For the engineers who frequent this forum, please explain to me why this solution will not work. It seems to be quite simple and effective. If it would work, then why don’t they try it? This guy also predicted the failure of BP’s top kill attempt due to the pressures involved.
He goes very fast. Very confident. Its like zeitgeist.
BoP and riser are damaged.. It may have to be torn off. So you can’t bolt on a new coupling device ontop of BOP. It would have to be welded on… good luck welding under pressure. His idea supposedly gets rid of all the pressure because its not an actual cap, but while positioning it, or if it is positioned even a cm off, will cause it to get knocked around by the fluids.
“prefilled with chemicals to prevent hydrate formation”: He’s basically just paying lip service to this problem, but it is the MAIN problem. Its the reason the dome idea fails. There’s nothing to stop the wellhead fluid from completely displacing his special chemicals in a milisecond.
Moreover, the issue isn’t that we can’t come up with fancy tools to solve the problem, the issue is they can’t be built fast enough. This tool would have to be special made and withstand 2-5 thousand PSIA of pressure. The damaged sections below it will also have to withstand this pressure, and there’s nothing saying it will. This is why BP tried a DOME because that would cover a lot of the potentially damaged areas.
Think of it as you have a damaged straw, and you cut off the tip and replace it with a new straw .The rest is still damaged and fluid might escape there anyway…
This is the dome idea. You’ll form methane hydrate, which is a solid, and you wont be able to fit it over the riser.
Moreover, aluminum would make a pretty crappy seal compared to what is typically used in packers… but this is not fatal to his idea. It just shows how little he understand about the petroleum industry.
His critsism of the LMRP cap is that it goes from a wider to a smaller cross sectional flow area. Well his does this too… but he claims this will cause massive pressure to build up, which just isn’t true. I haven’t run the mechanical energy balance equation but my guess is it wouldn’t be more than 500 psia. Its a non issue. Even if it did cause fatally high pressures, you could just NOT have the tubing narrow 
He also completely fails with the pressure balance. He thinks that equal and opposite forces will cancel, but that forces pushing up aren’t balanced by anything. Well they aren’t just LAYING it on there. Its attached. The pressure also exerts a force DOWNWARD onto the riser, balancing out forces above. The only concerns you can have now are material strength, which is a non issue because you can just buy it to be strong enough.
Bwahahah and he says 400,000lbf-2.2 million lbf… well what is the cross sectional area? How many PSIA is this? Tubes aren’t rated in terms of “lbf” they’re rated in terms of PSIA for a reason.
Its obvious from the fact that he doesn’t even screw in the cap on the garden hose that he doesn’t understand how BP’s solution is going to work…
He takes himself really seriously, and is probably using some 3d modelling program he uses at his job. He doesn’t know anything about petroleum engineering, and makes a lot of elementary errors anyway. To think that BP isn’t smart enough to figure out some obvious way to cap the well is to think that BP is turning down free money; that they WANT the well to continue blowing out of control rather than stop it. On this issue, everyone’s smarter than BP. Even Maddow.
I agree. I feel like, if the engineers at BP can’t yet figure out an easy way to cap and the well, there isn’t an easy way. Not that the oil spill isn’t enough of an incentive, but maybe they should offer some kind of monetary reward for outside engineers who can come up with an easier fix that they haven’t yet though about. It sure would save them money in comparison to what they’ll need to clean up the mess.
BP isn’t publishing any of the relevant engineering data. We can only guess. BP also isn’t accepting help from my professors here at UT Austin…#1 Petro Engineering graduate/research school.
BP is trying to save face. They figure its worth more if they solve the problem on their own than look helpless as someone else does it. This is only 10-15billion dollars in damages. Letting it go a couple more months won’t do too much more damage.
Sieben,
Thanks for replying to my question. It has been driving me nuts when I saw this video a couple weeks ago. From your response, the solution is not as “simple” as it appears in the video.
So nothing can be done until the relief wells are completed?
At least from what I know, nothing can be done. But I just wanted to put things in perspective first. It’s estimated that a total of 100 million gallons of oil has rushed into the water, yet no one brings up the fact that the United Statesuses around 800 million gallons of oil per day. What the oil spill has done in 68 days, we effectively do every three hours. I just think it’s so crazy how so little oil (in comparison to how much we use) has become such a disaster.
I don’t mean to take away at all from how much of a tragedy it is, but I thought the statistics were interesting 
I don’t know how much the relief wells will help. Lets say the fluid has two paths. It doesn’t just take the path of least resistance. The resistances change as more/less fluid flows through each path. Moreover, I can’t see how diverting oil thousands of feet to the surface is going to be less resistance than just dumping out into the ocean. Although since the oil is lighter than water this might work to an extent… but maybe they’ll put some sort of pump on it to make the pressure difference greater? Donno. Its not my preferred solution.
My idea, and it probably won’t work and there are probably good reasons why not, is to cut off everything that might be damaged. Just get it down to the outermost casing with the innermost casing in the middle. There are shearing tools that might be difficult to get in the hole, but you shear off the innermost casing 2-3-10ft and pull it ouf of the hole. So now you have a completely clean tube. We can plug tubes with something called a packer.
Of course, there’s also the fear that the seals below the 1st casing string might be broken, so that if we do manage to plug it off at the surface, the fluid will just bubble up through the sand.
The goal is to stop the oil spill completely. But no one has considered that this might be impossible, especially within only a few months of time.
If the environmentalists wouldn’t go crazy, we would probably be burning it off at the surface right now. We might be able to stop a lot of its spread. As you noticed… you can burn a million gallons pretty quick.
Sieben,
Really appreciate your responses on this.
Couple more questions.
Why is the oil reddish in color?
Are you familiar with the chemical dispersant they are injecting into the oil stream and spraying on the surface? Is this stuff safe?
Donno. Some ‘black oil’ is mucus green. Probably just the way it is
The particular chemical? No. Its just a surfactant (surface active agent). It changes the interfacial tension between oil/air/water so that the oil spreads less. Its all going to be bound up at the oil/water interface so I don’t see how there would be any chance of pollution.
Everyone is blowing this whole thing so far out of propotion… I mean, if they’re focusing on surfactants, the most boring and common thing in the petro business.. they’re really grasping for straws.