[ROCKMAN]

From RigZone: “Forty-seven workers were evacuated from the jackup Hercules 265 offshore Grand Isle, Louisiana following a blowout Tuesday. Efforts to regain control of the A-3 natural gas well at South Timbalier Block 220 that experienced a blowout are underway, rig owner Hercules Offshore said in a press release Tuesday. The U.S. Coast Guard evacuated workers on two lifeboats from the platform. None of the workers sustained any injuries. A Coast Guard cutter and two aircraft are headed out to the platform to conduct an over flight assessment.

Efforts are ongoing with the operator, Walter Oil & Gas, to mobilize the necessary resources to regain control of the well. The Hercules Jackup 265 has been drilling for Walter at South Timbalier Block 220 in 154 feet of water. Walter reported losing control of Well A-3 on an unmanned platform located 55 miles offshore Louisiana, while doing completion work on the sidetrack well to prepare the well for production. The well is flowing gas, and no oil is being released.”

Heard a report about the blow out on NPR. No more facts but pointed out that even if the hydraulics on the BOP fail it can be actuated manually by turning a very large wheel under the drill floor. Just takes a hand willing to run under a well blowing out. Some will…some won’t. About a dozen years ago I was on a rig in the GOM when a well about 20 miles away came in like this one. The company man on the rig worked for my consulting company. Hardly knew him. As the well started to come in he ordered abandon ship. BOP didn’t function so he ran under the drill floor to do it manually. Crew got off before it blew up. Never recovered his body.

Some will…some won’t.

[Oily Stuff]

Its rare these days to have manually controlled rams on a BOP stack offshore and if they were sidetracking I am sure a Hydrill (big bladder on top of the BOP stack) was involved. As RM points out its dangerous for a hand to have to drop below the floor in the moon pool, on a Texas floor, and manually close rams with the well blowing above his head. I have done it but I was young and stupid. I would think the BSEE would say that's a big no no these days. Closing rams, opening and closing chokes and diverter lines on even not so modern rigs these days is pretty idiot proof; slam the properly marked handles and take a not so casual stroll to the other side of the platform with your grubby fingers crossed, all the while speaking very respectfully to God. If things don't sound or look so good behind you don't stop at the rail, just jump. Its just water and eventually you'll be able to catch a ride with somebody.

The first thing people will want to know is how do these things ignite and this video will answer that clearly. Downwind notice the rocks (chunks of cement?) hitting the water. Those solids are passing thru the RT all the way up thru the derrick over the crown and clanging against iron causing sparks and ultimately ignition. I have seen rocks blowing up thru the derrick the size of bowling balls.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/23430161

WWS is on this well; its not too big a deal, IMO. They will be able to jack the platform down and cut pipe below the stack, all the while letting the well burn, until they are ready to cap. That would be Plan A and likely it will be Plan E that gets it. half the time they bridge off before too long. But I am speculating and that is a big waste of time. The pity in this will be the similarities made to the last GOM event as the public, and politicians clearly have zero tolerance for this sort of thing now. Since 1947 and the first Kerr Magee "offshore" well in the GOM I would bet this is loss of well control no. 1587. Its the oilfield; stuff happens. No hands were hurt, that's the good news.

Y'all have fun with this one....

[Tanada]

Assuming no fire how much methane can a blow out like this release in a day?

[Oily Stuff]

In my previous post I meant to say WWC, not WWS, my apologies to real men doing real work out there today.

Mr. Tanada, the short answer is lots. Millions per day, nobody knows. The biggest I know of was 200 MMCFPD, wide open, but that was a guess. It was sure loud, I know that. There is an engineering term called critical flow rate that essentially limits unrestricted flow rates by factors like casing ID, fluid densities, etc. but that is way over my roughneck head. This event underway right now they want to blow as hard as it can, without any restrictions, until they are set up to cap it, or kill it, to avoid flow up and around casing. The harder it blows sometimes the more likely it is to bridge itself off. Remember, as long as it is in the pipe, it can be fixed; when it goes around, outside the casing, it gets real ugly real fast. They can see this problem above the water line; they'll get it.

[ROCKMAN]

Tanada - As OS says it could be huge. Even a small flow like 10 million cuft/day is $50k/day and a lot of Btu's. They probably won't try to put the fire out. Sounds like the control systems and platform are too damaged to try to kill it at the surface. It would be much to dangerous to not have it burning. It would be like having a MOAB sitting there. Mother Of All Bombs.

[Oily Stuff]

Mama Nature did her thing and the well bridged off on its own.

http://fuelfix.com/blog/2013/07/25/herc ... d-reports/

[Plantagenet]

Once again, the so-called blow-out preventer failed to prevent a blow-out in the GOM.

EPIC FAIL


How many times must a blow out preventer fail
Before they are banned from the sea
How many times must the drilling crew bail
Racing away to flee

[ROCKMAN]

The report is a tad confusing. For the techno geeks who are interested: The large vessel you see is the jackup rig. That smaller structure below the flames is the platform. A relatively small one. It wasn’t a cantilever platform. The jackup is apparently a cantilever design. The jackup sets up next to the platform and the drill floor slides out over the platform. That’s the “cantilever” action.

