As reported in this blog last week, there is a massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico caused by the explosion and subsequent sinking of an off shore oil rig, the Deepwater Horizon. Authorities last week advised the ruptured well was spewing 159,000 litres of crude oil a day into the sea.This has now been increased to 900,000 litres per day and experts have warned it could prove to be the world’s worst offshore spill.
Strong South East winds have been hampering efforts to contain the oil slick which has now spread to the mouth of the Mississippi River. Hundreds of kilometres of coastline in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida are under threat.
Owners of the oil well BP are responsible for the cost of the cleanup, but the US government is utilising every available resource, including the department of defence, to address the incident.
Bulbeck EnviroSolutions is the Australian and South Pacific Distributor for Elastec American Marine, the largest manufacturer of Oil Spill Equipment in the US. Our Colleagues at Elastec have told us that they have shipped thousands of metres of containment boom to the disaster; in fact, they have shipped every metre of boom in stock.
Mike Miller, who runs a Canadian Oil Well firefighting company said the spill could be the biggest ever. He said the Exxon Valdez disaster in 1989 spilled 41 million litres of oil into Prince William Sound, Alaska, would “pale into insignificance in comparison to this as it goes on.
One of the methods being used to contain and dispose of the oil slick is by controlled burn. Elastec American Marine is supplying Hydro-Fire® Boom, which is a fire resistant water cooled inflatable boom that is an effective barrier to prevent the spread of oil fires on water. The system is ideal for "In-Situ" burning of oil spills. Elastec/American Marine is a world leader in the design and manufacture of fire boom. The original designs used ceramic floats and were later replaced by a reusable water cooled system.
The Hydro-Fire® Boom system offers the following advantages;
• Inflated boom design may be compactly stored on reels
• Reusable and easily stored
• Reel provides assisted deployment and recovery
• Rapidly deployable
"In-Situ" burning is a valuable response tool that can eliminate up to 600-1800 barrels (100,000 -300,000 litres) of oil per hour.
Hydro Fire Containment Boom is also available in Australia from Bulbeck EnviroSolutions. Click here to read more about Hydro-Fire® Boom.
In addition to burning, much of the oil is also being removed from the water surface by Oil Skimmers. Oil Recovery Skimmers are selective oil skimmers designed to remove oil spills from water. These oil skimmers are available in a range of sizes and in pneumatic or hydraulic drive for oil spill response or industrial use.
Oil Skimmers are equally at home in an API separator or inland river, harbour and open ocean and sea oil spills and are also available in Australia from Bulbeck EnviroSolutions. Click here to read more about Oil Skimmers.
Updated 4.05.10
How BP plans to plug the leaks
The company is towing a massive dome, over 4 stories high, which will will lowered to the sea floor. The leaking oil can then be pumped to a tanker on the surface. This will take several days and is an extremely delicate operation due to the sea currents at various levels. The major concern for authorities is the potential for the dom to slip sideways and further damage the well head.
Eventually two relief wells will be drilled under the sea floor to plug the cavity with heavy liquid. This could take approximately three months.
Some intersting facts about the Oil Rig:
The rig belongs to Transocean, the world’s biggest offshore drilling contractor. The rig costs about $500,000 per day to contract. The full drilling spread, with helicopters and support vessels and other services, will cost closer to $1,000,000 per day to operate in the course of drilling for oil and gas. The rig cost about $350,000,000 to build in 2001 and would cost at least double that to replace today.
The rig represents the cutting edge of drilling technology. It is a floating rig, capable of working in up to 10,000 ft water depth. The rig is not moored; It does not use anchors because it would be too costly and too heavy to suspend this mooring load from the floating structure. Rather, a triply-redundant computer system uses satellite positioning to control powerful thrusters that keep the rig on station within a few feet of its intended location, at all times. This is called Dynamic Positioning.
The rig had apparently just finished cementing steel casing in place at depths exceeding 18,000 ft. The next operation was to suspend the well so that the rig could move to its next drilling location, the idea being that a rig would return to this well later in order to complete the work necessary to bring the well into production.
It is thought that somehow formation fluids – oil /gas – got into the wellbore and were undetected until it was too late to take action. With a floating drilling rig setup, because it moves with the waves, currents, and winds, all of the main pressure control equipment sits on the seabed – the uppermost unmoving point in the well. This pressure control equipment – the Blowout Preventers, or ‘BOP’s” as they’re called, are controlled with redundant systems from the rig. In the event of a serious emergency, there are multiple Panic Buttons to hit, and even fail-safe Deadman systems that should be automatically engaged when something of this proportion breaks out. None of them were apparently activated, suggesting that the blowout was especially swift to escalate at the surface. The flames were visible up to about 35 miles away. Not the glow – the flames. They were 200 – 300 ft high.
