Spill baby spill, slippery politics

The New Orleans Times-Picayune is reporting that a worker on the Deepwater Horizon drilling platform has said a mud safety barrier was being removed prematurely before a final cement plug was place in the well, weakening emergency measures to control a powerful blowout caused by pressurized natural gas. BP was trying to seal an exploratory well when it exploded April 20, killing 11 rig workers

Rig work is (IMHO) waay more dangerous than catching ALaskan Kind Crab. Theyll probably never do a show about it cause the oil companies are paranoid about everything.

Black Gold is a documentary-style reality television series that chronicles three oil drilling rigs in Andrews County, Texas, 30 miles northwest of Odessa.[1] It is produced by Thom Beers, creator of Deadliest Catch and Ice Road Truckers. The Black Gold theme song is sung by country music star Trace Adkins. The title "Black Gold" comes from a slang term for oil.

Black Gold airs Wednesday nights on truTV at 10pm. It is also shown as a special presentation on TNT in high definition. Starting 8 April 2009, the show also airs in the United Kingdom on Five, under the title Oil Riggers

If the wind picks up, waves mix the oil with sea water, creating the mousse, which is heavier still and less able to remain on the surface. Eventually, the mousse behaves like a submarine, floating just beneath the waves, out of reach by recovery ships. It can remain in this form for months, ducking under floating booms and reaching shorelines. Or it can continue drifting on ocean currents until it sinks to the bottom. In either case, the results are not good.
To get an idea of how difficult it is to clean up oil mousse, here is a recipe for making some in your kitchen.

Oil mousse is toxic to marine life. When it gets into marsh areas, such as the Mississippi Delta, it sticks to plant stems, fouls spawning areas and coats bird feathers. In some cases, the oil creates dead zones where animals just don't bother going back to. On the sea floor, mousse affects shrimp, oysters, crabs and all the other critters that live on the bottom.

Chemical dispersants that are sprayed on mouse to get rid of it actually break it into smaller drops that sink more quickly. The oil doesn't really go away; it's just more evenly distributed on the ocean floor. Those chemicals are also toxic to coral reefs.

Mistakes like this are not rare. A 2007 MMS study found that cementing was a factor in 18 of 39 Gulf of Mexico blowouts over 14 years. The pressure surge from a gas bubble even has a nickname: the kick. There are procedures for recementing, but those take time and money; each extra day of leasing the drilling rig costs about $500,000. Halliburton (HAL) was in charge of cementing, under BP's direction. Robert MacKenzie, a former cementing engineer who is now a securities analyst for FBR Capital Markets (FBCM), says he wants to know whether BP ordered a so-called cement bond log test to evaluate the cementing. Such a test would have determined whether or not a remedial cement job was necessary. BP declined comment

Hayward said he was mystified that the blowout preventer failed, though failure isn't a rare event. The last-ditch shear ram is rarely tested under real conditions because of the destruction it causes. In a 2002 laboratory test for MMS, researchers found that three of six shear rams failed. Seven other makers declined to be tested.

Major blow in bid to stem oil leak
Posted 5 hours 20 minutes ago
ABC online news.



Containment dome: the 90-tonne chamber was thought to be the best short-term solution to stave off disaster (AFP: Mark Ralston)

BP has been dealt a setback to capping a massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico after a containment dome encountered flammable hydrate formations as it was lowered onto the leak site.

The gas hydrates, similar to ice crystals, formed on the inside of the 90-tonne chamber as it neared the seabed nearly 1,500 metres below the surface, making it too buoyant and clogging it up, BP chief operating officer Doug Suttles told reporters.

Workers have moved the concrete and steel box some 200 metres to the side on the seabed while they evaluate their options.

An estimated 210,000 gallons of oil have been gushing every day from a pipe ruptured when the BP-leased Deepwater Horizon sank on April 22, two days after an explosion that killed 11 workers.

The high-stakes attempt to cap the leak, rife with expectations because it will take three months to drill relief wells to stem the flow, had been considered the best short-term solution to stave off the biggest US environmental disaster since the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska.

"I wouldn't say it's failed yet," Mr Suttles said.

"What I would say is what we attempted to do last night didn't work."

He said BP was also considering other methods to capture the flow. Among the options being considered was to plug the leak by injecting ground-up material in a "junk shot". ..... <cont>

A target of the investigation, according to Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), who chairs the House energy subcommittee and met with oil company officials last week, is the final cementing job on the well. Four employees of Halliburton -- founded by Erle Halliburton in 1924 as the Halliburton Oil Well Cementing Company -- were on Deepwater Horizon. They had overseen the main task of cementing the well just 20 hours before the blowout.

This is done by plunging a slurry of cement down the hollow pipe to the bottom of the well, where the cement passes through a one-way valve, then rises back up through the narrow gap, or annulus, between the steel casing and the rock walls of the hole. This stabilizes the casing in the drill hole and keeps gas and oil from rising through the drill hole to the surface.

Or at least that's the idea. If something goes awry, such as cracks forming in the cement or the cement failing to set properly, gas bubbles can seep upward, and the pressure can begin to build toward calamitous proportions.

Kenneth Deffeyes, a professor emeritus of geology at Princeton who has studied reports of the blowout, said it's possible that "the cement job wasn't heavy enough and the gas bubbled up through it." But, he added, another factor could have been a malfunction of the valve, or "shoe," at the bottom of the well, which could have let gas and oil into the steel casing.

Mr Suttles said it may be possible to stem the flow by blocking the well's failed blowout preventer.

"We have some pipe work on the blowout preventer, and if we can open certain valves on that we could inject basically just rubber and other type of material into [it] to plug it up, not much different to the way you might plug up a toilet," he said.

Admiral Thad Allen of the US Coast Guard said it could plug the main leak.

"They're going to take a bunch of debris, shredded up tyres, golf balls and things like that, and under very high pressure shoot it into the preventer itself and see if they can clog it up and stop the leak," he told CBS television.