If this guy is right:
Over the next 2 months the mechanical situation also cannot improve, it can only get worse, getting better is an impossibility. While they may make some gains on collecting the leaked oil, the structural situation cannot heal itself. It will continue to erode and flow out more oil and eventually the inevitable collapse which cannot be stopped will happen. It is only a simple matter of who can “get there first”…us or the well.
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.
Sorry to bring you that news, I know it is grim, but that is the way I see it….I sincerely hope I am wrong.
We need to prepare for the possibility of this blow out sending more oil into the gulf per week then what we already have now, because that is what a collapse of the system will cause. All the collection efforts that have captured oil will be erased in short order. The magnitude of this disaster will increase exponentially by the time we can do anything to halt it and our odds of actually even being able to halt it will go down.
The magnitude and impact of this disaster will eclipse anything we have known in our life times if the worst or even near worst happens…
…If the BP data correctly or honestly identified four separate reservoirs then a bleed-out might gush less than 2 to 2.5 billion barrels unless the walls — as it were — fracture or partially collapse. I am hearing the same dark rumors which suggest fracturing and a complete bleed-out are already underway. Rumors also suggest a massive collapse of the Gulf floor itself is in the making. They are just rumors but it is time for geologists or related experts to end their deafening silence and speak to these possibilities.
This is likely to become the biggest environmental disaster in history. At least American history. And hard to top, short of the Yellowstone Caldera blowing.
This thing could bleed oil into the gulf for the next four to five years.
It is worse than “Katrina.”
Unfortunately, this disaster will only be enhanced by future Katrinas.
The “massive collapse of the Gulf floor itself” he mentions refers to rumours about tidal waves across the Gulf being caused by the collapse.
Leak that much oil, and it’ll maybe become profitable to scrape the residue off the gulf coast. BP will long since have gone bankrupt, of course.
What an epic disaster. Should that all happen, maybe they WILL decide to nuke the place. And it’ll make the ban on deep gulf drilling permanent.
Time to buy coal stocks, for the coming boom in synfuel production.
theoildrum.com, a collective of peak oil lunatics and assorted nutjobs, is the hardly place to go for reasoned analysis.
This disclaimer from The Oil Drum (see Rand’s link) is ironic in light of the letter sent yesterday by Bart Gordon and Ralph Hall to Charles Bolden:
Editors’ note for first-time visitors: What follows is a comment from a The Oil Drum reader. To read what The Oil Drum staff members are saying about the Deepwater Horizon Spill, please visit the front page. (Were the US government and BP more forthcoming with information and details, the situation would not be giving rise to so much speculation about what is actually going on in the Gulf. This should be run more like Mission Control at NASA than an exclusive country club function–it is a public matter–transparency, now!)
@Bill,
“Houston, we’ve had a problem.”
http://scienceblogs.com/catdynamics/2010/06/sanity_checks_on_oil_leaks.php#comments
I thought once the relief well started taking up the oil, that it would relieve the pressure on the original well. That was the whole point of the relief well. That is also the reason the relief well comes in below the primary well.
Nobody really knows what is going on downhole except for BP and its sub-contractors. Everything else you read about these doomsday scenarios is pure conjecture by parties who have no connection or access to data about what is going on downhole. Personally, I find no reason not to believe that the relief well won’t tap the reservoir in August and once the pressure is off the primary they should be able to cap it.
Seems to me that by now parallel contingency plans should be developed that assume a worse case scenario — the oil well will not be plugged and it will continue to leak at its current rate or a higher rate for an indefinite period of time in the future.
In that case, containment of the oil as it leaves the sea floor seems to be the only real option. I’m wondering is some kind of self-supporting flexible skirt could be lowered from the surface all the way to the seafloor that is several hundred feet in diameter. It would serve as a physical barrier between the oil contaminated water within the skirt and the ocean water outside the skirt. Processing and separation of the contaminated water within the skirt would then take place. Of course, the skirt would be about 5000′ feet tall so who knows if such structure is even possible or if it could survive currents and storms that frequent the gulf.
Whatever the solution might be, it seems that given the scope of the long term potential environmental and economic damage, some mega-engineering might very well be required to mitigate the damage to the extent that is technically possible. Even if an effort cost $10B to implement quickly, that could be a bargain. If the capping succeeds the worse-case fallback project would then be canceled.
If in the end we just allow the raw oil to spill into the gulf for the next 5, 10 or 15 years it will be a colossal failure of human imagination.
This is likely to become the biggest environmental disaster in history. At least American history. And hard to top, short of the Yellowstone Caldera blowing.
Yeah, only “meh”.
This is reason enough to stop listening to anyone at The Oil Drum.
There is this kind of legal principle that if your credibility is found weak in one area, it is assumed to be weak in all areas, short of having some proof that you are right about one thing and making stuff up about something else.
These guys have been going on an on “We are so doooomed, Peeeaaak Ooooiiiillll!” Now one of these guys says that that the contents of an Elephant field, perhaps half a percent of the entire world oil endowment, is somehow going to “self frac” its way to the surface. They have been going on and on about how overproduction on a well makes the reservoir unrecoverable, and now some dude is saying that this oil well will automagically keep increasing its “production rate” until the entire reservoir is cleaned out.
Next thing you know it, these guys will come back with the Thomas Gold abiogenic hydrocarbons hypothesis that this thing will leak a trillion barrels into the Gulf because it is tied into some upper mantle rift.
What this posting proves to me is that the whole Peak Oil thing is a crock.
I call bullshit.
I was thinking along the same lines as Paul above. If this field is as big as the scaremongers want it to be, then we can kiss our dependence on foreign oil goodbye. I say drill baby drill.
Yes, the Oil Drum is the last place to go. Their agenda is to end all oil drilling and just as the anti-nuke kooks used Three-Mile-Island to stop nuclear power in the U.S. with scare stories they are using this rig blow out as an excuse to end offshore oil drilling. A collapse like that is just BS.
Oil reservoirs simply don’t work that way. If they did it would be easy to get out all the oil in an underground reservoir. As it is you are lucky to get 10% of the oil in a reservoir without using expensive secondary and tertiary recovery methods.
The relief wells will work, and this will be over by fall, barring any interference by hurricanes, the one unknown, which would only delay it by a month or so.
And no, this is not the greatest environmental disaster even in the Gulf, the Ixtoc 1 blow out in 1979 still holds that record and it will take several months for BP to match it. And the coast of Mexico and Texas recovered without the need of a President shakedown.
What this does show is how the Internet, blogs and 7/24 news are able to hype a story to make it seem much worst then it is.
I agree with the above sentiment. If this really were going on, we’d see earthquakes now in the Gulf region as the land settles. We don’t. The map I linked to shows earthquakes in the US over the past week down to around magnitude 1. That’s roughly the energy equivalent of a ton of TNT. If some sort of catastrophic collapse were starting, we would see it there.
While there is a lot of good to the point about the agenda issue, remember that this is a field that has 5,000 feet of water pressing down on top of it, not 500 feet. The outflow is uncontrolled and we know there are issues with the well piping leading up to the surface of the seabed.
What they are listing is a worse case that *may* happen not one that *is* (as some of the comments seem to imply) happening this moment.
*If* the walls between the pockets crack and leak then they could feed the leak.
*If* the ‘roof’ cracks and collapses even in a small area then that means that you’ve got oil leaking out across an area 10’s to 100’s of square meters.
‘Worst Case’ is just that. Something out on the far end that has an extremity small chance of happening … but is extremity bad if it does come to pass.
So stop throwing away the message just because you don’t like the messenger. Evaluate it on it’s merits and place it on the risk scale accordingly.