● BP drills a hole down through many layers of rock, of different strength and consistency, to the oil.Obama is trying to sell the myth that the reason we're drilling so deep is because we've run out of easier places to find oil. Nonsense. We're drilling out there because we've allowed environmental activists to push drilling away from the easy locations and out to places where bad things can happen a lot easier. While you cannot blame Obama for the failure of the well, the method used and location chosen was approved by federal officials. Whether the approvals occurred during the Bush administration or Obama administration doesn't really matter - the fact is BP didn't do anything without the approval of Federal officials and they share responsibility for this mess.
● The oil will then come up through this bore hole at great pressure.
● You do NOT want that pressure forcing the oil sideways into upper levels of the drilled-through rock.
● So you line the bore hole with steel casing, and cement in the space between casing and bore hole wall. This is deep-drilling S.O.P.
● Evidence from the Top Kill failure suggests that this casing-cement system is now fatally compromised.
● So we have “down hole leaks” — oil under colossal pressure forcing its way sideways into below-sea-bed rock formations.
● If you had (which of course we don’t) some massive cork to jam into the top of the bore hole and stop the gusher, all that sideways-leaked oil would just come bursting out through fissures opening up in the sea floor.
● For miles around.
● And even though we don’t have such a cork, the bore hole might collapse in on itself, with the same effect.
As the writer says: “The very least damaging outcome as bad as it is, is that we are stuck with a wide open gusher blowing out 150,000 barrels a day of raw oil or more.”
Friday, June 18, 2010
It May Be Impossible to Plug the Hole
No matter what Obama wills, Mother Gaia may not cooperate and allow the gushing hole in the floor of the Gulf of Mexico to be plugged. The oildrum.com writes a very technical piece on the subject which John Derbyshire at The Corner summarizes this way:
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The notion that this is the fault of "environmental activists" is insane jibberish.
We're drilling in the deep sea because the world currently requires 84 million barrels of oil per day. The U.S. guzzles nearly one-quarter of that amount. You could open up ANWR or whatever other protected areas you want and we'd still be drilling in deep sea to get the oil that our way of life currently requires.
The only sane, rational response to this crisis -- and, truly, the thing that Democrats, Republicans and everyone else should agree on -- is to get ourselves off of fossil fuels as quickly as possible. The question we should be debating is: How do we do that?
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