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Politics : The Environmentalist Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: HPilot who wrote (29036)	5/30/2010 11:37:07 PM
From: Wharf Rat	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 36917

"There is a drillers forum on Daily Kos?" I have no idea. Not a place I hang out. ROCKMAN on May 30, 2010 - 5:41pm Wot – I don’t think I ever seen anyone offer that stat. More importantly I doubt anyone has been trying to maintain such a database. I would guess the number would be a small fraction of 1% given the hundreds of thousands of wells drilled. But the number that would alarm most folks is the number of “near misses”. Have an unplanned flow of oil/NG (”taking a kick”) is not an uncommon event. Take the BP incident: had they noted the mud flowing back when they turned the mud pumps off they could have turned off all the return valves (“shut the well in”), went in to the bottom of the hole with drill pipe and pumped down heavy drill mud until they stopped the flow. They could have then pumped more cement down behind the csg and gotten a proper seal. Then they could have temporarily abandoned the hole, come back years later and produced a few $billions of oil. And virtually no one in the public and even very few of us in the oil patch would have never known just how close we came to seeing what’s happening in the GOM today. And such incidents happen daily around the globe. It’s such a common possibility that there are schools that companies send their hands to for training in such “kill procedures”. BP took the backpressure off the well by displacing the riser/csg with salt water. And when the cmt failed that action allowed them to take a big kick. The kick those actions caused was not a Black Swan. It obeyed an undeniable physical law: HIGH PRESSURES FLOW TO LOW PRESSURES. If you were to ask any engineer what would happen if the cmt failed in this circumstance they would all, without exception, give the same answer: the well will kick. And every one of them would tell you the first sign that this was happening: the mud would rush out of the well even when the mud pumps were off. A well kick can very from a very minor incident where you just let the small amount of oil/NG vent out the well as use raise the mud weight. The other extreme is when the control valves can’t contain the flow and it’s sent to a flare line to burn off the oil/NG. About 30 years ago I had a well expel every bbl of mud in it and we had a 100’ flare shooting out over the cornfield roaring like a jet engine. We were able to pump a kill pill and get control back. What would we have done if we started to lose control of the flare? That’s when we would have hit the BOP…THE LAST LINE OF DEFENSE. theoildrum.com == ROCKMAN on May 30, 2010 - 9:03pm Permalink \| Subthread \| Parent \| Parent subthread \| Comments top wot -- I'll also toss out a number I can't verify with regard to near misses. In the last 5 years there have been 50 (an educated guess but still a guess) well kicks in the GOM that required shuting in the well. These kicks were killed using standard procedures. Had they not been able to shut such a well in they would have had a blow out that would have necessitated activating the BOP. So does that scare you that we might have had that many near missies or do you take comfort that we are that good at handling well kicks? Like I said above: if BP had seen the well coming in they could have shut in and killed it. And no one on TOD, including me, would ever known how close it came to being a world class disaster.