30 thoughts on “The Watering Hole: May 14, T’was my fault”

  4. Caption Contest:

    “Don’t taze me, bro!”

  5. Hope Jane is feeling better…

    Caption:

    AAAGGHH de tikl monstr, I’z surrrrrenddurrrr

  6. Following some of the testimony in the oil spill now. There’s definitely some skullduggery around the ‘modifications’ made to the BOP valve and also the seemingly dreadful maintenance procedures skipped issue on the BOP itself.

    http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6462#more

    The focus of the malfeasance is starting to focus on two things: the poor cement job done to seal the well and then a series of tests on the cement job to test if the well is sealed. There’s a lot of naughtiness going on all around if this is to true: Halliburton’s quality of work, Transocean’s maintenance of the BOP and BP’s involvement in asking for modifications to the BOP to be made and also in how it reacted to the poor results of several tests that took palce on the day of the explosion.

    That Steven Seagal film “On Deadly Ground” is beginning to look less like Hollywood and closer to life, even to people in the know.

    “There is a paper trail and the facts will be eventually known for everyone to shake their heads in disbelief. The people who made the decision survived, the people who followed through with the decision did not.”

  7. Oh and I don’t (yet) have a dog in the hunt about the size of the leak. I ‘ve not read up on the estimates coming from the astrophysicists.

    I think that comparable to other production wells in the area, that 25,000 is possible but 100,000 is way over what this well would be expected to flow.

  8. On the one estimate I heard that approached 100,000, it was really an estimate in around the 50,000-60,000 range, but had a possible variation that could possibly push it upward of 100,000.

    The info about the modifications to the equipment, and the poor maintenance of the equipment are concerning. And BP is starting to be a bit secretive about what it knew and when it knew it, and about the scope of the problem (akin to the Soviets during Chernobyl, or Dow during the chemical leak).

  9. Having never heard of the Oil Drum, before TtT started giving us the ‘inside’ of this industry – it is now bookmarked and I refer to it at least once a day.

    I don’t pretend to know or understand all of the calculations but gain insight and knowledge reading especially the comments.

    geek7 on May 13, 2010 – 4:59pm
    I take a middle position. BP management is not deliberately trying to sow confusion and doubt. They do it instinctively. It is in their DNA.

  10. Got a very good take on the Halliburton log that Congress saw the other day…. long story short, anyone who cared to know should have known the well was in trouble at least an hour before it blew…. more later-ish.

  11. Caption Contest:

    “Use of the litter box was a voluntary regulation, right?”

  12. I was trying to conceptualize on how to imagine what 210,000 gallons a day would look like. Well converting gallons to cubic feet (divide by 7.48) and taking the cube root of that yields a cube 27.4 feet on a side. From the videos from BP, that does not seem to meet what I am seeing. The flow rate seems to be about 4.3 pipe diameters per second. The pipe diameter is about 12 inches (1 foot) from what I seem to have heard. The flow rate in a second is about d*d*d*π*4.3/4 which yields a per second rate of 3.3772 cubic feet per second or 290,000 cubic feet per day or 2,182,600 gallons per day.

  13. Ah, if only cats stayed that cute.

    Tuesday is primary day in PA and I will be working the polls, as usual. Today, I went to the County Democratic Office to pick up some candidate signs for the polls. I was searching for a Sestak sign. Sestak signs were “sold out” (we don’t pay for them) by noon today. Supposedly, more of his signs were to be delivered later today. However, there were plenty of Specter signs in the office. I walked right past those and didn’t take any with me. I’m hoping that the “sold out” Sestak signs is a good indication that he has support by the precinct leaders and that he has an excellent chance of winning on Tuesday.

    Go Joe! :)

  14. Cats,
    Specter’s folks may have cornered all of the Sestak signs and tossed all of them in a dumpster in back of County headquarters. Remember Specter is a Republican.

  15. Walt, you’ll have fun following the calc discussion on the Oil Drum. http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6464#more

    Here was Fractional Flow:
    “You guys are likely brilliant but way out of your expertise area.”

    Ok, but read his posts and you’ll see where he’s coming from is that a lot of the ‘fag packet’ calcs we’ve been doing don’t account for:

    1. The bubble point of gas in the flow – a lot of what we see coming out is gas, which does not contribute to the spill flow, but occupies volume in the flow – difficult to estimate how much
    2. Some of the calcs (and yours Walt follows this) don’t account for laminar flow pressure drop across the profile – or that the flow is slower at the edges, so sizing the pipe and the apparent velocity is at best a rough and high estimate.

