Ask HN: As a non-expert, what would you do to solve the oil leak in the Gulf? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: As a non-expert, what would you do to solve the oil leak in the Gulf?

29 pointsImFatYoureFat127 comments

You're not an idiot, what ideas have you thought of for fixing the leak that you haven't heard being suggested elsewhere?

(This question was inspired by the debate over whether news updates on the status of repairs were HN appropriate.)

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I don't understand why BP's people think that you can just shove some heavy gunk into the hole and expect it to stay there. Common sense would suggest that you'd have to start by anchoring something inside the hole which you could use to build a progressively denser matrix. How the hell you do that at 30,000 feet underwater I don't know. Depending on the state of the hole perhaps you could put a hollow, expandable cylinder into the hole. The cylinder also would have a series of hinged blades that could be released and the pressure of the oil would force the blades together and close the leak. Hard to explain without drawing a diagram. Since it's an obvious solution I would guess that there's a good technical reason why it can't be done.

Getting a cylinder into the hole seems difficult. An earlier attempt called the 'top hat' involved putting a capped cylinder on top of the hole but apparently methane hydrates, which are lighter than water, started accumulating inside it and it kept lifting off the seabed.

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....

the pressure will be distributed across the diameter of the cylinder

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 should also note that the idea of blocking the hole with gravel isn't exactly a bad one. You're right to point out that if you use big pebbles for your gravel the oil will just squeeze through the abundant empty spaces. So... use finer gravel!

The pressure will try to push the gravel out. So maybe make it really sticky gravel, so that it glues itself together.

Now there are three things to say about this plan:

(a) we call this sticky, very fine gravel concrete and we use it all the time;

(b) a fun educational point: Even with really fine gravel, oil can still diffuse through it. Oil diffuses through "solid" rock all the time. The oil underground is actually trapped inside rock. The rock that holds the oil is relatively porous; the oil is kept underground because above that rock is a layer of denser rock that oil can't diffuse through very well.

(c) In case it isn't obvious yet: The reason your idea still doesn't work very well is that the first cupful of wet concrete you pour onto the hole will promptly get flushed away by the pressure of the leaking oil. ;) As will every successive cupful of wet concrete. Unfortunately, a giant slab of solid concrete must necessarily start out life as a thin layer of wet concrete, so the only way to put a concrete seal over a hole that is actively leaking is to cast it someplace else and then drop it on the hole.

Well this was why I didn't suggest pouring concrete into it...I was assuming that the cap would be cast at the same time as the cylinder :)

The only point of the gravel (rather than sand) is to disperse the flow sufficiently that maneuvering is easier - same way you could wade across a stream but would be knocked over by the same volume of water aimed at your from a firehouse.

"we call this sticky, very fine gravel concrete and we use it all the time;"

I wonder if Nanotech could come up with some kind of super concrete. Ie particles that stick together extremely well?

Actually an interesting point. What would happen if they cast a stadium sized block of concrete and dropped it on the hole.

It would go around.

>You can't "diffuse the pressure".

I must be missing something, the parent is talking about wrapping the 21" (inch) diameter pipe in a 25' (foot) outer pipe, this is effectively 200 times the area. The force applied currently by the oil coming up is going to provide 1/200th of the pressure when applied over the end of the pipe.

It's like blowing out through a straw - you can feel the pressure easily. Versus blowing out through a dustbin with a hole in the bottom.

Mind you it's 4:30am ... perhaps I should go to bed and think about this another time.

You can't diffuse static pressure, but when you deal with fluid flowing through pipes, you need to take the Bernoulli effect into account. Narrowing a pipe with a fast flow can sometimes decrease side pressure.

I understand that, and apologize for my loose terminology. There are two reasons I suggest employing a larger size.

The first is to do with flow, as you mention. While all of a large cap needs to be able to withstand high pressure, that is not in itself an especially tricky engineer problem. But size doesn't hurt; in my experience it's rather easier to stop up a large pipe than a small one with the same pressure, simply because it's a less delicate maneuver. In the case of a domestic plumbing crisis, it's nice to be able to exert your arm rather than just your fingers.

