(This question was inspired by the debate over whether news updates on the status of repairs were HN appropriate.)
So my idea is halfway between the two: place a large, weighted concrete cylinder with no end caps above the hole - a hollow top hat, if you like. It needs to be big, like 25' x 25' or larger; height is more important than diameter. This in itself does nothing to stem the flow - but nor does it obstruct it. So the cylinder can then be sealed around the bottom and fixed to the seabed without interference from the pressure of the outrushing oil.
Then one can begin filling the cylinder with gravel or whatever is suitable - smallest material first, working up to rocks. As we begin covering the gusher, the pressure will obviously push some of the filler material out of the way...but as it's inside a cylinder, the filler is just going to get pushed against the side of the cylinder, where its weight is going to increase the downward pressure on the material at the bottom, which has nowhere to go except in towards the center. When the aggregate pressure at the bottom of the cylinder from the sides into the center exceeds the pressure of the oil, it will pinch off the flow, like a valve. This of course assumes perfect packing of the filler material; in reality the oil will diffuse through it, but in doing so the pressure will be distributed across the diameter of the cylinder, which will make it much easier to cap.
Or we could just go with Andy Borowitz's suggestion to plug the whole with BP executives....
Okay, I was skeptical about this thread when I first saw it, but now I see the awesome potential for teaching physics here.
You can't "diffuse the pressure". At every point along the wall of a sealed vessel, the pressure is constant. So if, e.g., the pressure of the hole when sealed would be 100 PSI, then to stop it every square inch of the seal needs to withstand that 100 PSI.
If the top of your concrete cylinder has, say, 100 times the area of the hole, then the flow of oil may end up evenly distributed over that area. But if you then try to seal the top you must now provide the same strength of seal -- it must withstand the same pressure -- over a much larger area, which is probably harder to accomplish.
This seems counterintuitive, just as the lever is counterintuitive. But we use this principle all the time to lift things like elevators and cars. You push on a tiny-diameter cylinder with your arms (or with a little electric motor), and it pumps fluid into a much larger-diameter cylinder under the car, and the car rises. Of course, you have to pump up and down dozens or hundreds of times to lift the car one inch.
I'm struck by the fact that there are other oil plumes nearby on the seabed, eg 400 feet away from the big one. If the borehole itself is damaged and oil is also leaking out through cracks in the ocean floor, then successfully capping the wellhead will just increase the outward pressure to other leaks, and we'll end up playing whack-a-mole. Depending on how porous or fractured the ground is in the area around the well, attempting to just cap it may be futile.
Indeed, it seems as if the latest strategy is the mentioned here of dropping a giant funnel on it and sucking up as much oil as possible through a pipe rather than allowing it to diffuse into the water, while we try to get an/other rig(s) in place to drill relief wells. And the estimate of having that done by August is based on the time it took to perform a similar task in much shallower water. The explosion in April took place about 3 months after drilling began, and while BP began drilling a relief well around the first week of May, there's no guarantee that any individual drill will tap into the same pocket on the first attempt, which I presume is why the government has ordered they get a second one going ASAP. The Ixtoc I oil spill in the 1970s, which was also in the gulf, took 10 months to bring under control. Although our drilling and seismic imaging technology has improved significantly since then, they're also applied to wells at much greater depths.
You lost me there. The cylinder is open at the top, right?
Ever try to push your finger into a garden hose?
I have no idea with how much pressure the oil is coming out there, but it's probably more than enough to push any gravel out of the way before it makes it into the cylinder.
Yes, it would have to be a big pipe, but is that possible? Or, could you not attach a cone to the top of the cylinder to condense the flow into a smaller (pipe size flow)?
The problem with asking non petroleum engineers this sort of question is that you get incorrect and useless answers based on very limited "intuition and common sense" and not based on actual knowlege of the discipline.
Further more its not like the solutions that they have tried so far have been particularly high tech (put a cap on it and hope the water pressure with seal it, stuff the hole with crap and hope the water pressure will seal it, put fluid in the hole and hope the water pressure will seal it).
There are a lot of smart people on HN, so if nothing else it is good mental masturbation to make suggestions and then explain why those suggestions are or are not feasible.
People spend years just studying fluid dynamics alone. People spend years studying mechanical engineering by itself. People spend years studying chemistry by itself. People spend years coming to grips with the operational difficulties of undersea operations.
What those people would see in this thread is like what we'd see from a bunch of laypeople designing the back-end of a Web app.
No. The hope was that the weight of a column of heavy mud a mile long would be enough to counteract the pressure.
How many times has this attitude been proven pointless and ineffective? As I understand it one of the great things about "startup cultures" is the utilization of the outsider's prospective. Why can't that mentality be applied to this problem?
More seriously, the biggest barrier to laypeople coming up with practical solutions to this is that all of the forces involved are orders of magnitude outside of our experience. None of us has any intuitive concept of what things are like 5000 feet below the surface of the water. None of us has any idea what oil is like in that volume, let alone at that pressure and temperature.
