Confusion and technical terms make it hard to understand what happened in the Gulf of Mexico
By Seth Richardson
The media has been generally remiss in describing to us how the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico happened, and everybody’s too busy pointing fingers and talking about the impending damage from the oil to take the time to do so, so I’m going to have to give it a shot myself.
After consulting with some experts, here’s a layman’s explanation of how deep-sea oil drilling works and what likely happened beneath the Deepwater Horizon.
First, some basics on oil drilling. Take a soda straw and and the ink reservoir and tip from a Bic ballpoint pen. Now insert the ink pen into the soda straw. Now jam the whole thing into the dirt, and twist and push the ballpoint parts downward. That’s pretty much how an oil drilling rig works. The ink reservoir tube is the “drill stem,” the ballpoint tip is the “tool” or “drill bit,” and the soda straw is the “casing.”
As the well is drilled, drilling mud, a chemical concoction used to lubricate the drill bit and carry the rock chips the bit creates, is pumped down through the center of the drill stem, and it flows back up out of the hole along the outside of the drill stem. As the hole gets deeper, the casing is slipped down into the hole with the drill bit and drill stem inside the casing. Sections of casing are added to this stack as the hole is drilled.
At the top of the stack of casing, which does not extend to the bottom of the hole where the oil is, is a “blowout preventer,” or BOP. This is a complex device that has at least four different ways of sealing the well casing and preventing oil from flowing up the casing uncontrolled. It has a hydraulic ram that can crush both the casing and the drill stem shut, another hydraulic ram with a shear plug that can punch a hole through both the casing and the stem, creating a horizontal plug in the well, an “annular plug” which can seal the casing but not the drill stem, and a pair of fittings at the very bottom of the BOP called the “kill” and “choke” ports, through which high pressure fluid can be pumped to create pressure in the casing to keep oil from flowing up the pipe.
Typical BOP used on land
As the well is drilled, and the casing is rammed into the hole, there is space between the rock wall of the hole the tool is boring and the 1/2 inch thick wall of the casing pipe. This is the space that is cemented in order to seal the space around the casing and the borehole. This must be done to prevent the high-pressure oil from flowing up the outside of the casing, where it cannot be controlled or captured.
Once the casing is cemented properly, there is a strong seal around the casing that will withstand the upwards pressure of the oil.
During drilling, the upwards pressure of the oil is balanced by the weight and pressure of the drilling mud being pumped down the drill stem, so the oil cannot flow upwards. This pressure is kept on until the well is cemented and the cement has hardened. Then the pressure can be let off, and the valves on the BOP closed to cap the well, and the whole system is sufficient to withstand the pressure of the oil.
What seems to have happened here is a failure in the cementing process, likely caused by the nature of deep-water drilling. At the depths involved, methane gas is a frozen liquid, not a gas. The pressure turns it into a liquid, and the temperature turns it into an icy slush or solid.
As the well is drilled, it may pass through layers of frozen liquid, which so long as it stays frozen, is not a problem. But the cementing process generates heat. Cement, as it hardens, chemically changes into concrete, and in the process, it heats up.
To cement the well, the cement is pumped down the drill stem, from which the tool has been removed. The cement flows out the end of the drill stem and is forced under pressure back upwards towards the surface along the outside of the casing pipe. Normally, a calculated amount of cement is injected into the well as engineers observe the pressure, and when completed, the cement has formed a strong seal around the casing pipe for hundreds or thousands of feet upwards from the bottom of the casing, sealing the bore hole and setting the casing in place.
In this case, however, it appears that there were fissures in the rock strata filled with methane ice, and when the cement hit a fissure or pocket, the heat of the cement curing melted the methane ice. When melted, the ice becomes gas, and the pressure rises dramatically, which can, if the pressure outside the casing and inside the casing are not carefully kept in balance, rupture the casing somewhere above the bottom of the casing, driving methane gas into the casing on the outside of the drill stem. This gas begins to flow upwards and at the same time, the cement, which is supposed to flow up the outside of the casing and fill the space between the casing and the bore hole, can flow into the fissure that contained the methane ice, which means that the desired seal around the outside of the casing cannot be guaranteed.