The other reason is simply to do with bulk. The larger the cylinder, the greater it weight when finally sealed, the more room you have to anchor it, and the farther from the (presumably fragile) ground in the immediate vicinity of the gusher the circumference will be, if one is trying to bore into the ground with restraining pegs.

The surgical approach has not been very successful so far. Given the urgent nature of the problem, I feel it's worth trying the crude but frequently effective approach of large mass + gravity.

up voted you because the opportunity to learn more about this situation was one of the main reasons I asked this question

Having slept on the idea and read some more news this morning, I'm much less optimistic about it :-(

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.

but as it's inside a cylinder, the filler is just going to get pushed against the side of the cylinder

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.

The idea is build a 1 mile long column of dense liquid. Just the pressure of 1 mile of heavy liquid was hopefully enough to balance out the pressure of the oil.

It turned out not to be, but that was the hope.

I clearly didn't explain this idea very well. OK, let's imagine we have a mains pipe of 3 inches in diameter sticking out of the ground on a building site gushing water which we can't shut off, but fortunately it's at least fixed in place. That's our high pressure source of unwanted liquid, analogous to the oil gusher.

As you say, sticking something into it or even over the end of it to create a seal is not very practical. But suppose we took an oil barrel, which is about 2 feet in diameter, and drilled a hole in the bottom big enough to fit over the pipe. Getting in place would be a bit of a hassle but once you got the hole lined up with the pipe it wouldn't be too bad, right? OK water is still gushing but now it appears to be gushing in a narrow jet from the center of the barrel resting on the ground. It's still coming out of the same 3 inch pipe, rather than the whole mouth of the barrel.

We anchor the barrel with steel cables or whatever we can. Maybe we seal around the bottom of the barrel with concrete, so it's well and truly fixed in place. Water is gushing out the whole time, but money's no object here. When we are sure the barrel is sturdily anchored, we start shoveling gravel or lead weights it as fast as we can. As it fill instead of gushing in a narrow jet, the water will start (quickly) filling up the barrel - it's the same amount of liquid at the same pressure, but in order to get through the much heavier lumps of rock it's now flowing through a much wider pipe, at a rate proportional to the circumference of the original pipe/the circumference of the barrel.

If we work fast, we can get some kind of plug - perhaps on with an open valve on it - into the end of the barrel before it fills. OK, so then the liquid comes gushing through the open valve. But that means there is not too much pressure around the edges of the barrel, so we seal them with more concrete (I am of course assuming that the walls of the barrel can handle whatever pressure of water is coming out of the original pipe).

Come to think of it, we might as well just drop the barrel with the open valve on top of the thing. The valve prevents pressure buildup inside the barrel while we work on making a seal between the bottom edge and the ground. It just seems a bit easier to me to use filler material to step down the flow from a narrow jet to a wider tube.

Now we still have a gusher, but instead of coming out of a small hole in the ground it's coming out of a big faucet which we have built around the flow without making too much effort to halt it. At which point we close the valve at the top and hope the seal between the ground and the barrel is stronger than the pressure of the oil.

Although sealing the top of this concrete cylinder may be impossible due to pressure, would it not make it easier to attach a pipe and start collecting the oil?

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)?

Because often you can ram a bunch of gunk down the hole and have it stay there. This is how they have been controlling wells and stopping gushers since the beginning.

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.

That was kind of my point in creating this thread. While there are some complex elements in play here and it is a problem with many technicalities to it, there aren't THAT many elements to worry about at I understand it. You have water pressure, the pressure of the oil excreting, the depth and breadth of the hole, and how deep it is under water.

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.

> and hope the water pressure will seal it

No. The hope was that the weight of a column of heavy mud a mile long would be enough to counteract the pressure.

It's a smart idea; but I think the failure point there is the pressure. My mech engineering is shaky but I suspect getting a turn to expand under that pressure is hard. Also the hinges sound like a possible weak point.

It's "only" ~5,000ft of water.

I would think that some sort of suction could draw up enough mixture to minimize the problem. For example, 5,000 barrels a day is 145 gallons per minute. ($3500 = 10hp 145gpm pump)

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.

