Hold
On To Your Hats: This Thing's Gonna Blow! - Americans
21 July 2010By Dave LIndorff
What the hell are they thinking in Washington, and
down at the “Unified Command” in New Orleans, letting
BP try to close off the oil volcano spewing out the
top of the damaged Blowout Preventer (BOP) stack?
And what the hell is the mainstream press doing not
asking about the clear evidence of oil or gas spewing
out under pressure from cracks in the seafloor around
the base of the BOP? (See the image of oil spewing
from the sea floor here.)
Sure the initial partial closing of the valves is
working, but they haven’t built up much pressure
yet--just to 6000 lbs/square inch, which isn’t much
above the 5000 lbs/square inch at that depth of the
ocean--and a lot could go wrong. seriously wrong, and
good reason to think it will.
I made a call to the media office of the Unified
Command, the office set up to respond to public and
media inquiries about the disaster, which is
supposedly composed of people from the US Coast Guard,
other federal agencies, and BP. When I mentioned the
videos taken by BP’s own remote operating vehicles (ROVs)
of the oil and/or gas spewing from cracks in the sea
floor, I was told I had to call the press office in
Houston, “because you’re asking us a question about
the sub-surface well.”
But here’s the thing. The press office in Houston is
not run by the Unified Command. The people at the
office there answer the phone with the phrase: “BP
Press.” They do this because they are BP employees,
and the office is in BP headquarters.
This means if you want to know anything about the
structural integrity of the well below the BOP, you
have to get that information from BP, not from the
government. That’s the same BP that told government
regulators that they could handle any emergency. The
same BP that assured us when the well blew that the
spill was just leaking 1000 barrels of oil a day--a
figure that appears to have been knowingly understated
by a factor of 50 to 100.
Now, when I called BP I got a PR guy with a Brit
accent named Toby Odone, who claimed he was “not aware
of any oil leaking around the well itself.”
He also said, “We’re pretty certain that there is no
oil leaking around the well that shouldn’t be there.”
How then to explain their own ROV videos, showing
exactly that? Odone assured me he’d “get back” with an
answer. So far, no answer.
Odone also said something else that was disturbing in
its facileness. He said that the relief wells were
within feet of the original bore, and that they had
“not detected any hydrocarbons.” This, he assured me,
meant that there was no leak from the casing. But I
pointed out that those side wells had been drilled
from a mile away, on a slant, so that they only
approached the original well during the last quarter
mile or so from the bottom of the 13000-foot bore.
They were nowhere near the bore during the first
several miles of casing, so they can offer no clue as
to the integrity of the bore above the first quarter
mile or so above the oil reservoir. Odone agreed that
this was true.
I also put a call in to the US Energy Department,
which is supposedly monitoring the science of this
disaster and which put the attempted shut-down of the
well on hold for 48 hours earlier this week while
seismic tests were conducted to try and determine the
integrity of the casing that goes from the BOP down to
the oil reservoir. A press officer at the DOE asked me
to provide a link to the ROV video of the oil leaking
from the sea bed, and promised to get back to me with
an explanation of the department's thinking about
that. So far, no response or explanation. Clearly,
though, the Energy Department is worried that shutting
down the flow entirely at the top of the stack could
cause such high pressures inside the casing that it
will blow a crack in the pipe and allow the oil and
gas to push upward outside of the control of the pipe.
That’s why they are closing the top of the pipe
slowly, monitoring the pressure all the time. If they
can shut it down and the pressure rises to 9000
lbs/square inch or more, which is roughly the pressure
at which the oil is coming up from below ground, then
they will know that the integrity of the pipe has been
preserved, but if they cannot get the pressure to
build beyond 6000 or so lbs/square inch, it would mean
that the casing has been compromised, and they would
not be able to shut the flow down from the top.
leaving successful completion of a relief well as the
only possible shut-down option.
But here’s the question: If we can already see oil, or
perhaps gas, blowing out of cracks around the BOP,
doesn’t this mean that somewhere below ground, the
casing has already breached? And if it has already
blown open, isn’t any attempt to shut down the flow
and build up the pressure in the well just threatening
to worsen whatever break already exists? Especially
since BP and the government say that this "fix," even
if it works and doesn't blow the tube or burst the
damaged BOP, is only a temporary fix, until the relief
well is drilled and the well is plugged at the bottom.
Meanwhile, instead of this risky attempt to shut the
well at the top, they could be just attaching pipes to
collect all the oil in tankers on the surface, at
minimal risk to the wellhead and the casing.
Why isn’t the Energy Department or the Coast Guard
addressing this question of the threat to the well?
Why has no reporter at the regular daily briefings
hosted by retired Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen asked
this question?
It seems to me a fairly safe prediction that as they
crank shut the opening at the top of the well, the oil
pushing up from below at 9000 lbs/square inch of
pressure, or even 6000 lbs/square inch of pressure, is
going to push through whatever leaks already exist in
or around the well casing, and will be blowing up
through the ground around the BOP. If it’s bursting
out through those cracks already, while the pipe is
wide open, there should be little doubt that it will
burst out even more powerfully when the top of the
pipe is capped. That’s grade-school physics.
And if things do go badly, as the oil and gas blow out
of the casing and push their way up through the
fractured well hole and the poorly set concrete that
was put down there by Halliburton to fill the well
bore, it will widen the pathways to the surface,
probably following new fracture lines that will have
it coming out even further from the well hole. In no
time, we will have oil spewing from a wide are of sea
floor which will make it impossible to collect.
I don’t claim to be a geologist, engineer or oil well
expert, and I don’t want to be an alarmist, but having
seen the images of oil spewing up from the sea floor,
I have enough basic scientific understanding to know
that the casing has to have been already breached, and
that anything that increases the pressure on that
damaged casing is only going to make things worse.
So why are they trying to close down the well from the
top?
I’m just asking, because nobody else seems to be.
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