[QUOTE=company man 1;38116]At what depth do you anticipate them attemting the intersect? Have you seen the logs & the pore pressures? How do you anticipate them over coming the loss circulation zones & keeping this thing from flowing? Are you concerned with the well head/ BOPs leaning the way they are? Will they have ot run casing to the intersect point? Are they having to plug & set a whipstock each time they miss the intersect point?[/QUOTE]
First, I have no source of inside information about the relief well and am relying solely on published data from any source I can find. There is actually a lot of data on BP’s web site if you are willing to dig around for it.
Second, I am a geologist and not a driller. Everything I know about drilling I have learned from reading, not doing.
With that said, here’s what I’ve seen and what I would predict:
BP’s published plan calls for an intercept at around 18,000 feet, well above the porous zones. They reported they were at around 16,000 feet a week ago and drilling ahead. Looking at the drilling rates they’ve achieved puts the first try at an intercept right around now. Once they know they are close, and use the magnetometer results to pick a kickoff point, they will probably take a couple of days to set more casing to the kickoff point to give themselves maximum flexibility in mud weights for the kill attempts.
I have not seen any published pressure data from the relief well, but based on their approach during the topkill attempt I suspect this kill operation will start with mud weights appropriate for a soft kill (minimal chance of doing more damage to the original wellbore). They know the formation pressures from the first well, and can correct the needed density for the loss of riser height. I suspect they learned enough from the top kill attempt to know what kinds of pressures it took to keep the oil in the formation. I would imagine they will use a similar pressure, corrected for the extra distance downhole, and start there. They will probably let the well spout mud for a while to be sure they’ve fully evacuated the lighter fluids and are not seeing any oil flow. Once they are comfortable they have the well completely filled with mud they will try to slow down and then stop the pumping to see if they have succeeded in creating a static condition. Only then can they cap the original hole and inject cement through the relief well.
If the well does not go static and resumes flowing after the first try then they will keep trying with denser and denser mud until it stops. If the porous zones downhole suck up a lot of mud so that they are actually taking losses when the pumps stop - the original hole starts sucking down fluids - then they will treat it like any other lost circulation problem during drilling and mud down until it stops the losses and goes static.
The whole operation should take a few days, but very little oil should be flowing from the formation once they start pumping.
Also, I have yet to see any evidence that the BOP is listing any more than when the riser torqued it during the initial rig sinking. As such, I see no reason to be concerned about this in the next few weeks. All the measurements they were taking appear to me to have been aimed at perfecting the design of the LMRP cap seal. I’m sure they would be anchoring the BOP with massive tethers of they were worried about it falling over.
As for the flow rate, I think everyone would agree that it is dramatically less when they are sucking out 28K barrels a day than when the cap was off, making me suspect the flow is somewhere near 35K barrels a day. When the cap is off it is gushing like a jet engine exhaust. When the cap was first placed on the flex joint, the downward jets went way down into the valve assembly before turning up (just look at the distance the stains go down the pipes) and the cap was bouncing like a rodeo bull. When they are pumping at full capacity, the cap is rock steady and there isn’t even any outflow on the downhill side. The flow out the uphill side is just barely coming around the lip before floating upwards. I suspect they are at the technical limit of their ability to suck up oil without drawing seawater into the cap, which would risk hydrate ice formation in the system.
As for my comments about the government stepping up to its responsibility in this whole affair, I do not think there is anything they can do but let BP handle the kill operations with oversight. The government has no expertise to match that in the industry and no other company is going to touch this thing with the proverbial 10 foot pole. Exxon’s CEO has admitted that they can think of nothing they would have done very differently than BP did to try to stop the deepwater blowout. The other companies have not said they could stop the leak, they have only said that their policies would never have let this happen in the first place (but I’m sure even BP can claim that).
What I meant was taking over the cleanup effort. BP is in a challenging spot. They are not Americans and are struggling to deal with our bureaucracy. They certainly don’t want to proactively cause any more harm or their liability just goes up. So they tiptoe around placing booms and raking beaches. What’s needed is for the US government to step in and wage a war on the spilled oil. All hands on deck. All available people and all available resources brought to bear as quickly as possible. A lot of that can be done without oil company help.
I just find it pitifully sad that our political system makes it easier for them to simply point fingers at BP for its failings in the cleanup rather than actually stepping in and doing the right thing for the people of the Gulf. I fear that their election year calculus is that it will be easier to take a hands-off approach and blame BP than it would be to take the more appropriate hands-on approach and risk getting a few things wrong and getting some local people pissed at them. They want this to stay BP’s problem for political reasons and fear that action on their part would morph it into their problem. Yes, stick BP with the bill, but get after it for God’s sake! I’m already pissed at them for not waging this war to save our own shores when they are clearly so interested in fighting big wars “over there”. This smacks of raw politics by a ruling party that knows they are not winning any of the Gulf states this fall and are only willing to do the minimal photo ops for the base back home.
Sorry, I’m starting to sound like some of the rants that have almost turned me away from this site. Forgive my lapse into venting.