Top kill animation from BBC - how BP oil well is being plugged
news.bbc.co.uk
news.bbc.co.uk
EDIT: Here's a link to the video, he comes on at about 1:40
http://www.cnn.com/video/?/video/bestoftv/2010/05/25/jk.bill...
It's 5000 psi at a 20 foot diameter! That's one monster of a valve.
Also, it's not like a valve in your sink. It's designed to sit there, and they drill through the opening in it.
It looks more like those circular portals you see on alien ships in movies. Like an iris door.
You need tremendous pressure to move the sliders. It's even designed to be strong enough to cut right through the drill string if necessary.
I don't know why they are unable to get it to close, but maybe it's jammed or there have no way of giving it pressure.
So it's not as simple as "close the valve".
"The rig's blowout preventer, a fail-safe device fitted at source of the well, did not automatically cut off the oil flow as intended when the explosion occurred. BP attempted to use remotely operated underwater vehicles to close the blowout preventer valves on the well head 5,000 feet (1,500 m) below sea level, a valve-closing procedure taking 24–36 hours. BP engineers predicted it would take six attempts to close the valves. As of May 2, 2010, they had sent six remotely operated underwater vehicles to close the blowout preventer valves, but all attempts were ultimately unsuccessful."
Marine Remote Operated Vehicles (MROVs) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MROV are being used, but it is very difficult to operate them even in good conditions (flat seas and minimal currents). Add to that, the dexterity of the tools on the ROV is nowhere close to the dexterity of a human hand.
I don't think the outcome of this procedure is going to be be as clear-cut as the media have been reporting. "Roll the dice" seemed to be the story as of last night.
In reality, we'll only know if top kill worked in August when the relief wells are completed. Until then, we'll only be able to say the fix hasn't failed yet.
The worry is that if the fix is reported to have worked and problems materialize a month later, they won't get the same attention as another blowout tomorrow.
How exactly could they have made this worse by rushing it a little bit? Shouldn't there have been round-the-clock engineering shifts being paid for? Why is anyone going home at night to sleep comfortably?
In our terms this is like "oh well, server is down across the country, it's hard to reach so we'll just analyze our options for a few days and try a few things until something works - nothing to lose sleep over".
BP has all the incentives to stop this as quickly as possible; it is costing them lots of money and continues to be a PR catastrophe every day it continues.
There is nothing "new" here. They should know what to do and only have better techniques to solve problems, but they are doing no better than 30 years ago.
Nothing worked 30 years ago, they had to wait 9 months while they drilled relief wells. The tophat failed, the kill failed, everything.
And not a chance in the world would that work.
Open source software works because the people who contribute are .... programmers!
Other kinds of crowd sourcing works by doing something simple/stupid many times.
Most people don't even understand the problem. So how do you expect them to come up with a solution? How many people do you know who have the slightest clue what they do to drill a well? And reading wikipedia doesn't count.