“The well was successfully blocked by the injection of small pieces of sediment and sand into the well flow path”: I doubt anyone injected anything into the well. As OS says it bridged over: the well bore itself collapsed all on its own. The NG may not be flowing now but that can be subject to change if the well clears its throat. The small platform may have collapsed but that’s actually bad news. The well will still have to be plugged per govt regs. That means they are going to clear the debris off the well which is not probably cut off at the mud line which is 150’ below sea level. Then they have to latch on to that damaged casing, reenter the hole, clear it out to a certain depth and then start setting plugs in it. This will take a good bit of time and a lot of money and that’s if everything goes smooth. Worst case scenario: in addition to monies lost already the price tag could run $20 million to $80 million.

I know Walters and the consultant company they use. Same company I have used on most of my wells the last three year. Both are very safety conscious and diligent in such matters. In time we may find out what caused the well to come in. Odds are it was human error and not equipment failure. And that goes back to a point I made before about all the talk after Macondo of making offshore drilling safer. There’s no way to reduce the risk to zero. No amount of new regs, equipment or training. The hands on the rig didn’t want to die. Walters didn’t want to suffer tens on $millions in loses and the govt didn’t want another PR nightmare.

But it still happened. We can reduce the chances of another Macondo to a very low level but will never be able to promise it wouldn’t happen again. We either accept whatever the risk is or stop drilling offshore. Unfortunately there’s no position in between those two.

[Oily Stuff]

It would not have been physically impossible to have orchestrated any kind of kill procedure that soon, and to what? The well bridged on its own, it happens a lot. They'll get it plugged; costly, but piece of cake.

The diagram is off the different types of rigs used offshore, I am not sure what has to do with blowouts. The "once again" comment is very unfortunate as nobody knows exactly what happened out there. BOP's work all the time, wayyyyyyyy more often that when they occasionally don't work. Homo Sapiens don't always work the way they are suppose to either.

Might we say about the SW Airline plane whose nose gear collapsed the other day at LaGuardia "once again" a nose wheel failed? Of course not.

[ROCKMAN]

Not that this should make anyone feel better about offshore drilling operations but to add to OS's comment: precursor situations to a blowout are not that uncommon. Here's the sequence of events. The well has penetrated a hydrocarbon bearing zone. The fluid in the well bore provides sufficient pressure to keep those hydrocarbons from flowing up the well. IOW the well is "in balance". Then something happens that causes the well to go out of balance. I'll skip the various ways this happens. So the well starts to "come in" or begins to "take a kick". The hands see the situation developing and take any of several approaches to stop the flow. One method: shut the well head in. Essentially putting a cork in it. This doesn't bring the well into balance but allows them to take the necessary steps to do so. Activating the BOP at this time is typically not a good way to go. Causes problems and, if not done correctly (like jamming a piece of drill pipe in the BOP and prevents shutting the well in) it can make matters much worse.

There are hundreds of cases every year where wells in the Gulf Coast take a kick. I’ve been on individual wells that have taken several kicks. A bit unsettling but there are pre-drill procedures designed and practiced to handle such incidents. The tool pusher will usual have a “kill sheet” already prepared to deal with such a situation if it develops.

You’ll never see a media report about any well taking a kick. But even when they can’t kill the kick and have to activate the BOP it’s still very unlikely you’ll see a report of such an incident. But take a kick, have the BOP fail and have the hydrocarbons flow wild and ignite…now you get a bunch of media coverage. Again, not comforting, but for the thousands of wells that have taken a kick over the years a very small percentage turn into blowouts. In the last couple of years I know of several hands killed and more injured on wells that took a kick. But no environmental damage to speak of so no media frenzy. Just bury the dead, patch up the injured and get back to it.

[Oily Stuff]

To put this Walters event to bed, and in partial response to all the people at TOD who still look to RM over here at PO as the man in the know when it comes to blowouts, a trash shot, or junk shot, or what we in the well control business called a shit shot, is used very sparingly to plug tiny leaks. A shit shot is pumped when there are tubulars in the hole and the leak is high, for instance around the well head assembly. It consists of big things first, like golf balls, and frac balls, small chunks of old tires, followed by smaller material like cut up inner tube, sash cord and shredded panty hose. No joke. I have cut up some of this stuff and gone to the local Walmart to but all the golf balls they had. The idea is to plug a little hole so that you can get some mud behind it and start to load the hole with kill fluid. A shit shot does not get blown out of the hole to make big splashes in the water like some people have suggested that was seen in the videos of this last Walters event. Shit shots made the news in the Macondo sensation, for some reason, but I doubt seriously any kind of shit shot was pumped to try and plug a well that was flowing 65K BOPD, as some people speculated the flow rate was.

No biggie, just some clarification for those interested and on standby to pounce on the next well control matter that comes along.

[ROCKMAN]

UPDATE: The Rowan EXL-3 jackup drilling rig is location at the Hercules 265 jackup rig in South Timbalier 220 well A-3 to conduct plugging operations. The Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement has approved Walter Oil & Gas’ permit to drill a relief well. The relief well targets the original problem borehole, and once it reaches that well will be used to pump drilling mud followed by cement to secure the well.

As I suspected when the platform collapsed it severed the well csg near the mud line about 155’ below sea level. The fire may be out but I suspect it is still leaking some NG but they’ve not reported it. It would be difficult and expensive to tie back on to that severed csg but it could be done. Much safe to kill the well with the relief well. The original well still has to be P&A as per fed regs. When done this mishap may cost Walters $30+ million. Maybe a lot more. No details yet on how it went sideways on them.