BP Gulf Oil Leak Well-Head Repair … an anthology part VII

FINALLY!!!! The valves on the newly installed capping stack on the Macondo well have been closed as of 14:25 July 15, 2010 and the integrity test has begun. Just a mere 86 days after the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig first exploded.

All the credit for this achievement must be given to the engineers, technicians and crews of the ships and rigs from the many companies involved who conceived, developed and executed an excellent plan, the results of which we witnessed yesterday. Unlike the many agencies of the US Government, the companies that actually accomplished something were not deterred, nor did they make sure their every step was the most politically expedient thing to do from every possible angle. I am not giving any kind of a pass to BP; the company failed time after time before and continuing throughout this entire episode and deserve much the scorn they have received.

I had intended on writing out the time-line on all the stumbles and screw-ups caused by Obama, Napolitano, Salazar, Chu and the rest of the incompetents who have so openly exhibited their lack of leadership qualities. But I thought I begin with the video below, which does a very good job of summarizing Obama’s lack of understanding as to how to fix a crisis, rather than try to use it to further his socialist agenda.

Jake Tapper reports that in  a Rose Garden briefing this morning, Obama “said he wanted to speak to the public this morning because media reports were overplaying the significance of the cap being fitted over the well.”

“There were a lot of reports coming out in the media that seemed to indicate, ‘Well, maybe this thing is done,’” he said. “We won’t be done until we actually know that we’ve killed the well and that we have a permanent solution in place,” he said.

The president said that “it’s important that we don’t get ahead of ourselves here. You know, one of the problems with having this camera down there is that when the oil stops gushing, everybody feels like we’re done. And we’re not.”

Taking an optimistic but cautious tone, the president said that the cap will be used to either stop the flow entirely or partially until construction on the relief wells is finished. “We’re not going to know for certain which approach makes sense until additional data is in,” he said.

Obama is doing nothing more than to try and defuse any good news that he wasn’t personally responsible for. Heaven forbid someone else get credit for something! BP has said over and over that the capping stack is to be an interim measure to stem the oil flow, not the solution. They will continue drilling relief well number 1 and tie into Macondo. They well then “kill” the Macondo well by pumping heavy drilling mud down the relief well, which will be drawn up into Macondo and choke it foo permanently.

Our government has failed over and over and over in their response to this disaster. The claim that they have “managed” anything in regards to BP’s screw up is laughable. This administration is incapable of managing their way out of a wet paper sack.

Remember November!

BP Gulf Oil Leak Well-Head Repair … an anthology part VI

BP just released a video explaining some of the steps they were going to be going through to install the capping stack.

That was a lot easier than what I went trough tiring to write an explanation in almost real-time;-)

I’ll continue with my rant tomorrow.

BP Gulf Oil Leak Well-Head Repair … an anthology part V – UPDATED

Updated info at the end of the post

It was my expectation that today I’d be reporting on the progress of the stack test and then be moving on to expand on the rant I began at the end of my last post. Alas … not gunna’ happen. AP released a story this morning indicating that the government was treading “cautiously:”

An administration official, who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the talks with BP, said the government was acting out of “abundance of caution” and didn’t want potentially dangerous pressure tests on a tighter containment cap that has been placed over the well to go ahead until BP answers questions about possible risks.

This has been the government’s problem since they finally realized the Deepwater Horizon explosion and sinking was in fact a big deal. No one in the Administration knows what they’re doing, so rather than trust the experts, “let’s just stop everything, sit down and contemplate our navels until the right answer jumps into our laps!”

Meanwhile:

Oil continues to flow out the top of the 3 Ram Stack

UPDATE 20100714 13:35 PDT: BP has now postponed their regularly scheduled afternoon technical conference call … twice . No new time has been provided … yet!

UPDATE II 20100714 15:45 PDT: This afternoon’s delayed briefing just concluded. While there was a lot of “we’re working closely with go’mnt  scientist” and other such blather, Kent Wells walked through the process BP was getting ready to undertake to conduct the well integrity test. As he was speaking, BP began shutting off the top valve, which diverted oil flow from the discharge out the top of the stack as in the image above. Oil began flowing from ports on two sides of the capping stack as seen in the image below:

Top valve on Capping Stack is closed, diverting oil flow to side ports

Work will continue for the next couple of hours to close the remaining valves. BP will be intently watching the pressure in the well casing, which hopefully will rise to between 8,000 and 9,000 PSI and hold steady. As I wrote in yesterday’s post, should the pressure begin to drop, that will indicate the integrity of the well is compromised and they will not be able to close in the well. At that point they will connect the top discharge connection to the collection system and begin recovering the oil and gas with the recovery vessels on the surface.

