Obama spent another four hours on the golf course today while news on the oil spill gusher in the Gulf of Mexico keeps getting worse.
Did you wonder, like I did, why BP cut off the top of the pipe and let the oil flow out faster? Doesn’t seem to make sense. But then, I don’t know anything about drilling oil wells. On the other hand, dougr at The Oil Drum seems to understand a lot and writes an article that can only be described as frightening.
It is his opinion that BP cut the top of the pipe off to take pressure off damaged pipes under the sea floor. He calls that kind of underground damage a worst case scenario, which will lead to total collapse of the well and very little chance of sealing it off.
All of these things lead to only one place, a fully wide open well bore directly to the oil deposit…after that, it goes into the realm of “the worst things you can think of” The well may come completely apart as the inner liners fail. There is still a very long drill string in the well, that could literally come flying out…as I said…all the worst things you can think of are a possibility, but the very least damaging outcome as bad as it is, is that we are stuck with a wide open gusher blowing out 150,000 barrels a day of raw oil or more. There isn’t any “cap dome” or any other suck fixer device on earth that exists or could be built that will stop it from gushing out and doing more and more damage to the gulf. While at the same time also doing more damage to the well, making the chance of halting it with a kill from the bottom up less and less likely to work, which as it stands now?….is the only real chance we have left to stop it all.
It’s a race now…a race to drill the relief wells and take our last chance at killing this monster before the whole weakened, wore out, blown out, leaking and failing system gives up it’s last gasp in a horrific crescendo…
We can only hope the race against that eventuality is one we can win, but my assessment I am sad to say is that we will not.
The system will collapse or fail substantially before we reach the finish line ahead of the well and the worst is yet to come.
Meanwhile, BP is doing a “seabed integrity scan” amid speculation the entire underground oil reservoir of over 2 billion gallons of oil will bleed out, taking years to do so and causing the seabed to collapse in that area.
If he’s right………. No, just pray he’s wrong. Read the article here.