I'd be more charitable about common sense solutions to the cleanup, since that seems like the type of thing we can have an intuition about. The bottom of the ocean however is an entirely alien environment, with (for all intents and purposes) different physics.
The only people with an intuition for this are the ones working on the solution professionally.
If you can't at minimum do the physics required you can't play this game.
Even the most cynical of minds cannot possibly conjure up the conspiracy theory that everyone is just sitting around doing nothing. It is in BP's own best interests to fix this ASAP - the magnitude of fallout this creates for them increases as the problem drags on.
One of the less impressive aspects of our new information culture is that every Joe Schmoe now thinks he is an expert materials engineer, rocket scientist, political expert, economist, sociologist, historian, physicist, chemist, biologist, medical professional, and general.
As a trained mechanical engineer turned software guy, I find it ironic that we softies bitch about laymen's assumptions about our field, and we are aggravated constantly by other people who assume that everything just takes "a couple of days" to build... yet we are so quickly to leap to the same conclusion when it concerns a field that is not our own.
Then I would make a contraption consisting of three parts:
1) similar flange to the one on the ocean floor that can be bolted on to the one welded on the pipe
2) a cylinder welded on top of the flange
3) some sort of closing mechanism on top of the cylinder.
Get divers (or ROV's) down to attach the contraption to the pipe by bolting the two flanges together. This should be possible since the oil will just rise out of the cylinder, so the pressure of the oil shouldn't be a problem. When the contraption is secured activate the closing mechanism.
The only requirement here is that you can weld something onto the pipe below where the leak is. I don't know whether that's possible at that depth though.
Worse, it sounds like the state of the art for atmospheric diving suits will only get you half-way there: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_diving_suit
I would think that they could hook a giant pump onto one or more pipes and collect it somehow. At 145gpm, it would take 7000 years to fill up one of the super tankers.
Likewise, I wonder if they could put a heater on the top hat pipe. Maybe the oil is thick at that temp/pressure. Or maybe there are ice crystals, but it seems like they could solve that somehow. We have wires up North to thaw frozen pipes. Shop vacs have larger diameter hoses to not get clogged so easily. Maybe they could bundle lots of smaller pipes together.
Ironically, I accidentally poured a few cups of oil into my truck's coolant reservoir. I thought it would all float to the surface, but lots of it just stayed at the bottom. Blowing bubbles into the tank made it float up sort of like the bubble "pumps" in a fish aquarium.
At this point, they should just create a contest and let school kids come up with ideas.
Find a few empty supertankers (which I'm certain BP can round up if they need to), mount a bunch of large industrial pumps on top of each one, plant them strategically around the leak site, and start sucking up the oil-water mixture from the surface (and stop with the dispersant - we want the oil to stay together in this scenario). Once they're full in a week or so, bring another three or four supertankers in to take over. Meanwhile, send the full ones to a nearby port, offload the oil-water mixture, and deal with processing it to separate out the oil and the water there. We won't get all the oil; if we're lucky, maybe 75%. But whatever that percentage is, it's miles better than what we're getting now.
This is apparently what was done in the early nineties off the coast of Saudi Arabia when they had a similar problem. I'm not saying this would be cheap - supertankers and pumps don't grow on trees - but BP needs to fix this and show they're making a good efforts. Plus, you could probably recover a good deal of the oil as a part of the onshore processing and sell it like any other oil.
BTW: I think it's curious to compare the 19,000 bpd with the 645,113 bpd that the Alaskan pipeline moved in April. http://www.alyeska-pipe.com/Default.asp I can't visualize how much we must be consuming/burning every day.
With little background in physics I would think that the pressure of the oil's need to rise to the surface would exceed the pressure of the water's need to collapse the cylinder.
Criticism of this or any other idea is more than welcome.
When that well blew out it popped off the connecting pipe and began releasing thousands of barrels of oil at very high pressures. Even if the "hole" were clean cut and they could easily mount a fitting to it, the pressure alone would make it extremely difficult (try turning the garden faucet on high and then connecting a hose to it, possible, but rather difficult).
This is why blowout preventers exist, if a blowout happens the well is sealed from inside itself (as I understand it). I think it is ridiculous that mandatory blowout preventers never made it into law. Bright side of it is this incident will (or should) inspire reform.
I think everything they are doing is about as much as you can do at that depth with such high pressure.
My naive thinking would be a cone with a large diameter and a relatively small hole at the top. Plug a hose (or rather a pipe) into that hole and suck off the oil into tankers faster than it would push out on the sides at the bottom of the cone.
This could surely not catch all of the stream, but perhaps a worthwhile percentage?
Maybe if there was a gradually thinning cone, you could get it back to laminar flow partway up.
Done.
But I do have this picture in my head of throwing a bunch of gigantic parachute things into the water. Perhaps with tubes in their centers that lead to the surface. Or, throw so many parachutes down that it creates a canopy that directs where the oil goes. Or put some kind of super heating devices on these things and I don't really know what that would do....
Or they can build a huge cone from the surface downward.
Like you said, I'm no expert.