Pray the capping stack works!

BP Gulf Oil Leak Well-Head Repair … an anthology part IV – UPDATED

See update at the end of the post. I found a video of BP setting the 3 Ram Capping Stack; see the end of this post.

This is the forth in a series of posts I’ve written regarding BP’s efforts to stop the flow of oil and gas from their Macondo Well located in the Gulf of Mexico about 40 miles offshore from Louisiana. The 1st can be found here, the 2nd here and the 3rd post here. BP’s web page devoted to their response is here and from there you can access all of their resources including access to the video feeds from the cameras on the ROVs here.

On the last link, BP changed its page layout yesterday to show thumbnail views all the ROV feeds rather than a text list, making it much much easier to determine which ROV is in operation and where it is …

BP's ROV camera links page

There are a number of video and audio presentations on BP’s web site as well as copies of presentations and transcripts of meetings and conference calls, but there is one video in particular that provides a good overview of the process I’ve been walking through in my posts for the last couple of days. That video is available here.

Yesterday I left off at the point where BP had installed the Flange Transition Spool, the section of pipe that allows BP to connect a new BOP (Blowout Perventer) to the top of the well. BP is calling this new BOP the “3 Ram Capping Stack” and I’ve included a shot of it in the image below:

3 Ram Capping Stack being transported to the well site

This device, including the HC Connector at the bottom that allows it to quickly couple onto the top of the Flange Transition Spool, is about 18 feet tall and weighs around 150,000 pounds. Work seems to get in the way of fun, so of course I was off at a meeting when BP actually landed the 3 Ram Stack onto the FTS. My first view of the scene was …

3 Ram Stack in place

The HC Connector is a hydraulic/mechanical connector, so it took less than 30 minutes from the time the Stack was landed to complete the connection. At that point, there were many hours of testing to insure the 3 Ram Stack was still operating correctly. I have many screen caps that I won’t bore you with; besides I couldn’t tell you what was actually happening anyway.

Beginning today, BP will begin to shut down the oil flow through the well while at the same time monitoring the pressures within the well. Ideally, once the well is completely shut down and there is no more oil flow, the pressures will reach and then remain at somewhere around 8,000 PSI. If that happens, BP will be able to surmise that they can shut down the well in the event of a hurricane, causing the ships to have to leave the area. If pressures begin dropping off, that will tell them that the oil is escaping somewhere else; possibly to another underground reservoir, but it also could be heading to the sea floor through another path. That last possibility hopefully won’t happen.

Regardless of the outcome of the pressure testing, BP will continue completion of Relief Well #1, which was only a few feet away from the Macondo well as of this afternoon. The schedule is to complete this well by the end of July and then begin what is referred to as “bottom kill.” BP will begin to pump large volumes of what is called “heavy drilling mud” into the relief well. The mud will then be forced up the Macondo well by the oil flow. If all goes as expected, the mud will begin to choke off the Macondo well due to the viscosity and the weight of the mud relative to the oil. Their plan is to have the Macondo well completely shut down, or “killed” by mid August.

Now on to lighter fair. There is one shot I would like to show you that I found cool …

A fish checking out the action ... at 5,000 feet!

I have only seen fish on a couple of occasions and this was the only one I grabbed a shot of.

The Bottom Line

BP screwed up big time and they are at fault in this disaster, costing the lives of 11 men and causing a massive environmental disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. However, while I can’t speak to their actions on the ground, the beaches, the bays or the bayous, I’ve been listening to the technical conferences BP has twice a day and in my humble opinion, BP is doing a great job of getting the well capped and ending this nightmare. It is clear to me that their plan was well thought out, each element was tested to every extent possible and so far has been professionally executed. Great job on the repair phase so far, BP!

The US Government, on the other hand, has been asleep at the switch since day one! Actually, before day one … the agency that was supposed to be overseeing off-shore drilling operations such as this was unfortunately acting just like so many other government bureaucracies; incompetently.

