Mike - We should be able to freeze the oil in the blowout preventer and associated pipe between the blowout preventer and the first leak. Innocentive.com is running a challenge also. It allows teams to work together.
I am looking at a graphic on page A19 of the May 1st Los Angeles Times (Sources: BP, news reports. Graphics reporting by Julie Sheer.)
I have phase diagrams for gas and liquid nitrogen for the 150-bar and typical ocean temperatures from PODenergy spinoff technology. With some more information we should be able to work out how much liquid nitrogen we'll need and a way to strap pipes on the blowout preventer and the riser to freeze the oil in the pipe. Once we stop the flow, we'll need relatively little "maintenance" cooling.
Can someone find out:
- The temperature of the oil and gas as it transits the blowout preventer.
- A description of the fluid in the riser above the blowout preventer. (Is it sometimes 100% oil and sometimes 100% gas? Or is it always __% oil and __% gas?)
- The inside diameter and wall thickness of the pipe above the blowout preventer.
- The length of vertical (unbent) pipe above the blowout preventer.
- Viscosity charts for the oil that cover the range of -20 deg C to its temperature as it transits the blowout preventer.
- The specific heat of the oil (may prefer a chart if it changes a lot over the temperature range).
Mark E. Capron, PE
Oxnard, California
www.PODenergy.org
Oxnard, California
www.PODenergy.org
---------- Original Message --------
Subject: [geo] FW: FYI: Please pass this around. seeking out-of-box
input on the oil well leak as real-time 'grand engineering challenge'
From: Mike MacCracken <mmacc...@comcast.net>
Date: Sat, May 01, 2010 2:24 pm
To: Geoengineering <Geoengineering@googlegroups.com>
Forwarded by Mike MacCracken
Begin forwarded message:
From: Andrew Revkin
Subject: please pass this around. seeking out-of-box input on the oil well leak as realtime 'grand engineering challenge'
Please pass this around and/or reply or post a comment. Particularly interested in folks familiar with hydraulics/geology/engineering nexus.
For those in engineering and science community considering "grand challenges," there's one out there in realtime right now: the damaged well. Conventional approach will take months.
I just posted this callout for Feynman-style ideas:
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/01/a-dumb-question-about-stanching-deep-oil/
See below.
A very smart petrophysicist sent the following reaction, which implies that it's not out of the question to consider controlled explosions as a way to stanch the oil flow. I'm seeking to stimulate some creative thinking among engineers and others not wedded to 'in box' solutions like months-long effort to drill a parallel relief well.
One response to my post:
It's all about regaining control of the well, not preserving it. As you may have allready discovered in your resarch, control means harnessing high pressure oil and gas to flow at a regulated rate or to be shut off completely.
All wells must be controlled from their conception and through their productive life until they are plugged and abandoned (P&A).
Control is maintained at the wellhead, a sophisticated valve assembly, which in the case of the Deepwater Horizon is stuck open and inoperable (loss of control).
Regaining control can be accomplished either by restoring functionality to the existing wellhead or by drilling a relief well to penetrate the existing well, then plugging the well.
With that said, an explosion would have to be of sufficient depth and magnitude to cause the well to cave in sufficiently to plug itself and stay plugged, or stay plugged long enough to drill the relief well.
It will be intesting to see if the DOD thinks they can do that.
As the crisis deepens, I have to believe that BP is open to all suggestions which will stop their growing economic loss.
My apologies if you allready have all this information.
Regards,
Rob
--
ANDREW C. REVKIN
Dot Earth blogger, The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/dotearth
Senior Fellow, Pace Acad. for Applied Env. Studies
Cell: 914-441-5556 Fax/voicemail: 509-357-0965
Twitter: @revkin Skype: Andrew.Revkin
**********************************************************************************************************
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/01/a-dumb-question-about-stanching-deep-oil/
May 1, 2010, 10:33 AM
A Dumb Question About Stanching Deep Oil
By ANDREW C. REVKIN <http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/author/andrew-c-revkin/><http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2010/05/01/us/01engineering_graphic.html?ref=us> Three efforts to stop the flow of oil.
I’ve been catching up on my reading on deep-ocean drilling in trying to assess efforts to stanch what could be a months-long flow of oil from the pinprick in the Gulf of Mexico seafloor. The Economist has a superb history of deep-sea drilling <http://www.economist.com/science-technology/technology-quarterly/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15582301> (written before the drilling disaster) and Henry Fountain has written an excellent overview of the work aimed at capping the well <http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/01/us/01engineering.html> that was uncorked by the destruction of the Deepwater Horizon <http://www.deepwater.com/fw/main/Deepwater-Horizon-56C17.html?LayoutID=17> rig.
One naive, even dumb, question keeps coming to mind.
Is it possible to seal such wells using unconventional means — specifically controlled explosions? While covering the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, I wrote about some pretty exotic uses of explosives <http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/03/international/03WEAP.html> to attack buried targets. The Pentagon has all manner of powerful, but precise, munitions at its disposal, not to mention some of the brightest minds on the planet for gauging challenges involving hydraulics, geology and metallurgy.
Given that President Obama has called on the Pentagon to help, I’m just wondering about ways to approach this deep-ocean leak by considering the basics, Feynman style <http://biocurious.com/2008/05/28/the-real-feynman-algorithm> .
There are hundreds of talented oil-industry experts and government overseers working around the clock on this problem. Still, if the solution is left up to the industry, presumably it’ll be hard to avoid a bias toward conventional efforts aimed at preserving the (sizable) investment in the well and away from any option that would seal it off but prevent its future use.
Obviously you’d want to be sure an explosive solution didn’t have the potential to exacerbate the leak. But with months of unabated oil flows coming, it seems worth asking the question, however naive.
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