BloomBerg News: Small Nuclear Device Only Way To Stop Oil Spill :)

Asheron

Matt Simmons was on Bloomberg earlier, adding some additional perspective to his original appearance on the station, in which he initially endorsed the nuclear option as the only viable way to resolve the oil spill.

Simmons refutes even the latest oil spill estimate of 45,000-60,000 barrels per day, and in quoting research by the Thomas Jefferson research vessel which was compiled late on Sunday, quantifies the leak at 120,000 bpd. What is scarier is that according to the Jefferson the oil lake underneath the surface of the water could be covering up to 40% of the entire Gulf of Mexico. Simmons also says that as the leak has no casing, a relief well will not work, and the only possible resolution is, as he said previously, to use a small nuclear explosion to convert the rock to glass. Simmons concludes that as punishment for BP’s arrogance and stupidity the government “will take all their cash.” Now if only our own administration could tell us the truth about what is really happening in the gulf…

Watch Bloomberg News Video

PasturesNew

This is old news, somebody posted this on Fri/Sat or similar.

Asheron

The video is June 15th 2010

damanpunk

It could be stopped, I think these are the guys to do it http://www.statsgroup.com/

I've seen some solutions they come up with and they are superb.

edit: btw, 120k barrels a day? Get real, so with 20 conductors fitted how much do you think this field would be producing?

ChiefGrasscutter

I think a leak of 120000 barrels per day from a single borehole would make this shaft one of the most productive single boreholes in the history of oil exploration. I would hate to think what Mr Simmonds thinks the rate of flow would be if the BOP was not restricting it to a certain degree.
I would hazard a guess at the maximum a single borehole could provide as 70000 bpd under ideal conditions and with near perfect collection/production facilities: possibly less so here due to the nature of the oil bearing sediments.

At Thunder Horse in the GOM I recall the projected combined yield of ALL the boreholes combined over the entire field was as I recall around 225000 bpd - a figure that was never reached and anyway the achieved bpd rate seems now to be reducing rather alarmingly

I would indeed have expected the leak rate to increase in a cased shaft/well as sand erosion at the high pressures encountered would open up fissures in the metal of the well casing/BOP. Actually the presence of gas within the flow will considerably assist in erosion process. (high pressure water cutting is more effective with a gas shroud)
Conversely had the shaft been uncased/lined the flow rate would probably have dropped by now due to bridging over of the oil bearing formation.

Never mind if there is a huge oil 'lake' under the GOM as is the "claim" we can forget about peak oil, the price of oil and get out our drinking straws and suck it all up - oil will be so cheap as to be almost free................

StevieJ

Is this the same guy that Cantona had a go at during that United V Palace match? Eric must have done more damage than was realised at the time :eek:

amcluesent

Hussein Obama won't authorise a nuclear device as that will make exploiting the oil field very difficult. He WANTS the oil, but he wants it to be produced in a way that ensure $$ MILLIONS comes to him and is Democrat buddies by illegal seizure of BP from it's owners.

1984ReturnsForReal_2

ChiefGrasscutter wrote: »

I think a leak of 120000 barrels per day from a single borehole would make this shaft one of the most productive single boreholes in the history of oil exploration.

Pressure...............

matbe

Madness

If an an oil leak isn't bad enough what's the solution ?

A nuclear bomb ?

Make the Gulf of Mexico into a radioactive wasteland.


Complete Kn0bhead.
This is the best he can come up with - nuke it ?

Bullfighter

matbe wrote: »

Madness

If an an oil leak isn't bad enough what's the solution ?

A nuclear bomb ?

Make the Gulf of Mexico into a radioactive wasteland.


Complete Kn0bhead.
This is the best he can come up with - nuke it ?

Get a grip. We would only be talking about a device with less than a few kilotons of energy output, about the same as a US 'bunker buster' bomb. This is not some multi-megaton mushroom cloud city vaporiser....

The device would be detonated thousands of feet below the seabed, the radiation will still be shielded by millions of tons of rock.

They are proposing using it instead of the equivalent in conventional explosives because of the intense heat generated by a fission reaction which means that the rock is turned into non-porous glass - sealing the leak.

matbe

Would you like one in your back garden?