The failure of the Offshore Energy and Minerals Management Agency to provide the necessary oversight of the Deepwater Horizon, which exploded and sank and led to where we are today is all too typical of these bloated, bureaucratic government behemoths.

Tomorrow I’ll continue this rant, getting into all the stumbling and bumbling that has taken place since April 20.

UPDATE 20100713 19:02 PDT: BP just posted a more detailed explanation of the test they are preforming as I write.

UPDATE 20100714 19:00 PDT: I found a video of BP setting the capping stack onto the top of the Flange Transition Tool;

Amazing!

BP Gulf Oil Leak Well-Head Repair … an anthology II

So … last night we left off at the point where BP was removing the flange bolts using a hydraulic socket wrench.

View of the hydraulic socket tool on one of the flange bolts

Notice the bolt to the right of the one with the wrench (not the larger object directly adjacent to the bolt the socket is on … I believe that is an alignment pin, but certainly not a bolt head. I’m referring to the second object to the right of the bolt that the socket is on). It appears the flat surfaces have at some point been damaged. The image below provides a better view:

Bolt on the right shows damage to a couple of its hex surfaces

Not to worry! Just go to your trusty tool box and bring out the Dremal rotary tool … an industrial strength Dremal if I do say so!

Industrial strength Dremal rotary tool being used to grind burrs off of hex bolt in image on the left (click on image to see an enlarged version)

Below is a second view of the grinder seen from both ROV cameras:

Grinder seen from both ROVs (click image to enlarge)

The next image shows the hydraulic socket wrench loosening the now-cleaned bolt:

Socket on bolt that had the burs removed with grinder

Same view as the last, but from both ROVs (note the polished surface … as a the result of grinding, of the bolt below the socket in the image from ROV 1):

Damaged bolt removal seen from both ROVs (click image to enlarge)

ROV 1 now begins to remove all the loosened bolts:

ROV 1 using one of its mechanical arms and "hand" begins to remove the loosened bolts

The “hand” at the end of the arm is positioned directly above each bolt and then rotates counter-clockwise, unscrewing each bolt.

Bolt almost removed from flange

I was surprised that as each bolt was removed, the ROV would back away from the stack and move to a shelf located somewhere lower on the stack and drop each bolt on the shelf, rather than just drop the bolts to the ocean floor. Keep your work space tidy!!

Meanwhile, in the next image ROV 2 breaks out the trusty rotary wire brush and begins cleaning the surface of the outer flange:

Rotary wire brush cleaning the outer flange surface

It is pure speculation on my part, but I suspect that the Flange Overshot Removal Tool (FOLT), designed to remove the damaged flange, is designed with relatively close tolerances. BP cleaned the outside of the flange to make sure there are no large burrs or other obstacles on the flange that could inhibit the placement of the FOLT, shown below:

Flange Overshot Removal Tool ... used to remove the flange

Wire brushing continues to clean the entire outer surface of the flange:

View of wire-brushing operation from both ROVs (click image to enlarge)

I mentioned the “tool box: earlier. Below is a shot of one of those tool boxes:

Tool box

Note all the different colored rope loops with different tape markings; a very simple and clever way of identifying different tools IMHO. I’s say these guys may have done this type of thing once or twice before Below is a second view of the same tool box:

Another view of one of the tool boxes

At this point it’s almost midnight Saturday evening in the Gulf and the activity that I can see via the various ROV cameras is slowing down, so I decide to call it a day and go to bed. As it turned out, BP was apparently able to remove the flange around 12:30 or 12:45, so I missed that operation completely.

In the next post I’ll pick up the operation that began the next morning to install the Flange Transition Spool, seen in the image below:

Flange Transition Spool being tested

Some new technology coming your way …

I ran across something new today that is probably going to revolutionize the way we do many things in the future … liquid spray-on glass!

(PhysOrg.com) — Spray-on liquid glass is transparent, non-toxic, and can protect virtually any surface against almost any damage from hazards such as water, UV radiation, dirt, heat, and bacterial infections. The coating is also flexible and breathable, which makes it suitable for use on an enormous array of products.

The liquid glass spray (technically termed “SiO₂ ultra-thin layering”) consists of almost pure silicon dioxide (silica, the normal compound in glass) extracted from quartz sand. Water or ethanol is added, depending on the type of surface to be coated. There are no additives, and the nano-scale glass coating bonds to the surface because of the quantum forces involved. According to the manufacturers, liquid glass has a long-lasting antibacterial effect because microbes landing on the surface cannot divide or replicate easily.