The methane gas flowed up the casing to the drill rig, a mile above, expanding all the way as the pressure dropped, and exploded. The rig sank, and the riser pipe, which is similar to the casing but is attached to the top of the BOP, fell to the side, kinking and cracking.
Three of the four safety systems in the BOP, the shear ram, the blind ram and the annular valve all failed or worked only partially for some unknown reason, so the flow of oil was not cut off at the BOP as intended, and is now flowing through the casing, drill stem and riser. The drill stem has been capped where it protrudes from the riser pipe, but the broken riser pipe end, with the drill stem inside it, is leaking, as is a crack near the BOP where the riser and drill stem folded over as it sank to the bottom.
The problem BP engineers are facing now is that they are not certain of the strength of the cementing, and if they plug the well, they don’t know if the pressure from the oil will cause the cement to fail and allow the oil to flow up the outside of the casing rather than the inside, which would make the leak completely uncontrollable.
At the moment, the oil is coming up the casing into the riser, where hopefully it can be captured and pumped to the surface, which is preferable to blowing out the cement and ending up with a massive, uncontrolled release of oil.
So, BP is reluctant to try to plug the well, lest the cement fail, and, according to my sources, are pinning their hopes on the lateral well they are drilling in hopes of intercepting the well bore so they can pump the whole well bore full of cement to plug it. The problem is that it’s going to take a long time to drill the intercept well, and in the past, such attempts have rarely hit the 12 inch wide borehole from four miles away on the first try. The last time this was attempted, in Ixtoc, Mexico, it took six attempts to hit the bore. If it takes two months per attempt, it could be a year before they manage to shut the well down that way.
But, BP may be preparing to try a “junk shot,” which is injecting bits of rubber and other debris through the kill and choke lines to clog up the annular valve at the top of the BOP and stop the flow of oil that way, even though they risk blowing out the cement, which could lead to an even greater and faster release of oil that would be completely uncontrollable, and likely cannot be contained and pumped away by dropping a structure over the BOP.
Why it happened will take months to determine, but I hope I’ve given you a better idea of how it happened, and what the risks are.
Union thugs bully the Red Cross
May 20th, 2010, 12:30 pm by Seth RichardsonProgressive meddlers and unionized workers looking to preserve their paychecks call for FDA investigation
By Seth Richardson
The American Red Cross, a non-profit organization that manages nearly half of the blood supply of the nation is under attack by Progressive organizations like the AFL-CIO and the National Consumers League, a far-left “social justice” organization, who are objecting to staffing reorganization by the Red Cross in its blood collection clinics.
The AFL-CIO and NCL have called for an FDA investigation of staffing levels at the Red Cross, claiming that staff reductions and elimination of nurses is imperiling the safety of the blood supply.
According to the Washington Post, the Red Cross has significantly reduced the need for highly-paid nurses by increasing the number of trained technicians in their collection clinics. The Red Cross, like most other charitable organizations, is suffering from the recession and a drop in donations, and is trying to cut costs and preserve its ability to provide life-saving blood products.
But the labor unions representing Red Cross employees are barking mad about losing plush union-negotiated positions and are siccing the FDA on the organization in a typical Progressive/leftist tactic, just at the very moment they are negotiating with the Red Cross over extending contracts for union employees, including nurses.
According to the Worker’s Committee for Blood Safety, which describes itself as a coalition “composed of community groups, blood safety organizations, labor rights advocates, and unions that represent Red Cross employees,” there are nine expired union contracts, and another eight will expire in June. The WCBS claims that “[t]he major impediment to reaching an agreement on these contracts is the unwillingness of Red Cross to negotiate over health care, 401-k, and pensions. Red Cross maintains it has the right to unilaterally change health care coverage, 401-k, and pensions at anytime without bargaining.”
