crap he is spewing. But only after we first attempt a “junk shot” on him.
There is the possibility that this blowout will prove to be unstoppable, and the entire reservoir will empty into the Gulf over the next several decades, with a huge impact on sea life and fishing around the globe. It’s probably mentioned in the fine print of the BP prospectus, or in the “Risks” section. Every oil company probably has reference to “destroying huge chunks of the environment, that will take decades to end, and decades after that for the environment to recover” in the risks section of their prospectus. Or at least it seems like they should.
Drill, baby, drill.
June 17th, 2010 at 8:26 am
ApacheTrout Says:
I would like evidence that the detonation would not be noticed. With 100% certainty, can you state that the seabed would not collapse if the parent material 1,000 feet below the sea floor vaporizes? Can you state with 100% certainty that water rushing into fill such a void would not create a tsunami?
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I’m not a nuclear expert but it seems you overlooked the words LOW-LEVEL is the post above. Remove the image of the 1950s bikini islands test from your mind. This is not what we are talking about.
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constantnormal Says:
We (human beings) have zero experience with using this method of closing oil wells in blowout, either on land or under a mile of ocean, where the pressures and conditions are completely different different from the only known experience at this — which was a number of Russian attempts to stop natural gas well blowouts, on land, in completely different rock.
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My understanding is the Russians used nukes to seal wells several times between the 1960s and 1980s. If true, then we have more than zero experience.
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remember the nuke option is if the relief well fails. It is either that or let it pumped crude into the gulf for decades. If the relief well works, this conversation is moot.
Der Spiegel has an interesting article about the relief well
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,700759,00.html
the take away is these too are dangerous, their are cases where they blow out and then we have two leaking wells instead of one.
Der Spiegel also says it could be Autumn or later before the relief well ultimately works:
—
Although the BP engineers have already completed two-thirds of the first relief well, it is extremely difficult to find the out-of-control well in the middle of the bedrock, says David Rensink, incoming president of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists.
“You’re trying to intersect the well bore, which is about a foot wide, with another well bore, which is about a foot wide,” Rensink said recently. Hitting it with the first attempt, he adds, “would truly be like winning the lottery.”
Instead, the engineers will presumably have to repeatedly pull back the drill head to adjust the direction, Rensink predicts. “If they get it on the first three or four shots, they’d be very lucky.”
June 17th, 2010 at 8:46 am
Barry, this is great to see you are checking the Oil Drum as it is valuable on so many levels. I followed the comment threads there for a few weeks and you won’t find any pros from the oil patch who favor a nuke, even ‘low level’. In fact it is one of the top ten ridiculous suggestions along with the ‘giant screw’ and sinking a battleship on top of it.
As for relief wells, the pro consensus seems to be that tracking and imaging the drilling area is far more accurate than methods on hand in the last big sub-sea blowout in Mexico decades ago.
It is also important to bear in mind that the sub-sea canyon of the drill site location is really a very deep layer of Mississippi mud so it isn’t clear how well the ‘turn it to glass’ theory works.
June 17th, 2010 at 9:45 am
@Jim Bianco 8:26 am
I stand by my statement. My understanding is that the Russians only did this 5 times (4 of which worked), and only on dry land, in completely different geological formations, on natural gas wells that behave a lot differently than huge reservoirs of oil under immense pressure.
We have zero, repeat, ZERO, experience at extinguishing blown-out oil wells in weak strata several miles beneath a mile of water.
We are not able to assess the likelihood that such an explosion would not induce fractures in the rock far outside the sphere of glassification, or that the shock wave would not travel back through the oil reservoir and blow out other wells, possibly opening paths between deep reservoirs that did not previously exist. Natural gas is a highly compressible fluid, but oil? Not-so-much. Put immense pressure on a volume of oil, and that pressure gets communicated to the weakest spot in its current confinement. And if a nuke going off to collapse a borehole and fuse it into glass would not be described as “immense pressure”, I am missing the point of this exercise.
This situation is NOTHING REMOTELY SIMILAR to those that the Russians experimented with several decades ago. We have, nor has anyone else, EVER attempted to seal a high-pressure blowout of a very large oil reservoir under a mile of water and in rock that is apparently prone to fracturing. This is the wrong time to begin blindly experimenting, as the lesson learned could well be worse than the problem we are attempting to deal with.
Or, who knows, it might work … but are you willing to stand before Dirty Harry asking you, “D’ya feel lucky today, punk? WELL DO YA?” Because that is what the “fix it with a nuke” solution looks like to me. Before I would want to risk trying that, I would have to drill many holes and extract a lotta cores of rock, so that I knew what the nature of the underlying strata was for a hundred mile radius around the hole. And I would want to map the underground reservoirs, especially how close they come to each other, and understand the strength of the rock that separates them.
It would probably be faster to genetically enhance the natural bacteria that break down the oil, and turn them loose (although that has its own problems). Perhaps an armada of Costner’s centrifuge/filter-pumps could extract the oil from the GUlf. Maybe a hundred thousand of them could collect it faster than it was being spewed out (I don’t know enough details here either).
The point is that we don’t know enough to rush in and have even a ghost of a chance of making the situation better instead of worse. This is a time for more study and more thought, not faster actions.
And in the meantime we should hope like Hell that the relief wells successfully connect to the exiting hole, that some fraction of the casing is intact near the bottom, and that injecting cement at the bottom of the hole would bring it under control.
But based on the small amount of information that is leaking out from BP and the government, I think that we are looking at a situation that is degrading over time, and that may ultimately prove to be unstoppable by any existing technology (including nukes).
Sometimes — as when you back the Hummer out of the garage and over the neighbor’s kitten (or child) — bad things happen, and once they have happened, there is nothing that can be done to ameliorate the situation.
June 17th, 2010 at 10:13 am
ok, constantnormal you’re right. We have zero experience sealing an underwater well with nukes.
So, your advice is if the relief well fails, to let it leak for decades and destroy the southern half of this country.
Now let me repeat again, the nuke option is a last desperation attempt to collapse the well bore if the relief well option fails. It is either that or let the entire field empty into the gulf (or at least until the pressure drop enough to stop it).
June 18th, 2010 at 5:27 am
This is unimaginably bad. The nuke option has another challenge, what if it dont work? The oil keeps spewing? Then the oil is radioactive!
I think we just need to make giant underwater vacuums and siphon the oil outta there. It will take a year to set up but it will work. Maybe you need twenty of them or more, who knows.
We just damaged the Earth! Serious injury. If we dont get the lesson from this, I would say this is an existential warning shot. If the oil keeps going, it may poison the oceans and I could see it changing weather patterns, affecting the ocean currents and major weather patters.
This is the worst environmental catastrophe in Earths history, worse than Chernobyl, cos that had an endpoint
July 2nd, 2010 at 8:41 pm
A number of smart Scientist have figured out how to seal this well. And they are finally coming to my initial solution proposed 1.2 – 2 months ago. One needs to drill down 600 – 900 – 1200 ft deep in a parallel well. And they may need to drill three such wells. Each to contain the appropriate amount of
explosives to fracture the existing well causing the leak. The explosives can be a number of different kinds. The Armed Forces HQ will be the best to determine which would be best and least damaging to the eco system they are to be used in. With the three wells at different depths the explosives will need to be remotely detonated and protected each from the other so that if one fails to seal the next could be used and then the next in a controlled cascade. Each of the three should be able to due the job by itself.
First to crush the initial well causing the leak and second have enough shock wave on the return to implode the well with enough tonnage of rock and soil. The three will insure success.
This is no game get it done.
July 2nd, 2010 at 8:51 pm
The Sad thing about America is she has an answer but no one is listening.