Liquid glass was invented in Turkey and the patent is held by Nanopool, a family-owned German company. Research on the product was carried out at the Saarbrücken Institute for New Materials. Nanopool is already in negotiations in the UK with a number of companies and with the National Health Service, with a view to its widespread adoption.

The liquid glass spray produces a water-resistant coating only around 100 nanometers (15-30 molecules) thick. On this nanoscale the glass is highly flexible and breathable. The coating is environmentally harmless and non-toxic, and easy to clean using only water or a simple wipe with a damp cloth. It repels bacteria, water and dirt, and resists heat, UV light and even acids. UK project manager with Nanopool, Neil McClelland, said soon almost every product you purchase will be coated with liquid glass.

Follow the link above to read the entire article. Fascinating stuff.

Alternative Energy Supply vs. Supplemental Energy Supply

I’m sure you’ve all seen headlines, articles, columns and blog posts about how the United States (or whatever country you live in) needs to move away from traditional fossil-fueled (or whatever energy source your country uses) energy supplies to environmentally friendly renewable, or ‘alternative’ energy supplies; i.e. wind, solar, bio-mass, etc. Let’s capture this all in the term “Green Energy.” The latest buzz from both the Obama administration and the main stream media is about the creation of “green jobs” … but only if we give up our addiction to carbon-based energy sources.

I suspect most of the people advocating this position have absolutely no experience with, nor do they understand, the chaos that is present in large dynamic systems.The US electric system covers almost all areas of the nation and consists of what would be most simply described as three separate but interconnecting grids. According to the US Department of Energy’s web site,

The economic significance of electricity is staggering. It is one of the largest and most capital-intensive sectors of the economy. Total asset value is estimated to exceed $800 billion, with approximately 60% invested in power plants, 30% in distribution facilities, and 10% in transmission facilities.

The above statement captures the economic boundaries of the grid, but it doesn’t begin to address the engineering and physical aspects of one of the largest and most complex systems humans have ever created.

What I would like to convey within this post is that moving the existing grid to this vision of a Green Energy world will not happen within the lifetime of my six year old grandson. There are such huge issues to resolve and such massive costs to completely redesign and rebuild the system from generating plants to distribution systems to meters.

I’ll start by excluding myself as a an expert (recognized or self-professed) of the US, or any other national electric grid. My sole claim to experience in energy and power systems is as a customer of these systems and their prevarications, a consultant for the past 30 years developing and implementing energy efficiency programs for utilities and large commercial and industrial electric and natural gas customers, and not lastly a student of engineered systems.

The primary generation systems on today’s grid are made up of very large generation plants, capable of generating 1,000 megawatts (MW) or more of power. To put this in layman’s terms, a megawatt is 1,000 kilowatts or 1,000,000 watts. In other words, one of these plants can create enough power to light 10,000,000 (ten million!) 100 watt light bulbs (or more than 40,000,000 curly-que/compact fluorescent light bulbs).

The Western Systems Coordinating Council is the grid that servers the Western 11 US states and parts of Western Canada and Northern Mexico. In the WSCC there are more than 80,000 miles of transmission lines at or above 115,000 kilovolts (115 kV), more than 180 generating plants larger than 200 MW, and more than 19,000 substations, and many control areas, just to mention a few statistics. I’ll return to these issues later.

Power is the rate that energy is used (or consumed) and is measured in watts. Electrical energy is a measurement of work and measured in joules, calories or watt-hours. The two are not necessarily related. I can use one million kilowatt hours (kWh) over a period of several years in my home, or I can use the same one million kWh in one day in an arc furnace at my steel mill.

Grids are immensely complex, and controlling such a system is truly art. The one element that makes these power systems (yes, I meant power system and not energy system) so different than any other distribution system is storage. Unlike natural gas, oil, or for that matter tissue paper, there is no reasonable or cost effective way of storing power. It is used at the very moment it is produced!

There are several methods of storage in a power system, but little in relation to to overall size of the system, and as I said, it is generally much more expensive than most any generating technology. Probably the most used storage approach is pumped hydro, which utilizes generators and water storage, releasing water during summer afternoons when demand is high and pumping the water back up the hill at night when demand is at it’s lowest. Regardless … very expensive!

