That Dirty Tar Sands Oil

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… doesn’t seem that dirty anymore:

A record of success in the Alberta oil sands and the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico are expected to whet investors’ appetite for a $1.25-billion initial public offering from MEG Energy Corp., the latest in a series of mega-deals from Canada’s oil patch.
After a decade of raising private money from blue-chip backers in Britain and China, along with his family and friends, MEG founder and chief executive officer William McCaffrey plans to take his company public this summer. MEG needs money to pay for a $1.4-billion expansion of its properties over the next two years that is expected to more than double the company’s oil production to 60,000 barrels a day.

Just think how inviting those vast shoals of tar will be if the hyperbole at The Drum turns out to be true:

First of all…set aside all your thoughts of plugging the well and stopping it from blowing out oil using any method from the top down. Plugs, big valves to just shut it off, pinching the pipe closed, installing a new bop or lmrp, shooting any epoxy in it, top kills with mud etc etc etc….forget that, it won’t be happening..it’s done and over. In fact actually opening up the well at the subsea source and allowing it to gush more is not only exactly what has happened, it was probably necessary, or so they think anyway.
So you have to ask WHY? Why make it worse?…there really can only be one answer and that answer does not bode well for all of us. It’s really an inescapable conclusion at this point, unless you want to believe that every Oil and Gas professional involved suddenly just forgot everything they know or woke up one morning and drank a few big cups of stupid and got assigned to directing the response to this catastrophe. Nothing makes sense unless you take this into account, but after you do…you will see the “sense” behind what has happened and what is happening. That conclusion is this:
The well bore structure is compromised “Down hole”.
That is something which is a “Worst nightmare” conclusion to reach. While many have been saying this for some time as with any complex disaster of this proportion many have “said” a lot of things with no real sound reasons or evidence for jumping to such conclusions, well this time it appears that they may have jumped into the right place.
[…}
All of these things lead to only one place, a fully wide open well bore directly to the oil deposit…after that, it goes into the realm of “the worst things you can think of” The well may come completely apart as the inner liners fail. There is still a very long drill string in the well, that could literally come flying out…as I said…all the worst things you can think of are a possibility, but the very least damaging outcome as bad as it is, is that we are stuck with a wide open gusher blowing out 150,000 barrels a day of raw oil or more. There isn’t any “cap dome” or any other suck fixer device on earth that exists or could be built that will stop it from gushing out and doing more and more damage to the gulf. While at the same time also doing more damage to the well, making the chance of halting it with a kill from the bottom up less and less likely to work, which as it stands now?….is the only real chance we have left to stop it all.
[…]
We need to prepare for the possibility of this blow out sending more oil into the gulf per week then what we already have now, because that is what a collapse of the system will cause. All the collection efforts that have captured oil will be erased in short order. The magnitude of this disaster will increase exponentially by the time we can do anything to halt it and our odds of actually even being able to halt it will go down.
The magnitude and impact of this disaster will eclipse anything we have known in our life times if the worst or even near worst happens…

… keep reading.
Update: Counter argument to the worst case above.

53 Replies to “That Dirty Tar Sands Oil”

  2. Almost hard to believe unfortunately. When I read about flow rates higher than 10,000 bpd I had trouble believing it. At 20,000 bpd I began to think that something wasn’t right at the drill hole itself. Very cynical but I’m glad I didn’t buy that Florida condo.

  4. Gee, I wonder if the heads at National Geographic have finished exploding yet.
    I hope not.

  7. What no-one mentions is that there is a cure…..but nobody wants to go there.
    The Russians sometime past had an erstwhile blow out….they drilled a borehole nearby to a great depth and popped off a nuke. This obviously collapses the whole works and the well is sealed.
    A desperate measure for sure but…..
    That would spoil a crisis usefull for political reasons…

  8. Good plan Sasq.
    All we need is Bruce Willis, Ben Afleck a drill and a nuke. Cue the AreoSmith(sp?)

  9. ANWR is looking pretty damn good to the enviro nut jobs, I’ll bet, these days.

  10. Texan; JD:
    1. The piece was good enough for The Oil Drum, so it’s got some merit. I assumed the source was The Drum.
    2. I clearly labelled it as hyperbole
    3. SDA would die for weeks at a time if guest posters didn’t assist. Your smarm is not appreciated. I suggest that you contact Kate to have her remove her guest posters then, or better yet, ask her to let you post when she is on the road.

