[ale] BP knew of problems 11 months before the rig blew - further OT

[Greg Freemyer]

On Thu, Jun 3, 2010 at 4:51 PM, Jim Kinney <jim.kinney at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> On Thu, Jun 3, 2010 at 4:38 PM, Greg Clifton <gccfof5 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Obviously snipers were deployed in case it was a Korean/Al Qaeda, etc.
>> terrorist action, so as to prevent another rig from being taken down. Now if
>> this affair hasn't given ideas of how to wreck the US economy to those who
>> might care to do so, they must be taking a Rip van Winkle style nap. How
>> many hundreds of active wells do we have in the gulf? Hopefully those have
>> better failsafe cutoff valves.
>>
> Might be time to do some record checking on the engineering tests. Not that
> I suspect imminent danger from a goon squad...
>
> What's the lifespan of an oil rig? How do they change out failed parts on
> the head? What about those underwater?
>
> How is an old offshore rig shut down when it's time? How is the hole
> permanently plugged?

I doubt its hard to plug them.

At some point in the life of a well they force water down to fill the
hole from the bottom up (water being heavier than oil).

When that quits working there is no longer any pressure I don't think,
so even if they failed to plug it not much would leak.

fyi: natural oil seeps account for millions of barrels a year of oil
seeping into the ocean, so a small leak measured in barrels per day
should not really be major problem.  They even found some mountains
made of blacktop off the coast of CA recently.  Apparently a long time
ago they had some huge natural wells out there under the ocean.

Greg