Firstly latest estimates are between 12k and 19k barrels x day (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/30/us/30spill.html?pagewanted...). That's 350 - 554 gpm. If a super oil tanker can hold 2m barrels you'd fill one up with greasy, slushy water in between 105 - 166 days (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_tanker).

So why not do it?

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.

Yeah... your comment about supertankers growing on trees is way understated in regards to BP being able to round up a few empty ones in less time than it will take to drill the relief wells.

I didn't realize 2b metric tons is the total of all that carriers move in a year. Eek, off by 1000. (I should get some sleep.)

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.

Beware of mistaking intelligence for knowledge. If you don't really know anything about the subject matter, you are likely to overlook all kinds of relevant details, making your intelligent solution pretty much useless. If, in addition to being intelligent, you aren't aware of your lack of knowledge, you may get the tendency to think everyone that couldn't come up with your 'obvious' solution is a fool, which leads others to turn away and rant like http://mattmaroon.com/2009/05/01/hacker-news-disease/

Beware of mistaking knowledge for intelligence. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1369781

If there is one thing that playing video games over the couple of decades has taught me it's that there is NOTHING that a well placed nuke cannot fix.

That is all.

And movies taught it's probably the best way to deal with aliens:

"I say we take off, and nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure." - Ripley

I previously read that this is how Russia successfully handled the problem in the past with an 80% success rate (4/5).

If I were BP, I would post online detailed specs of the physics and equipment in play, in tandem with a massive cash prize for an original idea leading to the successful plugging of the leak.

I like the idea of crowdsourcing it, but can't help feeling that a sufficiently original idea wouldn't be recognized as feasible.

I would also ask others like the government to come in and try things. It appears at the moment it's like try something, oh didn't work, wait a week setting up for the next idea, try that, oh didn't work. Lots of wasted time it seems from an outside observer.

I've heard from more than one petroleum engineer that the only thing likely to work is relief wells and that all the rest of this is theatre. If that's true, it's a politically impossible truth, which would explain much of what we've seen so far.

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.

Can you explain "relief wells?"

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."

They started drilling the relief well in early May - http://online.wsj.com/article/SB4000142405274870434260457522... .

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."

So to get started, my uneducated suggestion is that they put a giant cylinder over the leak so as to at least contain the oil as it rises to the surface. I understand the problems with depth and pressure so ideally there is some fabric that is highly mailable (plastic, rubber, etc.)

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.

I would imagine just "putting a cylinder" over the leak would not contain it. To begin with, the floor of the ocean isn't a solid surface, there's a lot of mud which means the opening to the hole isn't "clean cut" - any kind of "well" uses an inner sleeve so that you can connect a pipe to the "hole". That's usually where the blowout preventers would go, I imagine, would be in the sleeve inside the hole. So, the opening to the well is probably pretty muddy and unstable.

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.

Extending on the cylinder idea, how about a cone?

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?

They tried that. The cone floated away.

The oil is much lighter than water. Plus it has methane which is even lighter than that.

I think the problem is that they originally did do something like that (the pipe itself), but the pipe is thin and the oil flow was well contained. Under these conditions, the cylinder has to be much wider and therefore much heavier. Additionally, there will be turbulent flow that will mess with the stability of the conduit.

Maybe if there was a gradually thinning cone, you could get it back to laminar flow partway up.

I would call a press conference where I would carefully explain that it was someone else's fault.

Not sure if anyone else saw this clip on the Rachel Maddow show, but it was interesting. Seems like the last time something this massive happened (in much shallower water), the same techniques were tried (and failed) and finally, relief wells were the solution - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHmhxpQEGPo

Too bad that drilling takes months.

I'd use a regular expression. I solve all my problems with regex.

Now you have two problems.

%s/oil//g

Done.

Except now you've globally eliminated oil.

I assumed that only the Gulf of Mexico was loaded in the current buffer, not the world. The operation also had the side-effects of preventing any turmoils.

Reducing global warming, but massively disrupting the plastics industry. Would ve economic disaster.

I actually had to deal with something similar at home.