  12. The wellbore is compromised down hole. lol. Here is thought it was compromised ‘up hole’.
    Maybe Hugo Chavez secretly ran a pipeline from Venezuela to the bottom of the hole and started pumping all the oil that we see exiting the stack.
    I seriously doubt they purposefully relieved the pressure as that would have increased the fluid velocity and caused more erosion on the last good casing shoe.
    150,000 bbls a day is not happening. A good offshore well may produce 25,000 – 30,000, although it is probably choked back.
    The relief wells are the only thing that will work, everything else is just for political theatre and to show the ‘small people’ that something is being done.
    If you use a nuke and the hole still leaks, then what? The best chance is to maintain the integrity of the well while waiting for the relief wells.
    The relief wells should enter the competent area of the wells, above the leak.

  14. O’s China Syndrome.
    Barack Petroleum MeltdOwn.
    …-
    “Is This What You Meant, Mr. President?
    “…even China investing in Clean Energy” – President Barack H. Obama, Speech from the Oval Office (June 15, 2010)
    “Sinopec Corp. and PetroChina, both Chinese state-owned corporations, injected more than $2 billion into Alberta’s oilsands in 2009…..More recently, China Investment Corp. invested $817 million in a project with Penn West Energy Trust, and Sinopec paid $4.65 billion US for a stake in Syncrude Canada, the largest oilsands operation in the world.” – Calgary Herald (June 10, 2010)”
    http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/2536623/posts

  15. Hey folks,look at the bright side.Want oil? You dont even have to drill for it.You just skim it off the surface.BP pays the clean up and you sell the oil.Park the shrimp boats and go skimming.

  16. The OilDrum is largely irrelevant. Their posting of this ‘assessment’ of what is actually happening or has happened in the GOM blowout is a perfect example of why. Reams and reams of verbage that amounts to ill-informed nonsense rife with incorrect/vague terminology & fundamental misunderstandings. In other words, pure bunk.
    Relief wells will be directionally drilled to the target, period.

  17. J said:
    150,000 bbls a day is not happening. A good offshore well may produce 25,000 – 30,000, although it is probably choked back.
    I worked offshore (East Coast) on the Terra Nova project. These wells produce 125,000 bbl/day on a bad day.

  18. The Oil Drum – of Peak Oil fame? The world is running out of oil and all that? Sure doesn’t look like it.

  19. For those not in the oil patch I’d recommend watching some of the “reality” shows of late that actually follow drilling rigs in Northern Alberta, BC and the arctic. the biggest surprise for me is the actual pressures involved in this work. this isn’t your garden hose pressure we are talking about. Then you consider that a mile under the sea the pressure is so intense (2,400psi) that man cannot go down that far and we have oil gushing out against this pressure and at such a rate as to boggle the mind.
    I am not saying that BP didn’t screw the pooch on this one but I find it pathetic that the great “0” in chief can only think of “who’s ass to kick”. Lets cap the well first and try to minimize the damage of the spill first and then do the finger pointing later. Lord knows there are enough Senate and congressional lackies lined up to form enough committees to last a career.

  20. K, I got a stupid question:
    Is it possible to drill a well on an angle? What I’m getting at is if they could drill on an angle so that the new well, meets up with the old below the main leak, at least you could reduce the pressure enough to plug the old well.
    It wouldn’t solve the problem of the other leaks further away, but would signicantly reduce the amount of leakage currently going on…

  22. Everything CJunk said.
    J
    If there wasn’t a problem downhole the rig would have never taken the kick.
    Andy
    TOD does also have some technical information in the comments and links to outside sources. Irrelevant is hyperbole itself.
    ron in kelowna
    TOD is a peak oil site for sure and you make a great point that this very blowout undermines their reason for being.
    Texas Canuck
    Exactly. Contain and control first. To control this well properly is gonna take time. The relief wells continue to be drilled.
    arkman201
    Any offshore expertise you could share would be appreciated.
    Syncro

