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-d
eep-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 (PA).
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.
I¹ve 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/displaysto
ry.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, I¹m 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 it¹ll 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 you¹d want to be sure an explosive solution didn¹t have the
potential to exacerbate the leak. But with months of unabated oil flows
coming, it seems worth asking the question, however