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 is always the Russian solution - a nuclear bomb (I think they actually did this, and I think it was successful - hate to see what happened to the surrounding wildlife though) http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0504/russian-paper-suggests-nucl...

When people have a problem they think "I know I'll use nuclear weapons", now they have two problems.

I wouldn't rule out controlled nuclear explosions until I found out whether the HUGE amount of oil leaking out every minute is more or less harmful to the environment than the would-be radiation.

Yes, but this assumes that using nuclear explosions will improve the situation rather than make it worse.

Are you sure that you aren't thinking about Regular Expressions?

On the other hand, how do they know that such an explosion wouldn't just make the leak bigger?

To confirm, the sea floor is 5000ft below the surface, and the oil reservoir 18000 feet below that.

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.

A rhombic triacontahedron can be formed out of "bricks" which are truncated versions of projections from the polyhedral faces to the center. Make these out of cement, and build a half dome around the well head. The pressure of the water should hold the bricks together with more force than the pressure of the well.

Why cap it? Better to put a turbine down there and start generating electricity from the all natural hydro-petro-electric source!

If you could inject oxygen into the stream you could burn it off at the same time.

I sat here for about five minutes thinking about this, and this really is beyond me.

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.

They already tried something similar in concept (the dome), but the gases froze and clogged it all up. I'm sure the same thing would happen with canopies.

It didn't clog up. It floated away.

hmmm... so I'll suggest something that doesn't trap everything. Overlapping partial domes if you will; the objective really is to get as much of that oil out as possible.

That isn't a bad idea at all. Since connecting a pipe is largely impossible because of the high pressure, maybe anchoring a larger flexible canopy over the well site to contain sub-sea plumes and funnel it to a couple of outputs would work...

It would be difficult to control the "canvas" underwater though because of current and other unknown variables.

I am sure there is no way I can explain this, but you all seem pretty smart, so here goes. What if they created a chamber using a larger diameter cylinder, say 10" larger than the pipe coming from the well head. There would be a hole in the bottom which is exactly the outside diameter of the broken pipe on the well head. The top of the chamber is left open at this point. The chamber is placed over the well head and welded into place while the oil continues to spew out the open top. The top of the chamber would have braces welded to it which would act sort of like drawer glides. An example would be like how the top of a cigar box slides into grooves cut in the sides. These braces would act like the grooves in the cigar box. But obviously with a lot more surface area to hold the pressure of the flow.A top could be slid into place, cutting off the oil flow and held there by the braces. The top is then welded or bolted to the chamber. The top could have a pipe with a valve installed that would connect to the ship above to capture the oil while the valve would control the flow. Anyway, I'm no engineer and I actually may be an idiot, but it's just a thought I had. Fire away.....

For the time being, just try to put pipes into the plume and pump it into tanker ships. Even getting 10% will help.

I thought of that too and liked the fact that it was so simple to implement compared to the other options, even if it would be hard to get 100% containment. It also has the benefit that it is physically similar to what they have to do with the oil under all-is-working-fine conditions. Therefore, it is similar to something they already have lots of experience doing successfully.

And btw if you are Empire/D Walter Bright I'm a big fan of your work. :)

Giant vacuum cleaner FTW.

I would weld a flange around the outside of the pipe a bit below where it's broken. This shouldn't be a problem since there's no oil under pressure coming out there.

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.

It would pretty much have to be ROVs (or manned sub, I suppose). 5,000ft is _way_ deeper than you can SCUBA dive.

Yep: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturation_diving#Extreme_depth...

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 thought the BOP was 30,000 feet down or is that the length of the bore hole? I've been fairly ignorant as to paying in depth attention to the whole debacle.

IIRC, from memory, the well head is at circa 5200 feet and the borehole extends from there circa 18,200 feet further, to a short distance below the intended production zone. (I may be mis-remembering.)

if mating the pipe with something is too hard, what if the flange were strung with some kevlar cords which loop over the broken opening. keep doing the junk shot but with bigger junk that'll get stuck at the what is now a kevlar net attached to the end of the pipe.

or seems like there should be a safety robot that grabs the end of a broken pipe, attaches a flange, then knits (like how they make socks) a pipe on the way back to the surface

Drill new wells next to it, into the same source, to remove the oil and pressure in a controlled way.