    The fun ones are the guys trying to account for the bubble point and treat the pipe as a partial constriction flow, with has a lot of well tried equations of differential pressure across an orifice in a pipe. BP of course could stick a pitot tube into the flow and figure this out, so the armchair engineers out here don’t have to.

    The general theme though is that > 5000 BPD seems to be the case but < 40,000 BPD is very likely. In real money, that's an Exxon Valdez every week – so that's nearly 3 already.

    Oh and you know that if we could do what we've just done like this, then you know Big Pocket could have done this, say, two weeks ago, instead of starting at 1,000, only going to 5,000 after someone else told them so and now…?

    Bastards. F***ing bastards.

    I notice that we are yet to see the negative pressure test results done that afternoon on the rig before the evening explosions…. somebody needs to hoot about that on the TV.

  16. Calling Steven Seagull… take these bastards out

  17. I tried to find out more about how the environmental impact of the oil spill will pan out. I found no real answers to what I looked for. So my update post below has more questions than answers. I only believe the Gulf of Mexico is dying.

  18. Walt, there’s not enough scotch in this household for me to even think about trying to comprehend the math….
    :(

  19. “Ah, if only cats stayed that cute.”

    Aw, c’mon, Cats, some of them do — a couple of ours can be so cutely that we want to just squeeze their little heads!

    Back to the doctor today, got some steroid shot and a scrip for more pills. The shot seemed to help quite a bit, but still a long way to go.

    When I was briefly waiting at the doc’s, they had CNN on the widescreen TV. It was just before 11:30 this morning, and the Gulf disaster was the current topic. I swear to the gods that they had a graphic with the BP logo saying “Got Any Ideas?” or something VERY close to that, with a hotline web address. Unfortunately, I got called in then and didn’t have a chance to write it down. I put on CNN after I got home and kept an eye on it, but never caught it again – I even checked both CNN’s and BP’s website to see if they had anything about a hotline. It really had looked more like something Jon Stewart would have had up, but it was definitely CNN.

  20. Given Boyle’s law, the gas component of what is coming from the well should be quite small in volume since the pressure at a depth of 5000 feet is about 160 atmospheres. In addition at those pressures, the methane and ethane components would be combined with water, much as carbon dioxide is in beer. To see how this contributes to volume, let a bottle of beer go flat (a waste, I know), first marking the level with a scribe on the bottle. What is unfortunate is that the methane component of such a mixture separates at about the 150 atmosphere level, releasing some silly ice. This is akin to what you see when you chill a beer too much and pop it open when it has reached subfreezing (for water) temps. That’s exactly why the first dome failed.

  21. Jane, glad you are feeling a bit better.

    —-

    So now there are 17thers? From TPM

    “Tea Party-Backed Repeal Of The 17th Amendment Gets Republicans Into Trouble”

    “…taking the selection of U.S. Senators out of the hands of voters and putting it in the hands of state governments…”

  22. Thanks, ebb. I probably shouldn’t be up so late, but the napping off and on is throwing me off.

    So, wait – the Teabaggers want the State governments to choose the U.S. Senators? How does that not equal the ‘old-boy-network’ disaster that we’ve been dealing with for at least ten years? These people really must be clinically deranged.

  23. JES,
    Take care! My MIL said “Never get ill on a weekend.”
    She was a nurse. Take care!

  24. That’s okay, Walt, I’ve already been ill “all of the week.” Probably stuck being in for a few more days at least, certainly don’t expect any excursions to the hospital (or ‘Huxtable’, as our family says.)

  25. Inquiring minds need to know:

    who is “Jezebel (sponsored by RentBoy)”.
    Earlier in the evening the Zoo was linked to the name.
    And
    Who is “FireOfHope-Sponsored By Mountain Dew”?

  26. I don’t know, ebb. I’m trying to figure out if their writing styles seem familiar.

    I think I’m the only person who has kept the same name on TP all this time. If I ever change it, probably all I would do is use my maiden name (Sechny), it’s unusual enough that I could never be confused for anyone else. Even after 21+ years, it feels too wierd to me when I see other Jane Schneiders.

  27. Thanks Jane.

    Gosh your sleep schedule is going to be way off – we may not be reading you until late in the day.

    Do hope sleep is restful so you’ll be on the mend!

    Now it’s Good Morning to both coasts!

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