In order to understand Matthew Simmons' claims before commenting on them, I transcribed the first five minutes of his interview with Dylan Ratigan from the video mentioned in this thread. I am posting the transcript here so that readers of The Oil Drum and search engines can fully see, in plain text, the words of someone MSNBC considers "one of the foremost experts on oil":
Partial transcript of Matthew Simmons' remarks to Dylan Ratigan on June 7, 2010; emphasis mine
Well it actually, you know, I now look back on the 47 days, and think that remarkably, while I was probably one of the first people to figure out the magnitude of this, I grossly underestimated the size of this disaster. What caught my eye in the first three or four hours watching this on television, when I saw this magnificent modern rig melt down, was that this had to be the biggest blowout in the history of the world, because literally, that rig is the size of an aircraft carrier and it took two days to melt it down. And at the meantime BP was saying it was a rig fire with diesel on board the rig. That's just a bunch of baloney. Uh, I didn't say baloney, I said a word I wouldn't say on your program.
And what was clear to me was there must be an unbelievable flow. And, I sort of you know grew up in the era of blowouts, I mean, you know, I started my career raising money for diving companies, service companies, 45 days after the Santa Barbara oil spills, so oil spills sort of been an area I've paid a lot of attention to. And the only way we've ever prevented big oil spills is either basically hoping that the well bore collapses, or that it depletes, or we explode it.
And so I started talking to some of my friends and we all came to the same conclusion. It was very obvious when this blew out it had to be reservoir pressures of 40-50 thousand pounds per square inch, otherwise the fire wouldn't have been so intense. And what would've come out first is the blowout preventer would have popped out of the well bore like a cork. And then what would come out second is the casing. That's what used to kill people on land based blowouts, the casing would come right out to the [inaudible] and fall on people. So we have an open hole and that's spewing, I would guess, somewhere between 100 and 150 thousand barrels a day of oil. Which is why you now have over a 100 mile oil lake at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico that's barely 4500 feet deep.
Now one the most important things going on this week is the Thomas Jefferson, the United States' biggest research vessel, is now on location. It was actually in the general arena area doing ocean bottom profiling and NOAA four days ago put it off and sent it over. They're going to basically find out where these plumes are and why there's this oil lake. And I would think by the end of the week we will discover that we have an open hole with no casing in it which [inaudible] about seven miles away from where BP had been trying to fix these little tiny leaks in the drilling riser. I bet we'll find the drilling riser is still connected to the rig bore, and so they've done everything wrong.
[Dylan Ratigan asks for clarification]
Well, they basically are trying to patch up a little leak in the drilling riser. You remember that what we're seeing on television, the drilling riser is 22 and a half inches in circumference. Most of it is elastomers to make it buoyant. In the middle is a seven-inch column where the annulus, where the drill bit goes down. So coming out of that is a little plume of gas. It's not oil. And it's only about four feet high. That could not by any way have actually covered 40% of the Gulf of Mexico.
So what we're going to find when the Thomas Jefferson finishes its work is we have an open hole with no casing in it, and the only way we'll shut it off is either let [inaudible] thirty years, which would maybe not only just poison the gulf of mexico, maybe the Atlantic Ocean. Or we could put a nuclear device downhole, like the Russians did in the 70s, and actually encase it by turning the rock into glass.
So, combined with the imagery provided by the remotely operated vehicles, here is what Simmons appears to be implying:
The blowout preventer, with the riser (which is "22.5 inches in circumference") still attached, was launched off the wellhead by the great pressure of the oil reservoir.
The blowout preventer, with the riser still attached, spiraled through the ocean to land seven miles away.
The blowout preventer, with the riser still attached, somehow landed and anchored itself to the soft ocean floor in a vertical, upright position.
The landing spot just happened to be the site of another deep hole in the ocean floor, which was venting gas (but not oil).
The blowout preventer landed so perfectly that it formed a seal over this hole, causing the gas to stream into the blowout preventer and out the "tiny" leaks in the riser.
All the parties involved, including the people drilling the well and operating the rig, (in fact everyone except for Matthew Simmons) are unaware that the real wellhead is seven miles away spewing 100-150 thousand barrels of oil per day, and has spent nearly 50 days trying fix this small leak of gas (but not oil).
Now that the LMRP cap is in place, some of the captured gas magically transmutes into oil on its way up the pipe towards the Discoverer Enterprise, fooling BP into believing that it is capturing oil.
A week ago, when I first heard an interview with Simmons, I was certain I had some misunderstanding of terminology, or that he had just misspoken, or his words were being shown out of context. However, he has said essentially the same thing multiple times on national television. Each time, his interviewers, who are professional journalists with an audience in the tens of millions, accepted what he was saying without question. (Rat sez it's pretty much the same story for all media on this)
the_one_smiley on June 8, 2010 - 3:59am |
