Let us first stipulate that
- BP is a callous international corporation interested only in profits and suppressing bad publicity and will lie to us at every opportunity.
- Their irresponsibility and greed have led to a situation where immense damage has been and will be done to the Gulf Coast economy, human life, and the living environment.
- Part of their irresponsibility is evident in the ongoing crisis, as it is increasingly obvious that there is danger that they, or anyone, may lack the ability to remediate the disaster they have created.
- A corporate death penalty should be considered, in the form of appropriation of all corporate assets, loss of a charter to operate in the United States, and possible criminal charges against corporate officers.
Having said all of the harsh things necessary, I'm dismayed by the lack of information available on the technical issues involved. I think that it badly damages the public debate. Coverage is maddeningly superficial. Drilling technology is immensely complicated and technical and the public good would be served by attempts to educate on what, precisely, is going on. Unfortunately, I'm not the man for the job. Any volunteers?
Light is better than heat.
Part of responsible citizenship is preparing yourself to make intelligent choices when the public good demands decisions on technical issues.
Public statements on the current dilemma from all sources, high to low, betray a lack of content about the complicated issues that are creating physical/technological barriers on our path to a solution.
In some cases it's because the parties making the statements find it in their best interest to avoid actual information. In some cases its due to the sad decreptitude of journalism in modern America. In others, it is a reliance on BS to carry the day in the absence of actual experience and knowledge. In some cases, to quote a great movie, its "making you afraid of it and telling you who to blame for it." Its aided and abetted by the willingness of a slack citizenry to be content with glittering generalities at the expense of information.
Call for teachers
I'd gladly explain marine architecture, hydrocarbon chemistry, high pressure fluid mechanics, drilling technology, and abyssal zone ocean ecology to all of you if I could, but I'm not that person. Just a humble biology teacher in lower Alabama.
This is a call for person or persons with technical experience in the drilling of major wells to make themselves available on Dailykos to enable our community to educate itself on what is likely, possible, difficult, and/or impossible in the present situation, and for descriptions of common drilling practice framed in layman's terms.
What do we need to know?
A brief mental survey of things that most of us don't understand, from someone who pleads almost total ignorance of the specifics. This is the fruit of a bit of googling, logic, and basic science background:
- Drilling wells involves controlling the drill head's speed, direction, and state of repair from the wrong end of a miles-long hole.
- The law of the conservation of matter means that as the drill displaces rock, all of that rock has to come to the surface, a mile or more away. It appears that the main way that this is done is by pumping fluids down the well through one space and up through another space.
- The birds and bees of hydraulics dictate that fluids, suspended rock, and the drill shaft itself all experience friction. The longer the hole, the greater the resistance. There are also large temperature and pressure differences along the length of the shaft...large enough temperature and pressure extremes that materials can behave quite differently both physically and chemically and their behavior can change in different parts of the system.
- As it descends, the drill shaft is invading various strata of rock with widely varying physical characteristics. These can have an additional large effects on drill behavior and can themselves be altered in ways predictable and unpredictable by the passage of the drill and shaft. Among those strata are the oil-bearing strata themselves. The fact that the oil is gushing from the well against huge water pressures indicates that in its native strata the oil is under considerable pressure itself.
- While all of this is going on below the surface, a deep water platform has to accurately maintain its position above the hole come what may. It may be stating the obvious, but a deep water platform is not sitting atop a substructure that reaches the bottom.
- Stopping the gusher can only be done by remote control and must be done while the oil is still running Try it at home: when you shift a garden hose, don't you turn off the water first? Ever get impatient and try it with the water still running?
- Fifteen or twenty other items that I have yet to think of in thirty minutes of musing on a Friday morning.
Some immediate questions
From reading the excellent but rather technical article on drilling fluid in Wikipedia I gather that there are many kinds of "drilling mud." What is being used in the top kill procedure?
Given the immense pressures involved, how, practically speaking, do they force the mud into the shaft against the pressure of the oil? And why doesn't the mud just blast straight back out given that it has an outlet?
What, precisely, is the "junk" in the junk shot, beyond glib references to golf balls? How is the method of introducing those substances to the well different than the pumping of mud and why is there reason to believe that they may successfully block the flow of oil?
Spraying dispersant on the oil causes it to emulsify and spread through the water in small droplets. The idea seems to be that if you increase the surface area of the oil/water interface by emulsification that natural processes will be able to act on the oil and assimilate it. Is it true as I suspect that it has worked successfully on much much smaller volumes of oil and that this may be a case of ignoring that the much larger volumes of oil make this a case of doing what you can rather than doing what works?
If we are to do anything but shout and cry: "DO SOMETHING AND DO IT NOW!" it seems that we need some advanced education and someone to give us that education.
Any volunteers?
Baz