skid
27th July 2010, 12:40 AM
Interesting Link...
"Drilled through 13000 feet of rock, and 2 miles of that was beach sand"...
http://www.kunstler.com/Grunt_replytoSimmons.html
Mr. Kunstler,
My brother is "The" World expert on blow outs and well control. This is his response to your missive from the simmons guy. He is doing the reliefs wells
We've always been concerned about the well broaching as the secondary
containment casing has 3 specifically designed rupture disks in it. These
were part of the engineered design, for good reasons too complex to put down here. If any one of them failed, they could direct the flow at 2 outside
casing strings, 22" and 18" and these are set into weak rock. But these
"shoes" are deeper than any previously reported failure or broaching depths anywhere in the world.
*** and I wrote the definitive work, and to my knowledge, the only paper on the subject, as this kind of thing is constantly a concern in our work. We
have never discovered a surface broach (*** and I call this a "40-acre
choke!") deeper than 3,000 ft. The Bay of Campeche well broached from about 1,500 ft when Red Adair shut it in on a shallow casing. But nobody ever gave [him] points for being smart. Bold, yes! Smart, no!
Some more detail is in order. The rupture disks fail to about a 3 mm
opening. They are designed to control a failure mode in the 16" containment string so that if it fails, it fails at pre-determined points. Otherwise, it could fail in such a way as to either damage the 2 primary containments: casing and tubing, or damage the wellhead supporting everything in the well. If subjected to massive flow, the holes could erode to a much larger orifice, but that doesn't seem to have happened. Our current shut-in pressure is lower than we expected, but still MUCH higher than would be seen if any of the rupture disks had failed. If any appreciable amounts of oil were flowing into upper zones, we would have seen signs of that while drilling the 2 relief wells. Believe me: we were looking!
It's pretty clear to me that the lower pressure we see now is either 1) The
well wasn't as good as the Reservoir Engineers predicted (Either way, it is
a GOOD well! Or 2) It was actually flowing harder than our earlier
estimates. Neither of these choices is much of a stretch.
Now as to the silly shit about poking a nuke into the well:
If we could poke anything into the FUCKING WELL we would have killed it weeks ago! Does this guy think we've been sucking our thumbs? We snub kill strings into flowing wells all the time and kill them when we get the pipe in there. We can't access this well! It's in 5,000 ft of FUCKING ocean!
This deep-water sediment section is different than normal GoM rock. It all
is. Sealing this well at 15,000 ft would simply allow it to blow out at
16,000 ft. The freakin' well is only 18,326 ft deep in 5,000 ft of water.
That means we only drilled a little more than 13,000 ft of rock, and most of
that "rock" was 2 miles of beach sand that avalanched off the upper shelf!
It takes 8 casing stings to get a deep as we got. I've been below 27,000 ft
on land with 5 casing strings! All that pipe - yes, millions of dollars
worth- is because nothing shallow will contain anything deeper. The
producing zone has over 10,000 psi and the fracture pressure at 16,500 ft
has a measured value of 9,600 psi. Without casing between the 2 zones, it
would already be blowing out to that zone!
As to oil leaking out of the sea floor: so what? If the guy knew anything
about anything he'd know that there's oil and gas leaking out of just about
every sea floor in the world! The Santa Barbara Channel has had oil seeps since pre-history. The la Brea Tar Pit is an oil seep! There's a huge pitch lake in Trinidad (Also Called La Brea) and the Eternal Fires of the
Zoroaster's is a gas seep of antiquity!
There are bounding faults around the Macondo structure that may be leaking. I suspect, once we start looking closely, we'll find many similar leaks in the deep water environment. As I said, this rock is not different than we're used to working with, and most of it got there by a series of avalanches down the Continental Slope. Who knows how many leaky seals there are?
The last screwy thing is all this energy about methane bubbles! For crying
out loud: there have been studies for years trying to figure how to harvest
all the world's methane hydrate! It's everywhere! Still forming on sea
floors all over: especially in the Arctic and off Russia's northern coast.
If you Google "methane hydrate" you'll see a DOE paper from May-2010 on the subject! In fact, the Bermuda Triangle is claimed to be a huge methane trap!
There was some crackpot college professor from California reporting we'd
blow the whole Louisiana coastline off if we didn't be careful. The world is
full of nuts!
