re: Deepwater Horizon - question about the cement

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Wow. So many safety devices that failed, along with human error. It blows my mind that this happened.

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Things go wrong on these operations all the time which are out of your control. It's an immensely complex operation with a lot of people playing their own part. The worst problems though almost always involve human error. It only takes one screw up and your career in this industry is finished.

Will someone ever go back and tap in to that well?

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Will someone ever go back and tap in to that well?

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LLOG has been drilling in the macondo field for years now so yes.

Couldn't shear the tool joints

ETA: I was at LSU in PETE when this shite happened. A guy came in and gave a PowerPoint presentation on the Junk Shot method they attempted to seal the well. It was basically 400 slides of wacky shite they were pumping downhole and it was hilarious

I kno rite

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Engineer

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Thank you good sir.

Think of drilling a hole in a piece of wood (like into a block, not through and through). You then pull the drill bit out. You pick up a straw and stick it in the hole you just drilled. You take some glue and "pump" it down the straw. It will come out the bottom, then up the area between the straw and hole in the wood. If you pump some water behind the glue you can time it to where the glue is out of the inside of the straw at the same time you fill the area between the straw and hole. You then let it sit and dry. The straw is now glued into the hole. The straw is the metal casing (big pipe), the glue is the cement.

It's obviously much more complicated, but that's basically it. Think of layers of rock with different fluids inside (the rock is porous) and each layer may have a different pressure. The pipe stops the pressure from coming into the well bore. The cement will stop the pressure from jumping from one layer to another.

Due to depth of the hole, temperature, well bore fluid properties, centralization of the casing inside the hole, etc., pumping the cement takes a lot of analysis. They adjust the properties of the cement slurry. This isn't your driveway type stuff. If the pipe isn't centralized, there might be large voids where cement didn't get behind pipe. Happens all the time. A cement bond log is just a sensor that scans the casing and can confirm that cement got everywhere it needed to. If it didn't, they can shoot holes in the pipe and squeeze in cement to spots they missed. Again, stuff like this happens. It should not have caused a blowout. Ignoring it along with MANY other things led to that. Even though they didn't do the bond log on the DWH, there were other signs. They had tanks on the rig filling up with well bore fluid. Which means the well was slowly flowing back. I've seen the graphs. They ignored the alarms because they were offloading the same fluid and just assumed tank levels were all messed up due to that. But in reality, it was easy to see. Once that heavy well bore mud is out, there's nothing to hold back the formation pressure and boom, our have a blowout. When your blow out preventer doesn't work, you're toast.

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Couldn't shear the tool joints

ETA: I was at LSU in PETE when this shite happened. A guy came in and gave a PowerPoint presentation on the Junk Shot method they attempted to seal the well. It was basically 400 slides of wacky shite they were pumping downhole and it was hilarious

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My dad worked for Wild Well Control (BTI actually) and they were attempting to drop the dome over the wellhead.



problem was getting it in place over the wellhead which was difficult.

The movie was very Hollywooded up.

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The movie was very Hollywooded up.

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Yeah, and I knew it would be going into it so it didn't bother me. I've got friends that hate how it was portrayed and others that enjoyed it. I've found that the more stereotypical oilfield "baw" you are, the more you hated it, almost like you're required to do so. My biggest complaint was the portrayal of the woman who wanted to engage the BOP but was being held back by the man. In reality she just failed to do her job.