  23. Question:
    – A properly maintained heavy mud column can (always?) overcome well pressure, right?.
    – I assume oil is about half heavy mud density.
    – I assume a free flowing well pressure is constantly declining. (goes negative eventually – hence the donkey pumps)
    – At some point will the oil column itself be enough to overcome the pressure? Or will there always be methane in the column that greatly reduces the density?
    – Is this well losing pressure daily/weekly? (If not, peak oil is a long way off, heh)

  24. mikeg81
    That is what the relief well is. MWD (measurement while drilling)technology will be used to hit the 9 7/8 casing in the existing wellbore somewhat above the the payzone in order to take advantage of the maximum hydrostatic column to circulate the well dead.
    Syncro

  25. I was only lamenting to myself the other day how Sarcasm seems to be lost on people these days.
    Of course the well is leaking downhole.
    There is NO ‘up hole’.
    Mikeg81: Yes, you can basically drill on any angle the big problem now is the dreaded Ellipse of Uncertainty. Logging tools have errors in their measurement (I won’t go into it here) that will make the relief wells hard to drill than many think.

  27. ron in kelowna
    A heavy mud or water column is how well control is achieved.
    both formation fluids and mud systems can vary, the mud being taylored to match different conditions.
    yes, eventually the formation pressure will be depleted.
    this appears to be a really gassy oilwell. bp itself is claiming some 30 mcfd. that is thirty million cubic feet/day of natural being flared off of what they are catching.
    yes. see above, but this find may be indicative of further potential.
    Syncro

  28. ron in k:
    Peak Oil and running out of oil are totally different things. We may be very close to the first and centuries away from the second.
    As to ‘it doesn’t look like it’ a lot of bigwigs take it very seriously, including the US military.
    Case in point: the first article quoted here mentions an investment of 1.4B$ to produce 30,000 barrels a day. A few decades back you’d poke a hole for a couple millions and produce as much.
    Just to keep production at its current level, we need to bring on 4 million bpd of new production every year. This is getting harder and more expensive all the time.

  29. “Ellipse of Uncertainty”?
    I don’t really like the sound of that.
    So why not reduce the margin of error somewhat, and drill to the point where the old well meets the oil resvoir? Might be easier than try to hit the old wellbore itself…?

  30. J
    My apologies. I missed the sarcasm and considering most of my comments fall into that category I should be more aware.
    On this file I am serious.
    Syncro

  31. mikeg81
    that is what they are doing. The elipse of error refers to the difficulty they are going to have milling through the outside of the 9 7/8 casing at this depth.
    Syncro

  33. Mikeg81, yes, ‘drilling at an angle’ is entirely possible & actually, ‘directional & horizontal’ drilling is a very large facet of the oil & gas industry that has been in use and developed for decades. Most wells these days aren’t vertical anymore for various reasons. The basis of which is
    real time guidance & steering data transmitted in real time while the well is drilled. These downhole tools have measurement errors, like anything, so the further out you drill, these errors compound into a growing ‘ellipse of positional uncertainty’.
    Your best first choice is to try and intersect the well bore directly…..a large reservoir could support many wellbore driectly at high flow rates, so drilling other wells into zone will probably accomplish nothing wrt relieving flow at blowout.

  35. …agreed, it’s the only real solution. All this other stuff falls under the category of ‘time fillers’ under the guise of ‘doing something’ while
    the relief well rigs drill ahead to target. It may take several ‘sidetrack attempts’ to finally intersect it, but it will get done.

  38. Syncro: mcf is thousand cubic feet. mmcf is million.
    mikeg: Directional drilling is an inexact science, no matter what some may say. It’s the compounding error that’s the big problem, plus the initial uncertainty. One key point to remember for all drilling operations: It’s X miles down, and it’s dark. One directional driller that I worked with put the steering process something like this: Imagine that you’re driving a semi-trailer…from the back…looking only at the road behind you…and only being able to see the lines on the road as your orientation markers. That’s what steering a directional hole is like. It’s gotten a little better technology-wise since then, but you’re still driving forward while looking backward.
    Also, as a general comment, I’m not sure if I have this right (not a petroleum engineer, but I’ve worked with them), but with no pressure control on the well, the gas-oil ratio (GOR) should come into play, if it’s a really gassy well. When the pressure controls are off, the gas will start to come out of solution, and it should preferentially be produced. The rate of production will still be high, but the gas will admix in the sea water and disspate, and the rate of oil production will slow down. Don’t take that to the bank, though; these pressures down there are insane (megapascals).

  40. I thought that the article was quite informative, as were a couple of the links to oil well technology.
    For example, I didn’t know they flowed concrete out the bottom of the drill pipe and up the sides of the hole to seal it in. It makes sense, given the pressures involved.
    If the oil and gas -does- start coming up the outsides of the pipe, there seems no way stop it short of melting the whole strata shut with a nuke, or drilling into the well below the damaged section and pumping concrete into the whole thing.
    It will be interesting to see if the blow-out preventer assembly does fall over, as the article predicts.

  41. Re: relief well.
    Steering a bit at those depths is going to be a huge feat. Remember, GPS doesn’t work down there, so all navigation is done with a gyro-based tool. Those things lose a lot of accuracy over such distances. They have to be set topside, then lowered through a mile of water, plus the distance to the old casing. They’re calibrated on a floating rig, so there will always be movement to deal with. It’s every bit as hard as boring a tunnel from both ends, and having the two line up. Even from solid ground, with advanced survey techniques, there will always be error. A little prayer might be in order.

  42. This is a high pressure blow out. That fluid (water, oil, gas) has particles of rock embedded in it. The high velocity fluid grinds those particles against the exposed surfaces as it travels to the low pressure line (the well) and in doing so, frees up more particles to join the erosion stream.
    The rate of flow from the rock into the low pressure zone is proportional to the pressure difference and surface area. Erosion increases surface area and outflow reduces the pressure. As the formation erodes and collapses into smaller fragments these open up fresh surface areas that cause more outflow.
    So, if the rate of erosion opens up new surface area faster than the flow rate depressurizes the deposit, the flow rates increase. Otherwise the pressure decreases until the flow stops.
    Closer to home, this is how Cigar Lake Mine was lost, how McArthur River was almost lost twice, how Patience Lake became a solution mine, and how Esterhazy K1/K2 has been almost lost several times. No oil involved, just water and sand.
    Blow out preventers are there for a damn fine reason. Steel pipe can be eroded to nothing in seconds.
    Nuking it wouldshatter the deposit and might make it depletes faster or perhaps slower. I don’t think anyone can possibly know that so that is out.
    One solution is to thread down a line into whatever is left of the well deep enough that high density fluiid can be injected there. This then flows up the well towards the top. If that column gets long enough it will weigh more than the pressure from the well. At this point the flow stops. Good luck with that – the outflow is so fast that it would likely erode to nothing. And if the well is open to the surrounding deposits then the high density fluid goes sideways into the rocks and not up the well, so it can’t build up a column, and so can balance out the pressure from underneath.
    My call is: that hole is open until the deposit has depleted itself. Get used to oil in the Gulf of Mexico. Time to start adapting while hoping that it reaches equilibrium on its own.

  43. I stand corrected on the gas flow notation. The Mpa are extreme.
    Your thoughts on producing the natural gas to stem the oil flow are interesting.
    Syncro

  44. ….they ain’t runnin gyros….positve or negative pulse MWD, possibly with additional ‘at-bit’ inclination sensors….

  45. They need to drill baby drill!! Relieve the pressure plug the hole and get as much of that oil as is possible.

  46. instead of shutting down drilling in the gulf they should be getting as many rigs with the depth capability drilling into that reservoir as they can from where ever they can. as soon as they can. How many floaters are there that can drill at that depth. Suspend the wells they are currently drilling and get them to the gulf.

  47. What may put some issues into perspective regarding the well is the immense pressures at that depth and how Boyles law explains the problem they have.
    From a commenter at the DrillingAhead website;
    (Its a longer read and posted May31)
    “In my opinion using my knowledge and experience no one could have stopped what
    appears to me was the makings of a disaster. They built the 20 hour
    bomb accidentally and it would have been impossible for anyone to detect
    what was going on until it exploded.
    …
    “The secret to this I am sure is when they decided to pump Nitrogen cement into an abnormally pressured deep-water
    well. They should have never done this is my opinion. The last thing you
    would ever want; is to end up with gas behind the casing string in a
    Deep-water well. You do not want gas behind any casing string anywhere.
    It is different on a land rig or a surface BOP where you can actually
    let the nitrogen surface as it breaks out of the cement. It is not
    contained and even if you install the hanger seal you can still monitor
    the pressure behind the casing through a well head wing valve. But if
    you do this on a Deep-water well as soon as they installed the pack off
    in the casing hanger at 5000 ft. it was the same as lighting the 20 hour
    fuse. The gas continues to migrate and there is no place to monitor it
    or to bleed it off. The pressure just keeps building.”
    …
    “One barrel of gas from the bottom of this well will increase
    in size by approx. 884 times when it reaches the surface. This is 884
    barrels or 37,142
    gallons from the original 1 barrel of gas which entered the well bore at
    18,000
    feet. Gas expands based on Boyle’s Law.
    …
    “They have now decided to displace the marine riser from 14 PPG mud to 8.6 PPG sea water. This is going to react and increase the
    lifting
    forces because the downward forces are being reduced. If they had
    finished
    displacing the 14 PPG mud with 8.6 PPG sea water it would have reduced
    the
    hydrostatic by an additional 1,404 PSI. This is when the failure
    occurred and
    the well kicked and blew out.
    The upward force at this point on the casing string and casing hanger was 534,892 pounds above the actual weight of the casing
    that was
    ran.
    …
    “9) Regardless this was failure is equivalent to a 6,740 PSI under-balanced kick with a volume
    of approximately 100 barrels of compressed gas stored and waiting with a
    bubble
    pressure of 6,740 PSI and then an open formation with a BHP of 13,000
    PSI
    following behind. It would have been next to impossible for a driller or
    anyone
    else to push the buttons fast enough to close the BOP in time. If the
    casing
    and hanger blew into the BOP there would have been nothing in the BOP
    that
    could have closed to stop the flow. (I believe this is the case.)”
    …
    There is more of this commenter’s speculation found at:
    http://www.drillingahead.com/forum/topics/what-i-believe-may-have

  48. syncro
    oh yeah, bad cement for sure,
    I think they were setting a plug so they could do some repair , setting a plug with seawater in an overpressured zone would be an error. had the plug gone right, they could come up and repair cement problems or if they had to ,run in from top to bottom with a smaller string. as long as the current btm string had some cement integrety over a 100meters or so it would have been safe.
    BP has been doing a p!ss poor job of running out information. telling reporters they were heating a plug, just pure BS. a “drilling fluid they call “mud” ” is my favourite reporter expertise line.
    DADDY DID YOU PLUG THE HOLE? the only hole Obama should plug is his cake hole.
    by the way, a good scale of things in the post above , 534000 lbs above casing weight. 270 tons , half the weight of the BOP.

  49. a wide open gusher blowing out 150,000 barrels a day of raw oil or more.

    Well…
    After reading all the above comments and having the hell scared out of me/us along the east coast.
    I can make only one sly comment.
    In about a year if Obama is still president.
    He will have to put up large ‘NO SMOKING’ signs all along the Gulf of Mexico, around the tip of Florida and all the way up to Canada.
    And you communist bastards in Cuba-
    Put out those Cigars!
    Sheeesh.

  50. It would seem these pressures are similar to the atmosphere of Jupiter—-which is a no go zone.
    “One barrel of gas from the bottom of this well will increase
    in size by approx. 884 times when it reaches the surface.”
    Sounds more like a fluid than a gas…..
    Re nukes I recall reviewing the stuff on the wigwam tests.
    Nuke depth charges are still in inventory but homing torps are the preferred solution.

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