"Drilled through 13000 feet of rock, and 2 miles of that was beach sand"...
http://www.kunstler.com/Grunt_replytoSimmons.html
Mr. Kunstler,
My brother is "The" World expert on blow outs and well control. This is his response to your missive from the simmons guy. He is doing the reliefs wells
We've always been concerned about the well broaching as the secondary
containment casing has 3 specifically designed rupture disks in it. These
were part of the engineered design, for good reasons too complex to put down here. If any one of them failed, they could direct the flow at 2 outside
casing strings, 22" and 18" and these are set into weak rock. But these
"shoes" are deeper than any previously reported failure or broaching depths anywhere in the world.
*** and I wrote the definitive work, and to my knowledge, the only paper on the subject, as this kind of thing is constantly a concern in our work. We
have never discovered a surface broach (*** and I call this a "40-acre
choke!") deeper than 3,000 ft. The Bay of Campeche well broached from about 1,500 ft when Red Adair shut it in on a shallow casing. But nobody ever gave [him] points for being smart. Bold, yes! Smart, no!
Some more detail is in order. The rupture disks fail to about a 3 mm
opening. They are designed to control a failure mode in the 16" containment string so that if it fails, it fails at pre-determined points. Otherwise, it could fail in such a way as to either damage the 2 primary containments: casing and tubing, or damage the wellhead supporting everything in the well. If subjected to massive flow, the holes could erode to a much larger orifice, but that doesn't seem to have happened. Our current shut-in pressure is lower than we expected, but still MUCH higher than would be seen if any of the rupture disks had failed. If any appreciable amounts of oil were flowing into upper zones, we would have seen signs of that while drilling the 2 relief wells. Believe me: we were looking!
It's pretty clear to me that the lower pressure we see now is either 1) The
well wasn't as good as the Reservoir Engineers predicted (Either way, it is
a GOOD well! Or 2) It was actually flowing harder than our earlier
estimates. Neither of these choices is much of a stretch.
Now as to the silly shit about poking a nuke into the well:
If we could poke anything into the FUCKING WELL we would have killed it weeks ago! Does this guy think we've been sucking our thumbs? We snub kill strings into flowing wells all the time and kill them when we get the pipe in there. We can't access this well! It's in 5,000 ft of FUCKING ocean!
This deep-water sediment section is different than normal GoM rock. It all
is. Sealing this well at 15,000 ft would simply allow it to blow out at
16,000 ft. The freakin' well is only 18,326 ft deep in 5,000 ft of water.
That means we only drilled a little more than 13,000 ft of rock, and most of
that "rock" was 2 miles of beach sand that avalanched off the upper shelf!
It takes 8 casing stings to get a deep as we got. I've been below 27,000 ft
on land with 5 casing strings! All that pipe - yes, millions of dollars
worth- is because nothing shallow will contain anything deeper. The
producing zone has over 10,000 psi and the fracture pressure at 16,500 ft
has a measured value of 9,600 psi. Without casing between the 2 zones, it
would already be blowing out to that zone!
As to oil leaking out of the sea floor: so what? If the guy knew anything
about anything he'd know that there's oil and gas leaking out of just about
every sea floor in the world! The Santa Barbara Channel has had oil seeps since pre-history. The la Brea Tar Pit is an oil seep! There's a huge pitch lake in Trinidad (Also Called La Brea) and the Eternal Fires of the
Zoroaster's is a gas seep of antiquity!
There are bounding faults around the Macondo structure that may be leaking. I suspect, once we start looking closely, we'll find many similar leaks in the deep water environment. As I said, this rock is not different than we're used to working with, and most of it got there by a series of avalanches down the Continental Slope. Who knows how many leaky seals there are?
The last screwy thing is all this energy about methane bubbles! For crying
out loud: there have been studies for years trying to figure how to harvest
all the world's methane hydrate! It's everywhere! Still forming on sea
floors all over: especially in the Arctic and off Russia's northern coast.
If you Google "methane hydrate" you'll see a DOE paper from May-2010 on the subject! In fact, the Bermuda Triangle is claimed to be a huge methane trap!
There was some crackpot college professor from California reporting we'd
blow the whole Louisiana coastline off if we didn't be careful. The world is
full of nuts!