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Senator Nelson: The BP Well May Have Lost Structural Integrity Beneath the Sea Floor
On June 2nd, Bloomberg pointed
out:
Plugging the well is another challenge
even after BP successfully intersects it, Robert Bea, a University of
California Berkeley engineering professor, said. BP has said it
believes the well bore to be damaged, which could hamper efforts to
fill it with mud and set a concrete plug, Bea said.
Bea
is an expert in
offshore drilling and a high-level governmental
adviser concerning disasters.
On the same day, the Wall Street
Journal noted
that there might be a leak in BP's well casing 1,000 feet beneath the
sea floor:
BP PLC has concluded that its
"top-kill" attempt last week to seal its broken well in the Gulf of
Mexico may have failed due to a malfunctioning disk inside the well
about 1,000 feet below the ocean floor.
***
The broken
disk may have prevented the heavy drilling mud injected into the well
last week from getting far enough down the well to overcome the
pressure from the escaping oil and gas, people familiar with BP's
findings said. They said much of the drilling mud may also have escaped
from the well into the rock formation outside the wellbore.
Yesterday,
Senator Bill Nelson told MSNBC that he's investigating reports of oil
seeping up from additional leak points on the seafloor:
Senator
Bill Nelson (D-FL): Andrea we’re looking into something new right now,
that there’s reports of oil that’s seeping up from the seabed… which
would indicate, if that’s true, that the well casing itself is actually
pierced… underneath the seabed. So, you know, the problems could be just
enormous with what we’re facing.
Andrea Mitchell, MSNBC: Now let
me understand better what you’re saying. If that is true that it is
coming up form that seabed, even the relief well won’t be the final
solution to cap this thing. That means that we’ve got oil gushing up at
disparate places along the ocean floor.
Sen. Nelson: That is
possible, unless you get the plug down low enough, below where the pipe
would be breached.
Indeed, loss of integrity in the
well itself may explain why BP is drilling its relief wells
approximately twelve
thousand feet (and see this)
beneath the leaking pipes on the seafloor.
And prominent oil
industry insider Matt Simmons believes
that the well casing may have been destroyed when the oil rig
exploded.
On May 27th, Simmons addressed this
issue on MSNBC:
On May 26th, Simmons referred
to this again on a second appearance on MSNBC:
And he referred to it again on Bloomberg on May 28th:
And again on MSNBC
yesterday:
Other updates on the Gulf oil situation:
As McClatchy wrote
yesterday, the 100,000 barrels
may still be gushing every day from the BOP/riser itself (forget the other leaks or the potentially broken well), even after the installation of the LMRP cap:
BP's runaway Deepwater Horizon well may be spewing
what the company once-called its worst case scenario — 100,000 barrels a
day, a member of the government panel told McClatchy Monday.
"In the data I've seen, there's nothing inconsistent with BP's worst
case scenario,"Ira Leifer, an associate researcher at the Marine
Science Institute of the University of California, Santa Barbara, and a
member of the government's Flow Rate Technical Group, told McClatchy.
Leifer said that based on satellite data he's examined, the rate of
flow from the well has been increasing over time, especially since BP's
"top kill" effort failed last month to stanch the flow. The decision
last week to sever the well's damaged riser pipe from the its blowout
preventer in order to install a "top hat" containment device has
increased the flow still more _ far more, Leifer said, than the 20
percent that BP and the Obama administration predicted.
Leifer noted that BP had estimated before the April 20 explosion
that caused the leak that a freely flowing pipe from the well would
release 100,000 barrels of oil a day in the worst-case scenario.
The oil was not freely flowing before the top kill or before they cut
the pipe, Leifer said, but once the riser pipe was cleared, there was
little blocking the oil's rise to the top of the blowout preventer.
Video images confirm that the flow of black oil is unimpeded.
"If
the pipe behaved as a worst-case estimate you would have no visual
change in the flow, and I don't see any obvious visual change," Leifer
said. "How much larger I don't know but let's just quote BP."
How
much oil is gushing from the well has been the subject of heated debate
for weeks, with independent scientists suggesting that as much as
95,000 barrels could be gushing into the Gulf of Mexico each day. For
more than a month BP and the Obama administration placed the figure at
5,000 barrels a day.
***
Leifer, who is described in the flow
rate's preliminary report released last week as a "world reknown
researcher" who's published more than 60 scientific articles, said BP
still has not delivered the data that scientists need for an accurate
appraisal of the spill's size.
"We're still waiting," he said.
»
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sorry to introduce anectdotal, undocumented commentary, but somewhere early on, and i cannot find the link now, i read that the BP drilling permit was for 18k feet and that they had drilled to 25k and that had something to do wtih the malfucntioning plug.
again, i have no documentation to offer as to the veracity of this comment. i simply saw it once and now i can't find it again...............
I heard something along those lines as well weeks ago. I don't doubt that they may have exceeded the drilling plan depth... things being so cozt with MMS and all...
everyone in the administration should be going for being in the administration.
Sorry. I really felt that was a necessary edit.
some are likely going in their pants, not so much for just being in the administration as for being in this (gutless, corrupt, mendacious, impractical, unimaginative, uninspiring...) administration in times that clearly call for courage, honor, truth, practicality, imagination, leadership... they would, perhaps, have gotten away with it in the eighties or nineties. but to jail them and not the bush administration just seems half-hearted and a missed opportunity.
Did you think I might had been a nut, too, when I was trying to explain this point about the source being below the seabed and that the other leaks along the sea floor shouldn't have anything to do with other rigs?
I'm still going with "if true..." also as it seems we're in stranger and stranger days when it comes to news reports and rumors and blogs and tweets and ZH.
I just missed the implications of what Simmons was trying to say initially. BP and the Gov never told us about the potential near surface structural failures in the well... which would have clued me in immediately. I was believing the problems were between the 7 7/8 and 7 inch production pipes 17,000 feet down. How the hell could they miss knowing a leak only 1,000 feet below the seabed is anyones guess!
And BTW... it's nothing personal thespian... I think we are ALL nuts these days!
Sounds like all three of us have been reading Cog Dis's dissertation lately.
I too was in the oilfields a long time ago (a 'mud engineer'), so this GoM blowout practically breaks my heart. We need the oil out there in the Gulf. But, we need a clean Gulf too.
I hope that the offshore oil guys are MUCH MORE CAREFUL now. But, we do need the oil until we have new energy sources.
The last question of the latest DR Show video Simmons talks of a "oil lake" being dumped on the Gulf Coast by a hurricane and "painting the Gulf Coast black". Can anyone imagine what 6 inches of oil coating Houston, New Orleans, etc... would do to the US and the economy? Let's hope the oil doesn't hit the fan, because then the Country would be FUBAR.