That's basically what the "relief well" plan is, but it's taking a couple of months to get there.

I think the trick is that it needs to be intercepted deep enough into bedrock to not risk having the whole BOP crater.

There are two inlets (link to pic below). Pump a slurry of mineral oil, aluminum pellets, and elemental sodium on one side. On the other pump sea water. The chemical reaction looks like: 2Na + 2H2O -> H2 + 2NaOH, and a whole lot of heat that might melt the aluminum just long enough to form blobs. There's no O2 left over so combustion won't happen, right? -OR- maybe a two part foam, with composite reinforcement would work.

http://www.bp.com/liveassets/bp_internet/globalbp/globalbp_u...

I would immediately seek out, using all methods possible, anyone who could reasonably be considered an expert on such issues (to my own satisfaction), and find out their opinion.

Then I'd find out what my budget was, and who else I had to deal with afterwards.

Etc...

Your suggestion reminds me of the example in the book Wisdom of the Crowds (or maybe it was Wikinomics or both)

"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

Defer to the experts.

Why?

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?

You asked what I would do, so I answered. :)

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.

Well, "the experts" are informed by the physics, mechanical engineering and chemistry that's been learned over the years WRT to oil drilling and these problems. As some of the other threads have illustrated, you certainly can't ignore the basic physics required, which I'm sure many if not most of us never learned or have long forget (or we're just very rusty at solving these sorts of problems).

If you can't at minimum do the physics required you can't play this game.

I can only conclude that you do surgery on yourself because you aren't willing to trust the experts.

I didn't want to side track to discussion into an argument over whether laymen can think critically about complex issues or not but this is kind of a ridicules accusation.

There is a great difference between not trusting experts (what you are accusing me of) and having ideas of my own and asking others for their opinions of my ideas.

I don't do surgery on myself but if I had a deadly uncured disease I would question the doctor as to why various treatments won't work to cure me. In all likelihood he would answers for all of my questions (which in itself would put my mind at ease a little), but it is possible that he wouldn't have all the answers (leading me to want a second opinion).

that would be as crazy as trying to fix your own blown out oil well

Because nobody here knows anything about how stuff works at that depth. And a million other reasons. You can't "hack" this can you?

The "experts" have let this go unstopped for 5 weeks now.

Correction: The "experts" have tried in vain for 5 weeks to stop this, and have thus far failed.

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.

BP is working to fix it ASAP, by drilling relief wells, a fix that is known to work, and known to take a long time.

In the meantime they're attempting to keep their PR as good as possible by a) downplaying the size of the spill and b) taking mediagenic actions that are unlikely to succeed, but are useful distractions. Giving them names like "Top Hat" and "Top Kill" and "Junk Shot", and whatever they will be calling "lower marine riser package cap" in a few days.

On the conspiracy point, I disagree. Oil companies are mostly aligned with the Republican Party, and we have a Democratic president and Congress, Bush had a Katrina black eye, so one theory is that BP is "taking one for the team" in order to give Obama a black eye. Even Halliburton is involved, which Cheney led at one point and likely still has strong connections to behind the scenes. I'm not saying I 100% think that is what happening, or that they even caused the original accident in the first place, but there is political benefit at play here, which gives somebody a motive, somewhere. Just a theory, but I can't rule it out yet. Especially given what appears to me to be dangerous incompetence and/or a lack of planning, preparation beforehand, and a lack of hustle and applied common sense after the incident began. I have to wonder how much is due to incompetence and how much to evil/intent.