The WCBS goes on to complain, “A union official… states that he believes Red Cross is trying to replace its workforce with cheaper, less experienced workers who are paid as little as $11 an hour.” Well, yes, this is very likely the case. So what? The Red Cross is entitled to cut its workforce and its labor costs in response to dwindling donations and an economic recession, isn’t it? Evidently not, according to Progressives and socialists. Evidently the Red Cross is seen by union employees as a sinecure that ought to guarantee them a lifetime of highly-paid work with gold-plated benefits.
And then the group has the gall to mendaciously claims that these workers “are paid little better than minimum wage.” Problem is the minimum wage is $7.25 per hour, and last time I checked, $11.00 per hour (which is the least the group claims the Red Cross is offering… and they don’t say to whom this wage is offered or what the actual wage range is) is one-and-one-half times minimum wage. Typical Saul Alinsky “Rules for Radicals”/Progressive disinformation and propaganda at work there, I’m afraid.
The Washington Post quotes Red Cross spokeswoman Stephanie Millian as saying that the complaint to the FDA is “a negotiating tactic to try to gain leverage at the bargaining table…While issues of blood safety and the presence of nurses were brought up at these press conferences, it is wages and benefits that remain the top union concern at the table in each of our negotiations, not blood safety.”
Given the WCBS statement on its own website, Millian’s statement is highly credible, and the complaint to the FDA is highly suspect.
While the Red Cross has had problems with its blood processing systems, and is operating under a court-supervised consent decree issued in 1993 related to errors and problems with their handling of blood, there is little evidence that current process of collecting blood has endemic problems that require full-time heavy staffing by nurses rather than trained technicians.
An October 30, 2009 Adverse Determination Letter from the FDA pointed out a number of systemic problems and errors in blood processing and handling that had occurred in several of the Red Cross’ processing facilities, but none of the complaints pointed to problems that would be resolved by keeping nurse staffing levels at blood collection points high.
According to the Washington Post, the union complaint is based on “anecdotal evidence.” Washington Post staff writer Darryl Fears writes, “Feigen and the whistle-blowers have not drawn a direct connection between the reduction of workers to problems collecting blood.”
Anyone who has been in a hospital knows that most blood draws are performed by trained technicians called phlebotomists, not nurses. Sticking a needle in someone’s vein and drawing blood does not require a nursing degree, and the complaint is pretty clearly union machinations to keep a stranglehold on the Red Cross and keep union members employed.
This sort of abuse of process is pretty typical of Progressives and union bosses, who will do or say anything to preserve their privilege and power.
The Red Cross provides invaluable non-profit services to the nation and the world, and the last thing we need is union parasites sucking the life-blood of the Red Cross, which survives on your donations, to feather their own nests. We need to support the Red Cross in busting the stranglehold of unions on our precious blood supply.
If the unions and leftist advocacy organizations had even a shred of decency, and had any true concern for the needs of the nation, or blood safety for that matter, they would offer to pay the salaries of Red Cross union employees out of union coffers and through Progressive/Leftist donation campaigns out of a sense of egalitarian socialist solidarity for a non-profit public service of inestimable value, and they would agree to serve the Red Cross, and their fellow human beings for free, as the many tens of thousands of non-union Red Cross volunteers do every day.
But that’s not what the union bosses at the AFL-CIO and the WCBS or the pundits at the NCL are after. They want to achieve Progressive power and control over the nation’s blood supply and mandate artificially high wages and benefits, and union dues, that they can use to politic with and fund their own pet projects and perks. Union greed knows no bounds, particularly in the Age of Obama, where union bosses have the ear of the President and are granted boons like ownership of GM, while secured bond holders are defrauded, and Obama will no doubt “encourage” the FDA to further harass the Red Cross as a favor to the labor unions and other Progressive organizations..
Perhaps in response, the Red Cross should stop collecting blood entirely and let the AFL-CIO or the National Consumers League take over the task of providing non-profit life-saving blood collection and distribution.
Somehow I doubt the fat cats and pundits at the AFL-CIO, NCL or WCBS are willing to put their money or their morals where their big fat mouths are.
Nor do I want the labor unions in charge of the national blood supply. Do you?
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