Two articles in the NY Times in the last two days have given me a completely different perspective on the idea of "blowing up" the well to cap it. Before reading these articles -- one an op ed in today's times, the other a feature article in yesterday's paper about the failure of the Blow Out Preventer -- I really didn't understand how blowing up the well has a good chance of stopping the gusher while offering little risk of an uncontrolled flow of oil from the reservoir.
There have been a few somewhat wild eyed articles posted about the danger of the sea floor "collapsing" allowing the whole reservoir to escape into the Gulf. While I didn't buy the argument made in those posts, I did worry that somehow an attempt to blow up the well would fracture the sea floor and allow the reservoir to escape without any means of stopping it because the drill hole and pipe would be destroyed.
What convinced me otherwise is realizing that between the sea floor and the reservoir is something like two and a half miles of sediment and rock. The drill well is not like a fracture in the earth; it's more like a very long but infinitesimally narrow pin hole in a giant slab of concrete. The idea that the entire "roof" of the reservoir is going to collapse is kind of silly.
Christopher Brownfield, a former nuclear submarine officer, published an op ed in today's times outlining how to stop the gusher pending the drilling of the relief well. It doesn't take nukes or other exotic explosives. Most importantly -- and this is what changed my mind -- he explains how the "blowing up" works. He argues that by drilling one or more holes parallel to the leaking well, lowering large conventional charges into them to form an "explosive column" and detonating them. The result is a collapse of the well and tons of rock and debris collapsing into the well effectively plugging it. The article is an interesting read, and Brownfield also makes an pretty compelling argument that the Navy he served has the expertise in underwater demolition to do this:
http://www.nytimes.com/...
Blow Up the Well to Save the Gulf
By CHRISTOPHER BROWNFIELD
Published: June 21, 2010
...
The Navy also commands explosives experts who have vast knowledge of underwater demolitions. And it has some of the world’s finest underwater engineers at Naval Reactors, the secretive program that is responsible for designing nuclear reactors for nuclear submarines. With the help of scientists in our national weapons laboratories and experts from private companies, these engineers can be let loose on the well.
...
With this new structure in place, the Navy could focus on stopping the leak with a conventional demolition. This means more than simply "blowing it up": it means drilling a hole parallel to the leaking well and lowering charges to form an explosive column.
Upon detonating several tons of explosives, a pressure wave of hundreds of thousands of pounds per square inch would spread outward in the same way that light spreads from a tubular fluorescent bulb, evenly and far. Such a sidelong explosion would implode the oil well upstream of the leak by crushing it under a layer of impermeable rock, much as stepping on a garden hose stops the stream of water.
It’s true that the primary blast of a conventional explosion is less effective underwater than on land because of the intense back-pressure that muffles the shock wave. But as a submariner who studied the detonation of torpedoes, I learned that an underwater explosion also creates rapid follow-on shockwaves. In this case, the expansion and collapse of explosive gases inside the hole would act like a hydraulic jackhammer, further pulverizing the rock.
He is specifically NOT calling for the use of nuclear explosions. It's actually a pretty simple idea -- use explosives to collapse the well. It's not really that different from the "top kill" idea of dumping mud and debris into the well until the weight of the debris exceeds the pressure of the gusher. Only here, if the explosive column were say 200 feet, you would already have 200 feet of rock debris that would need to shift only a few feet to kill the well.
Before Brownfield explained it this way, I had the image of an explosion blowing off the Blow Out Preventer and just making a bigger gusher. The key to his idea is that the explosion would be set off underground, parallel to the drill hole.
PS -- Sorry if this violates the BP Mothership protocol. I'm a bit inexperienced here and am under the impression that those diaries about about monitoring what's going on, rather than op eds, etc. I'd be glad to delete and move this if necessary.