Also, I'm not sure these experts have really "tried". If someone's hair catches on fire on Monday at 3pm, then BP's first attempt to put out that person's hair fire is at 8pm, then next on Wednesday, then next about 2 weeks later (failing again), then 2 weeks later the next attempt, etc. -- it makes one wonder whether there could have been more attempts made earlier -- I mean, afterall, this person's hair is on fire. And whether they could have had more backup/failover techniques sitting on the sidelines ready-to-go quickly during the first few hours and days after the leak began. All the talk about the challenges of having the depth and pressure constraints are legitimate, but what should also be obvious to any reasonably intelligent person is that another constraint is time. Regardless of what particular technique is use to stop/reduce the leak, the most effective thing you can do is to implement it very early. The total damage to the environment will be proportional to how many hours/days/weeks the oil is left to leak into the sea. So making the investment in process and equipment and people and training to be able to stop this very early will pay off. Since a decent engineer could probably have told them there was a chance the blowout preventer could fail (for a variety of reasons) they should have had several alternate/backup plans to execute very soon afterward. Given that the magnitude of the downside impact could be so obviously huge.

Also, this is one of the cases where the fundamental elements of the problem are actually pretty simple: oil leaking into water. Just stop that flow from happening. Lots of ways to do that. Yes it is deep. Yes high pressure. With a decent background in physics and engineering I think one can come up with lots of solutions and tactics that would work. But they all need to be tested (at 5000 foot depths) and fine-tuned and resourced and have people trained on before a real accident occurs. What angers a lot of people in this case is the sense that BP and friends did not do this.

Also there have been big oil spills in the past and the companies involved almost always live to fight another day. Exxon Valdez was one of the biggest spills in US history. In the recent news about Apple overtaking Microsoft in market cap, that still only brought them up to #2. Know who was #1? Exxon. All costs/penalties/grief BP will get from this is really just going to turn into a dollar charge against their balance sheet. And they already have billions in cash. The negative PR/psych effect will slowly fade away. And if they have to raise prices, they just pass it on as a cost-of-doing-business to the folks who buy their product. Us.

> "If someone's hair catches on fire on Monday at 3pm, then BP's first attempt to put out that person's hair fire is at 8pm, then next on Wednesday, then next about 2 weeks later (failing again), then 2 weeks later the next attempt, etc."

Fixing a large fissure deep under the ocean is not at all like putting someone out of fire. To even make such a comparison betrays a severe lack of understanding about the magnitude the difficulties of such a problem.

Honestly, I'm trying to be as civil as possible here, but your attitude aggravates me. You are laying down serious claims of impropriety on the part of all of the scientists and engineers who are working on this problem based on your, let's be honest, uneducated notions about what plugging an underwater leak is like. If you are going to accuse others of such grievous impropriety, you should at least make some effort to be qualified to make the judgment. As it is you are, like many others, armchair geological engineers.

> "Also, this is one of the cases where the fundamental elements of the problem are actually pretty simple: oil leaking into water"

Jesus. Fucking. Christ. I'm not sure how much more you can oversimplify that. Would you also characterize your car's engine as a fire burning in a confined space? Or how about let's use your extensive experience with bottle rockets to criticize NASA engineers? I suppose absolute zero is a lot like the inside of your freezer, too, just colder.

> "Lots of ways to do that. Yes it is deep. Yes high pressure."

Uh-huh. I really like how you've just completely dismissed two of the most bleeding-edge limits of human technology, understanding, and ingenuity with a wave of your hand. Yep, it's deep, yep, it's high pressure, but surely our trained scientists will breeze right past those minor inconveniences! Otherwise what the hell are they good for, if they can't even make mincemeat of such minor roadblocks like being 5000 feet under the ocean?

> "With a decent background in physics and engineering I think one can come up with lots of solutions and tactics that would work."

As someone with a decent background in engineering, I would like to know what in the blue hell would lead you to believe this. Our scientists and engineers are smart, talented people, they are not magicians.

> "What angers a lot of people in this case is the sense that BP and friends did not do this."

Good misdirection. You started off by criticizing the people in charge of plugging this hole, saying that because of the long delay between each try to plug the well, they are clearly not trying hard enough, and that lay advice would be useful to these people who clearly don't know WTF they are doing. Now you're steering this into a criticism of oil regulations - which has nothing to do with the original topic at hand.

Free speech is awesome - everyone should have the right to say whatever they want. It does not, however, make you a qualified commentator on everything and anything. "It can't be that complicated" is all too common a sentiment with laymen, and I'm particularly disappointed that a tech-savvy crowd, who has to deal with the limitations of scientific and engineering understanding everyday, is so easily susceptible to this.

