Yo Junkdrawer... Looks Like You Were Right On The Oil Rig Explosion !!!

[WillyT]

Just breaking on Rachael...

ON THE GULF OF MEXICO — The deadly blowout of an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico was triggered by a bubble of methane gas that escaped from the well and shot up the drill column, expanding quickly as it burst through several seals and barriers before exploding, according to interviews with rig workers conducted during BP's internal investigation.

Link: http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/top/all/6995633.html

Original DU Post: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=389&topic_id=8258972

Good catch my man...

:hi:

[Junkdrawer]

1. Scarecrow on FireDogLake gets the credit....

but as soon as I read it, I said to myself "Wow, that fits". And the more details that emerged, the more it fit.

The takeaway is that deep water drilling is much, much more dangerous than shallow drilling.

[WillyT]

2. Thank You For Bringing It Here And Giving It Wider Exposure !!!

Found the Power Point Presentation quite revealing myself.

They KNEW this could happen!

:applause:

:hi:

[Junkdrawer]

3. 'Welcome. And I'll bet that this, like almost all engineering disasters....

will have multiple fuck-ups revealed. I heard this Wednesday on DemocracyNow:

....

SCOTT BICKFORD: Well, as your prior guest stated, Transocean owns the rig, it was then leased by BP to do drilling. Halliburton is the contractor that actually cements the well, and when a well is drilled, very simply, a drill pipe is put down into the ground and someone like Halliburton comes in and fills that pipe with cement, pushing the cement down through the pipe so it comes out of the bottom of the pipe and gurgles up around the outside. When it gurgles up around the outside, the actual hole is cemented or cased so that the hole won’t collapse. If in fact the cementing job is done improperly for any reason, there’s the possibility that the hole collapses, there’s a possibility that the- that gases in cavities that they’re drilling through come into the pipe and come up through the pipe and they collapse. There are some reports that part of the drilling column that they actually drilled had collapsed and they actually had to drill a parallel column next to it and that may have occurred because of poor cementing operations. So Halliburton’s primary job in this thing was to cement and enforce the well so it wouldn’t collapse. This well was drilled both as an exploratory well and then this rig did something it doesn’t normally do, it added what’s called a production liner to the well. In other words, it prepped this particular hole to actually produce, and this rig was set to move off the hole in two days and go on to another- drill another exploratory well. They wouldn’t brought another production rig over it at the time. And then started producing it. But, this was an exploration well which was asked for some reason to finish production operations on this well and there is some inference that the company itself had lost some drilling pipe in a prior well up to $25 million worth of drilling pipe. And one of the reasons this rig stayed on this particular well to complete the production operations was to save money because they had lost money on a prior exploratory well. That, again, is something that needs to be looked into.

...

http://www.democracynow.org/2010/5/5/bp_funnels_millions_into_lobbying_to

[WillyT]

4. We Need To Interview These Guys...

Among others...

Link: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x8293894

:shrug: