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8) Who ran the e-logs in this well? Who was responsible for the mud weight monitoring? How long was Halliburton or Schlumberger down this hole, running their e-logs? Did they get stuck? Call to publish the E-Log report.
A good team has all these people working together and helping each other out in a highly dangerous, noisy environment that often stinks of diesel fumes from the gigantic engines and pumps that pump the drilling mud through the miles of hollow drill pipe and circulate it back to surface.
Atomic Blast Proposal to seal well. I stress this is not a good idea.
I always reply to this idea by giving these analogies
Let us say there were some cracks in the dam wall of Hoover dam or any of the other giant dam of the world. Now behind that wall is an immense pressure of water waiting to get out. If you put a giant bomb there, to fuse the concrete, you will break the wall and all the water will come out. I feel the same for an A-bomb down below. You will crack the formation and release more oil and gas into the environment, in this case the sea floor. So instead of one leak you will have thousands.But let us take another look. Ideally you would want sand to fuse to glass to create a blockage of glass so that the oil and gas will not come up.
Let us say you detonated an A- bomb on the sea floor bed.
The blast would go up instead of down. It is easier to move water than earth. You might fuse 50 to 100 foot of mud. The 6000 plus pounds per square inch of oil and gas would still come up the hole but now it will be spread out through the mud and will be coming up through the sea bed floor.
Let us say you drilled a well down next to this well, say 50 to 100 feet away and drilled a large enough well in diameter down 1500 feet below the sea floor. It would have to be big enough in diameter to fit in the A-bomb. Let us say nothing goes wrong in the drilling and you do not fracture new pathways to the existing well or the oil does not find its way via either via a fracture or a porous zone to your new well and you do not have a second blowout. That would be good.Now you detonate your A-bomb. If you look at pictures of A-bomb caverns created after blasts underground they are gigantic voids where the rock was vaporized. You now have a much larger area for the oil and gas to find its way into many more fractures that you created and through the sea floor to the surface. You will never get a homogeneous vast layer of fused glass. It does not happen in nature. There are always cracks. This solution might work if this was not a high pressure well, but if it was low pressure we could let the sea water of 2300 pounds per square inch close the well for us. Remember atmospheric pressure is only 15 pounds per square inch at sea level. This sea water pressure would shut down 99% of all wells on the earth's surface.
What people do not understand in oil and gas drilling is that less than 5% of the world's wells are high pressure oil and gas wells. I want to stress here, that I do not mean great depth wells, in sea water. There are places in California, on land, where new mudlogging geologists would not be sent until they understood about high pressure oil zones. It is a dangerous game drilling into high pressure oil and gas zones because you risk having a blowout if your mud weight is not heavy enough. If you weight up your mud with barium sulfate to a very high level, you risk blowing out the formation. What does that mean? It means you crack the rock deep underground and as the mudweight is now denser than the rock it escapes into the rock in the pore spaces and the fractures. The well empties of mud. If you have not hit high pressure oil or gas at this stage, you are lucky. If you have the oil and gas comes roaring out and you have a blowout, because you have no mud in the well to suppress the oil and gas. You shut down the well with the blowout preventer. If you do not have a blowout preventer, you hope that the oil and gas pressure will naturally fall off with time, otherwise you have to try and put a new blowout preventer in place with oil and gas coming out.
I saw the strain on many company men's faces and those of the mudmen who were responsible for keeping that fine balance between mudweight and not blowing out the formation when I logged in high pressure zones.
THEY WOULD ASK TO BE NOTIFIED IMMEDIATELY THE BACKGROUND GAS UNITS WENT ABOVE 50 UNITS OF GAS OR 1% GAS WHILE DRILLING. Geologists were responsible for logging the geology but more important was watching the background gas, so they could weight up the mud and prevent a blowout. When mud began to flow back out the well under pressure from deep underground, you knew you were losing that well and you would probably have to shut that well down with the blowout preventer and spend weeks getting cement into the well and basically write off the well. The investors who put up the money for the drilling would then be asked to pay more money in for a non functional well
Let us say whoever worked on that well from the geologist to the mudmen to the drilling contractors to the company man to geophysicists who sited the well, their reputation was mud.
Personal history on one blowout well near Sacramento California in 2006.I was responsible for preventing a blowout just south of Sacramento at 11500 feet when the well began to flow. The company man was an arrogant man and would not believe our instruments for measuring the gas pressures during drilling and therefore would not weight up the mud. I called the offsite petro-engineer to get him to take control away from the company man. I was kicked off the site. The well began to flow and the blowout preventers were actuated to shut down the well. They lost the most productive zone of the well because of the great pressure and only saved the top 8000 feet because it was already cased with steel. It took many weeks to get the well under control. The investors had to pay in more money. I do not know if they ever made a profit, but I think they did, probably after 6 months to a year. Normally you will pay off a land well's cost within two months from the oil and gas flows. That means you have paid off at least $5 million dollars in 2 months and then it is all profit as long as the well keeps producing. It is not surprising that the world is greedy, mad and blind. How can you get the oil companies to convert to solar? Where's the profit?
High PRESSURE wells are not the norm, like this Gulf of Mexico BP one. It is very dangerous and although the rewards are higher, nobody likes working on them. The investors do not care as long as they make a profit.
The company knows the risks and is prepared to sacrifice people and the environment. After all money is money. There are always more people and the environment is the responsibility of somebody else. NO OIL COMPANY CARES ABOUT THE ENVIRONMENT. If they did, they would not be in this business. There is no such thing as clean oil. It is all carcinogenic. It is like asking the tobacco companies to care about your health. You can not ask people with no morals to care. It is hard enough for them to manage the façade of caring. They have learned to keep quiet and say nothing. BP gets all the flack. They deserve a great deal, but spare some for two of our other friends. Where are Transocean and Halliburton? I do not see them standing up to shoulder any of the blame. I guess they are lying low, as usual and counting their loot.