Wow you are getting rude. Chill out.

Rude? You made a bunch of idiotic points, and he politely refuted them.

What you just said there was rude. Any karma voters care to back me up with clicks? :)

Also, I don't think he refuted my points. He certainly did not do so politely. Let's agree to disagree. Just keep it civil.

My example about putting out a person's hair fire had to do with speed, frequency and preparation for the attempt. I clearly did not say anything about relative difficulty. Stopping the oil leak under these conditions I agree is harder than putting out a person's head fire. The point was about preparation and hustle and being able to move very quickly, very early to stop the fire/leak ASAP, given the downside. In this, I personally think they've failed ridiculously.

I did not accuse any scientists/engineers who are actively trying to solve the leak now of doing anything unethical. I do not and cannot know for sure the details of exactly which person did what, when -- none of us can, and much will be hearsay. However, I thought it was clear from my post that I think it appears more of a lack of preparation before the accident, and/or a lack of will after the accident began, at a leadership level. At the level of an individual engineer, he may want to do the smart/cautious thing, but if he is overruled by executives or accountants, etc. then his intent has no effect.

I did not completely dismiss the challenges of depth and pressure. I even cited them specifically. But if you focus on the core goal we have right now, it's that there is oil flowing into water at a certain location. Just stop that flow and/or contain it to a finite controlled volume, and prevent it from spreading out into a much larger area. It doesn't matter exactly how quickly you stop/contain it, and it doesn't matter exactly the volume of the containment zone, or even whether you use 1 technique or 3, together or in sequence, just make it happen and do it quickly. And they fundamentally know how to put and operate equipment down there, and lay pipes, and draw oil up to the surface for further processing and transport. What BP needs to do is basically just a variant on that same fundamental task. Again: there is some fluid in another fluid. Bad stuff getting into some good stuff. Keep it from spreading in an uncontrolled manner. That is not fundamentally impossible, even at 5000 feet depth. Walls. Pipes. Suction. Seals. Tanks. Valves. This is all well understood technology and can be put together in a variety of ways.

Also, all your claims about how lay people (such as myself, you imply) are inherently unqualified to talk about this subject would apply equally well to you. However, in reality, I would argue that a reasonably intelligent and educated person can come up with a decent analysis and decent solution ideas, comparable to that of professionals within a field, given that the constraints that that field operates within are sufficiently knowable and understandable by said lay person. In essence, Mother Nature doesn't know or care what degree you have.

You and I may have differences in how solvable or preventable we perceive this situation to be, but frankly you keep going overboard and saying rude things. Imagine you are sitting across a table from me, speaking to my face, and adjust your words accordingly. Free speech is awesome. But with it should come the sense of responsibility to not be rude to whom you are speaking.

Checking the shipping time calculator at searates.com it looks like a typical shipping time from Newark to New Orleans would be 6 days. I assume some time could be knocked off that if you were traveling at emergency speed and paying extra for whatever other obstacles arise. Call it 3-4 days from east coast ports to gulf waters. West coast ports would presumably take longer.

Transit time alone is not a factor to dismiss. It's not too hard to see how time adds up, really.

Good point! Yeah I agree that's a factor. Heck, even if they could contain the leak in 6 days it would be a huge improvement over 6 weeks or 5 months or whatever it will end up being now.

On the point about transportation time being a factor: in getting resources to accident site, there are many well-known ways of mitigating that. They can keep things cached on site, or use equipment from other nearby platforms that are not in accident mode, or, they can keep stuff based at a closer port, like New Orleans rather than New Jersey, for example. Plus they can fly in as much as they can, which would be a matter of hours in those cases. Lots of other things they can do, have trained teams and ships on standby, ready to deploy quickly to any of say 5-20 wells (or whatever) in their service area, if an accident occurs. The cost of keeping those people and equipment sitting idle and nearby can just become a cost of the operation, and considered to be justified as a net-win in accident scenarios. And again, we're talking about a company making billions in profits every 3 months -- they probably have enough margin to divert some of it upfront to buy better preparation and reduced accident-containment-latency.

