A problem of physics
excerpt from
nola.com
Ted Bourgoyne, professor emeritus of petroleum engineering at Louisiana State University, said that getting the oil to flow nearly a mile up the drill pipe to the ship will be tough.
"It's pretty challenging. I don't think it's ever been tried in this deep a water," Bourgoyne said. "We'll have to see if we get a good chimney effect going and and we get a good flow of oil up the pipes or whether it just bubbles out the bottom. You'd have to do some pretty good modeling on that."
BP probably hasn't had much time to analyze the composition of the oil and gas coming from the well and create models for what it will take to make it flow properly up the pipe, Bourgoyne said. If there's too much resistance in the pipe, the oil won't make the long journey to the top.
The best situation, Bourgoyne said, is if there's also a lot of gas in the well, because the lighter gas will help the oil bubble up to the surface.
"It's a gravity-driven phenomenon," Bourgoyne said. "I'm sure they'll get some oil and gas to flow up it, but the question is whether they'll get enough."
New leaks feared
Even if BP is successful, Eric Smith, associate director of the Tulane Energy Institute, said the company is concerned that the drilling riser, a larger pipe that forms a sheath around the drilling pipe, might spring additional leaks after the coffer dams are installed because of all the trauma it's been through. "The concern is that that thing has been through a lot of stress," Smith said.
As long as the velocity of the oil is not too fast, Smith believes that BP will try to cut the joint where the riser pipe comes out of the failed blowout protector, and install a new blow out protector on top of the old one.
The idea is that the new blowout protector would be more stable then the containments along the crumpled riser, and could be properly shut off while the relief wells are being drilled so BP doesn't have to keep bringing oil to the surface. |