It would be difficult to control the "canvas" underwater though because of current and other unknown variables.
That is all.
"I say we take off, and nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure." - Ripley
Apparently all the same techniques (the cap, the top kill) were tried 30 years ago -- in much shallower water -- and didn't work then either. What worked was a relief well. If that precedent holds, then we're barely past the beginning of this catastrophe. I hope that's not true, but it's beginning to look that way.
edit: found this http://www.nola.com/news/gulf-oil-spill/index.ssf/2010/05/gr... "BP is drilling two relief wells, which will permanently intersect with the damaged well and shut down the flow of oil into the Gulf of Mexico by pumping concrete into it."
So a relief well is a new well that intersects with current wells and allows concrete to be flowed to the current wells. Can anybody elaborate? Why would it be political suicide to come out and say, "This is the only viable option. Here are the pros, here are the cons. This is our best option. Now let's get to work."
I can't find a time frame on how long the relief well would take, I suspect a while. (It took 9 months for the first well to come online in the Ixtoc 1 spill, and even then it took another 3 months for the flow to subside). The political suicide comes from human nature needing to see something being done. "Uh, so we have a fix in place. Oh yeah, it's gonna take a year to work." "So what do we do now?" "Wait."
And btw if you are Empire/D Walter Bright I'm a big fan of your work. :)
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Some modifications to your idea: Use a really long nose guidance rod of titanium or something that is much smaller than the pipe diameter.
Have the plug have a new pipe running through it to allow the oil to gush through, but then have a new kill valve after you seal the plug in place.
I'm not sure whether the point would get pushed aside, but a guide rod definitely wouldn't hurt!
I think at this point they should just seal the thing off rather than trying to run additional plumbing into it...
Of course, the oil would probably start leaking through the sand/rubble after a few days.
This could be trivially solved by applying nuclear explosives to weld everything shut, with the added benefit that local fishermen could stop to worry whether they'll have a job again soon. </sarcasm>
At least if they use the nuke method no one will care about the oil spill anymore whether it works or not.
Those are truly ideas I had instantly. What's terrifying is that my ideas bare any resemblance to the supposed experts's.
I think the trick is that it needs to be intercepted deep enough into bedrock to not risk having the whole BOP crater.
Then I'd find out what my budget was, and who else I had to deal with afterwards.
Etc...
"But managers did learn to type. And Goldcorp did use the internet to mine gold: in 2000, it abandoned the industry's tradition of secrecy, making thousands of pages of complex geological data available online, and offering $575,000 in prize money to those who could successfully identify where on the Red Lake property the undiscovered veins of gold might lie. Retired geologists, graduate students and military officers around the world chipped in. They recommended 110 targets, half of which Goldcorp hadn't previously identified. Four-fifths of them turned out to contain gold. Since then, the company's value has rocketed from $100m to $9bn, and disaster has been averted."(http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/sep/05/news.netric...)
TL;DR Hey BP take advantage of someone who needs some cash more than you do in order to find the solution
Granted it was flowing water, but same principle.
Anyways what you do is use an open hose and some hose clamps on the leaking pipe, then you direct the oil hose where you want it to go. Since there is no resistance on the other end, the oil will just go through without any pressure build up. And by using a hose clamp on the leak, it doesn't go elsewhere.
Then you can point the hose whereever, maybe park an oil tanker nearby, and pipe directly into it. Then you build a platform that uses a Y valve to divert oil between multiple vessels without spilling.
Here is a diagram: http://imgur.com/4m2GY.jpg
There are some good diagrams at NYT and washington post: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/graphic/2010/05... http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/05/25/us/20100525-to...
Funny that the outlet on top of the cap they tried to lower over the leak became clogged with some kind of ice/methane crystal mix.
The junk shot/top kill didn't work... as far as I can tell, the mud just sprayed out the top of the broken, bent pipe. Taking blood coagulation as an analogy, there is a complex system of aggregation to form a clot and then strengthen at a breach in an arterial wall - this isn't exactly replicated by what they used in the junk shot, apparently a mixture of mud, golf balls and car tyres.
One idea would be to try something else for a junk shot that would actually change the flow characteristics of the oil such as glue, or liquid nitrogen. Mind you, this stuff gets pumped into bottom of the blow out preventer, and the leak is at the top 30ft away. That isn't very much time to change the viscosity of the oil. You would also need a very large volume of this junk shot material... Alternatively, maybe junk shooting with a pile of rare earth magnets could do the trick, assuming the pipe is ferromagnetic.
Also there is still the sea-floor to surface pipe attached to the top of the blowout preventer, albeit bent off at an angle. You could thread something through the post breach pipe back towards the main breach and try to plug it that way.
The coolest solution I can think of is to fire a copper slug down the throat of the bastard thing with a surface mounted rail gun.
http://www.bp.com/liveassets/bp_internet/globalbp/globalbp_u...
No idea how to deal with the `plumes`, though. <silly> Add detergent? </silly>
More information at http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2010/0513/Why-don-t-we-just...
