Wednesday, August 04, 2010

Just A Follow Up To The Last Post

These are the current headlines from cough cough, Huffington Post, which is a "news" aggregate.

WASHINGTON — The government is expected to announce on Wednesday that three-quarters of the oil from the Deepwater Horizon leak has already evaporated, dispersed, been captured or otherwise eliminated — and that much of the rest is so diluted that it does not seem to pose much additional risk of harm.

Right, the biggest man made disater in history has, dissapeared?
Just ask the folks in a little place called Valdeze, Alaska how that shit works.

They are lying to you, again.

Key word, dispersed. That would be that magic elixer that causes cancer, some nasty shit called Corexit, Yeah, it'll corrects it alright, key word, " Solvent". The EPA told them to quit using it and they went ahead and dumped a few million gallons in the ocean so it can show up in the food chain for another fifty fucking years. Go read this whole propaganda piece and ask yourself  just who needs a swift kick in the nuts. Lying. Mother. Lovers..

Here is another beauty, whatever happened to those relief wells, by the way?



ON THE GULF OF MEXICO (Associated Press) - Mud that was forced down a blown-out well was holding down the flow of oil at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, BP said Wednesday.

Send the bill for the link to Arianna.

How is it that they spent a month just trying to cap that spewing mess that was estimated at fifty to a hundred thousand pounds per square inch and no one could tell us how many fucking gallons/ barrels a day and now they can just " pump some mud" back down the breaches of Hell?   Now they can just pump some mud down the same hole at their liesure and it is some kind of mile stone?
Let's do some math here, this is from ABC two weeks ago,

Pressures in the well are continuing to rise, National Incident Cmdr. Thad Allen said today, signaling that the cap seems to be working and there are no other leaks in the well. This evening, the pressure stood at 6,700 pounds per square inch, lower than officials would like to see but not a cause for immediate concern. 



“The well pressure is now being controlled by the hydrostatic pressure of the drilling mud, which is the desired outcome of the static kill procedure carried out yesterday,” BP said Wednesday in a statement posted on its Web site.
Through Tuesday afternoon, engineers pumped mud weighing about 13.2 pounds per gallon at slow speeds from a surface vessel through a choke line into the blowout preventer on top of the well. If all goes well, cement may be applied to fill the well over the next few days.

Thank you, NYT, for that bit of info.
Now then, I will be the first to say I suck at math but if you go back and reread those two little quotes, something jumps out at me.
One uses Pounds per square inch and the other uses pounds per gallon.
If memory serves me, a gallon of tap water weighs eight pounds.
So, whatever "mud" they are using is five pounds per gallon more than plain tap water, given it is a mile down, I want to know how a gallon of "mud" that weighs thirteen pounds can stop a well that was estimated to be at 6,700 psi.
Like I said, I was never real good at math but that defies the laws of physics.



I want to know how that shit works and Bill O'Rielly is my first choice as an underwater special correspondent.. Just make sure there is a lot of anchor chain involved.

6 comments:

  1. Busted, the mud weighs 13 pounds per gallon. Multiply that by however many gallons the mud pipe holds and the figger comes out pretty high. "Static head pressure" it is. Just like the pressure at the bottom of the ocean is higher because of the weight of the water. Stuff Shill O'Reilly down the pipe to pig it out when they're done...

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  2. Tim, don't sweat it. Apology accepted.

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  3. Like Mayberry said, it's the weight of the whole column of mud, from the surface all the way down to the bottom. Figuring you got a 5 inch round pipe and this mud is 13 pounds per gallon and you got 8,000 feet of pipe, figure you can put maybe 8,000 gallons of mud into the thing, that's going to get you around 20,000 psi of pressure at the bottom of the hole from one gallon stacked right on top of the other (in actuality the pipe is bigger but the same general principle applies) . Thing is, if anything is leaking now, it's the drilling mud -- and that shit is full of toxic heavy metals (thus why it's heavier than water, doh!). They need to start pumping concrete down that bitch lickity split or sooner or later they're going to run out of mud to keep pumping down, because you can be damned sure they're losing heap-loads of mud to the surrounding formations...

    - Badtux the Oil Penguin

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  4. Could still be too little, too late. Seems there is some evidence that all that hidden sunken "oh-so-dispersed" oil is changing the temperature and viscosity of the normal current in the Gulf---the current that powers the Gulf Stream and keeps the weather such that we can actually grow edible foods. The Gulf current is stalled...if it spreads to the Gulf Stream up the coast, global harvest failures could begin next year.

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  5. Anonymous8:49 AM

    What I don't get is how in da'fuck those eagg-heads were able to pump ANYTHING down under such pressure and nothing has cracked yet along the way.Imaging forces of the mud pumps pushing shit down against exploding oil and gas. How? I figured if you needle some hose into the main tube and shit running from that tube with such pressure (!!!), the mud should be blown fucking out along with oil and gases, right? Bc they are not pumping 400-600 pounds/second. How in the fuck that shit works on contact with oil/gas mixture? Anyone? Everyone knows that there are some portland-cements that could harden in salty water, but they pumping their mud into fucking oil, which has totally different property charachteristics.

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  6. Anon, ever hear the statement "oil and water doesn't mix"? Same deal with oil and drilling mud. Drilling mud basically is a clay slurry with various heavy metals added to bring it to a specific weight, and is specifically designed to be able to keep oil (and surrounding rocks, and etc.) out of the bore of a well. What they do is gradually increase the weight and pressure until they find just enough to push the oil back down, then gradually back off until they calculate that the amount and weight of mud in the hole is just right to keep things stable. Oilfield folks have decades of experience doing this kind of thing, and remember, it was BP's idiotic decision to pump the mud *out* of the hole that led to the original blowout in the first place....

    I must admit that I, too, am surprised that the header and other infrastructure held, though. Hopefully they'll continue holding until the well is completely cemented in..

    - Badtux the Oil Penguin

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