So … power is generated and used at the same instant. This in itself creates significant challenges to introduce Green Energy. Solar produces power only when the sun shines, and I’m not just referring to night and day. Below is a graph of a large photovoltaic array located in the Inland Empire area of Southern California showing hourly production for several days in early May, 2009:

Even in an area that isn’t normally affected by the marine layer so often seen along the coast of Southern California in June (the notorious June gloom), clouds have significant influence on the power output of a PV array. The same thing can be said for wind turbines and their power output if the wind stops blowing … or blows to hard. These issues are among several that eliminate wind and solar as viable alternatives to conventional power generation … supplemental, yes but not an alternate.

Note I said ‘eliminate?’ Sure … you could add these generating sources to a grid, but they would have to be backed up 100% by conventional generation sources to insure continuity and reliability. There are two primary reasons for for the need for 100% backup. These “Green” sources cannot be relied upon to produce power when needed (remember … power is used at the instant it is produced). Additionally, and more difficult to envision, power grids are inherently unstable.

First, as I intimated earlier, the grid is really one machine with many parts. The power flows within each section of the grid depend upon synchronization between the hundreds of generators. The interconnects between the three sections are not capable of carrying as much power as the transmission lines within each section. The graphic below shows most of those connections.

Second, the instability of the grid is challenging to control. For an AC power grid to remain stable, the frequency and phase of all power generation units must remain synchronous within narrow limits. A generator that drops 2 hertz (Hz) below 60 Hz will rapidly build up enough heat in its bearings to destroy itself. So circuit breakers trip a generator out of the system when the frequency varies too much. But much smaller frequency changes can indicate instability in the grid. In the Eastern Interconnect, a 30 mHz drop in frequency reduces the power delivered by 1 gigawatt.

Introducing thousands, or as dreamed by the Enviros’, hundreds of thousands of small, distributed generating plants driven by variable “energy” sources such as wind or solar radiation will make control of the grid more difficult by several magnitudes. Further, even if all this new Green Energy were added to the grid, all of it would have to be backed up by more reliable sources of generation.

This would double the capital costs and some of the backup generation would have to run at the same time the Green Energy was running just to control flows within the grid. This doesn’t even address the requirement for generation running in a standby mode, commonly referred to as spinning reserve, in the event of the loss of a generating unit or an entire plant.

When more power is being generated than is being used, the excess is turned into heat and is wasted. Again recall … power is used at the instant it it produced. If not used on the load side … instant waste heat! This in turn would cause higher system operating costs.

I’ve thought long and hard for an analogy to an electric grid that can make all this more understandable to the layman … and the best I’ve come up with so far is an ocean. Open your mind and think of the Pacific Ocean; it has currents, swells, waves, temperature variations, and other phenomenon that create and drive its parts. Likewise, an energy grid has generation systems, transmission systems, distribution systems and finally, the load, or if you prefer, the air conditioners, refrigerators and other electric appliances in your home.

A large underwater earthquake that causes the sea floor to shift, or a massive underwater landslide will cause a column of water to suddenly rise which in turn produces a tsunami or tidle wave, as occurred off the coast of Indonesia on December 26, 2007. Humans can do nothing to stop the resulting force; only move to higher ground until the sea settles.

Likewise in the grid, something seemingly so small as a transmission line sagging as it heats and then touching, or grounding, against a tree can cause much of the grid generation to disconnect (move to higher ground) to protect itself, thereby shutting down large pieces of the grid … as happened in Ohio on August 14, 2003, resulting in a blackout that affected over 55 million people in the US and Canada for hours.  That cascade is similar to the power outage that occurred in 1965 as a result of a failed relay at a power station in New York, darkening the Northeast for 12 or more hours (and purportedly causing a spike in the birthrate nine months later).

What does all this have to do with Green Power? Our current grid is not sophisticated enough to be able to control the immense vagrancies imposed by massive numbers of generating sources distributed across the grid and therefore outside the control of the artists responsible for making this immense machine work. One of the current buzz-phrases is “smart grid” (of which I’ll discuss in another post). The cost to make the grid “smart” will be ginormas all by itself … over and above the cost of all the Green Energy!

… and that doesn’t include the need for Obama to declare the second and third laws of thermodynamics unconstitutional!