Forwarded by Mike MacCracken Begin forwarded message:
> From: Andrew Revkin > Subject: please pass this around. seeking out-of-box input on the oil well > leak as realtime 'grand engineering challenge' > > > Please pass this around and/or reply or post a comment. Particularly > interested in folks familiar with hydraulics/geology/engineering nexus. > > For those in engineering and science community considering "grand challenges," > there's one out there in realtime right now: the damaged well. Conventional > approach will take months. > > I just posted this callout for Feynman-style ideas: > > http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/01/a-dumb-question-about-stanching-d > eep-oil/ See below. > > > A very smart petrophysicist sent the following reaction, which implies that > it's not out of the question to consider controlled explosions as a way to > stanch the oil flow. I'm seeking to stimulate some creative thinking among > engineers and others not wedded to 'in box' solutions like months-long effort > to drill a parallel relief well. > > One response to my post: > > It's all about regaining control of the well, not preserving it. As you may > have allready discovered in your resarch, control means harnessing high > pressure oil and gas to flow at a regulated rate or to be shut off completely. > All wells must be controlled from their conception and through their > productive life until they are plugged and abandoned (P&A). > Control is maintained at the wellhead, a sophisticated valve assembly, which > in the case of the Deepwater Horizon is stuck open and inoperable (loss of > control). > Regaining control can be accomplished either by restoring functionality to > the existing wellhead or by drilling a relief well to penetrate the existing > well, then plugging the well. > With that said, an explosion would have to be of sufficient depth and > magnitude to cause the well to cave in sufficiently to plug itself and stay > plugged, or stay plugged long enough to drill the relief well. > It will be intesting to see if the DOD thinks they can do that. > As the crisis deepens, I have to believe that BP is open to all suggestions > which will stop their growing economic loss. > My apologies if you allready have all this information. > > Regards, > Rob > > -- > ANDREW C. REVKIN > Dot Earth blogger, The New York Times > http://www.nytimes.com/dotearth > Senior Fellow, Pace Acad. for Applied Env. Studies > Cell: 914-441-5556 Fax/voicemail: 509-357-0965 > Twitter: @revkin Skype: Andrew.Revkin > **************************************************************************** ****************************** http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/01/a-dumb-question-about-stanching -deep-oil/ May 1, 2010, 10:33 AM A Dumb Question About Stanching Deep Oil By ANDREW C. REVKIN <http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/author/andrew-c-revkin/> <http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2010/05/01/us/01engineering_graphic.html ?ref=us> Three efforts to stop the flow of oil. I¹ve been catching up on my reading on deep-ocean drilling in trying to assess efforts to stanch what could be a months-long flow of oil from the pinprick in the Gulf of Mexico seafloor. The Economist has a superb history of deep-sea drilling <http://www.economist.com/science-technology/technology-quarterly/displaysto ry.cfm?story_id=15582301> (written before the drilling disaster) and Henry Fountain has written an excellent overview of the work aimed at capping the well <http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/01/us/01engineering.html> that was uncorked by the destruction of the Deepwater Horizon <http://www.deepwater.com/fw/main/Deepwater-Horizon-56C17.html?LayoutID=17> rig. One naive, even dumb, question keeps coming to mind. Is it possible to seal such wells using unconventional means ‹ specifically controlled explosions? While covering the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, I wrote about some pretty exotic uses of explosives <http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/03/international/03WEAP.html> to attack buried targets. The Pentagon has all manner of powerful, but precise, munitions at its disposal, not to mention some of the brightest minds on the planet for gauging challenges involving hydraulics, geology and metallurgy. Given that President Obama has called on the Pentagon to help, I¹m just wondering about ways to approach this deep-ocean leak by considering the basics, Feynman style <http://biocurious.com/2008/05/28/the-real-feynman-algorithm> . There are hundreds of talented oil-industry experts and government overseers working around the clock on this problem. Still, if the solution is left up to the industry, presumably it¹ll be hard to avoid a bias toward conventional efforts aimed at preserving the (sizable) investment in the well and away from any option that would seal it off but prevent its future use. Obviously you¹d want to be sure an explosive solution didn¹t have the potential to exacerbate the leak. But with months of unabated oil flows coming, it seems worth asking the question, however naive. ------ End of Forwarded Message -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "geoengineering" group. To post to this group, send email to geoengineer...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to geoengineering+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering?hl=en.
<<image.jpg>>