I think BP should have dealt with the oil flowing up to the surface first. They should bring in the massive tankers with big vacuums to suck the oil up. This will buy them more time to fix the leaks below.

I would drop a large inverted cone made of steel or concrete so that it's point obscured the breach. The weight of the plug would keep the oil pressure from pushing it out, while a stabilizing float attached to it's top would prevent the cone from tipping over. Like so:

     |     < Line up to deploying ship
     O
     O     < Stabilizing float
     |
   -----   < Steel/concrete plug
   \   /
  __\ /__  < Breach
     V

Once it settled you could likely pour a block of cement around it...

I think the pressure from the oil coming out would push the point of the cone to the side.

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 was going for the 'Big Dumb Booster' version... All beef and no brain!

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...

Hmm, since it has leaked so much oil already... I wonder what would be the effects of just letting the well empty out. Make the hole really big so that pressure is reduced, then the oil just floats to the top where you can collect it all. Maybe a giant floating ring to contain the oil in the surface.

No idea how to deal with the `plumes`, though. <silly> Add detergent? </silly>

Discreetly sneak in there and run a pipeline off to your own storage facility and open your own parasitic oil company. I propose a startup.

I remember reading about how atomic weapons detonated at the point of the leak would seal it a few weeks ago.

More information at http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2010/0513/Why-don-t-we-just...

Start pouring millions of tons of sand. Might have an affect after a month or two.

Setting off a massive explosion with the well at the center. Massive enough to move sufficient amount of material towards the well to essentially clamp it shut.

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>

As far as I know nuclear devices tend to create massive holes rather than welding. Perhaps it would be better to use our nuclear capacity for energy generation and our petroleum for explosives, rather than vice versa.

At least if they use the nuke method no one will care about the oil spill anymore whether it works or not.

1) Put a big ass cap on the top of it 2) Try to choke it off by pumping in a ton of junk. 3) Blow it up.

Those are truly ideas I had instantly. What's terrifying is that my ideas bare any resemblance to the supposed experts's.

Likewise. I pretty quickly thought of the "suck the oil plumes into a tube, draw up to surface" solution (at least as a stopgap) so was shocked that it took BP about 3-4 weeks before they put such a system in place. Weeks! Felt like that should have been on site and implemented within hours or least the first day or two after the leak began.

I suspect the issue is more the depths they're working at. At 5,000 feet down, these "simple" solutions don't become so simple anymore.

I'd send in Juan Sheet to sort it out: http://youtu.be/Xknub_pILt8 .. he says "this spill is no match for me."

a large rubber hose with one end capped off after they put in the pipe the can inflate it to try to shut off the flow

http://twitter.com/TheOilDrum

Get the military to do it and invoice BP.

Create a time machine, go back in time, and build the oil well in such a way as to not break like it did.

Someone in the future has already done that. But they won't emerge naked from the chrono-portal, 1 year ago, until July our time this year. Also, when they emerge naked from the chrono-portal they are immediately crushed and drowned and eaten by deep sea crabs. Ouch, time travel hurts my head.

I revise my plan to "wait for some time-travelers from the future to fix the oil rig". That way we won't have to invent the time machine, which could use up a lot of tax dollars that would be better-spent blowing up desert-dwellers and bailing out failed investment banks.

Don't want to be nitpicky, but its "you're", not "your". The irony is also a bit funny

The tactic of suctioning oil/water into a pipe/tube has the benefit of not falling prey to many of the other problems (inability to form a seal, temperate/freezing, needing fine-grained on-site human activity, etc.). Bring the oil/water mix up to the surface, maybe filter it, dump it in a ship/tank on the surface. Downside is it may be impossible to suck up 100% of the leaking oil, but even getting 80% would be a huge improvement, and reduce further damage to the sea. I believe they started doing it, then at least temporarily stopped it to prepare for the top kill attempt.

I have no idea how the broken pipe looks like, but cover it with an inverted funnel connected to the remaining pipe to the surface. This way at least some of the oil will be recovered.

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