Quote:
Originally Posted by billywatson
There was a safety valve that was proposed to be mandatory on ALL US offshore drilling. It was going to be a law...but the Bush administration nixed it.
Why?
Too expensive.
How expensive?
$500,000.
As in half a million dollars.
I think BP made 6 billion last quarter. Can anyone do the math here and figure out how long it woulda taken them to pay for the safety valve that the Bush/Cheney crew let them off the hook for?
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Your information is flawed.
Let me explain: On top of the well head sits the BOP (blow out preventer). This is a house sized valve that is designed to shut of the well in case of a blow out. It does this by cutting through the pipe with a shear ram and sealing it off.
There are several ways to trigger the BOP, "switches" if you will. A hydraulic switch, a manual one (to be engaged by submersible robots), and another one I'm not sure about (spring loaded fail safe in case of loss of hydraulics, I believe).
The device you are talking about would have been an additional BOP activation switch that can be triggered acoustically.
This mess happened not because the switches failed. As the rig sank, it jammed the riser pipe into the BOP, with likely a section of drilling pipe or hardened tool joint in it. As a result the BOP couldn't close because the shear rams were not able to cut through that tool steel section.
The problem is not that the switches failed, but that the BOP could not perform as designed.
The acoustical switch you're talking about would have made no difference.
Another thing, the fact that right now the riser is jammed into the BOP is the only thing that actually LIMITS outflow. Any attempt to remove it in order to install a new BOP or even a new riser could mean that the well starts flowing at its natural flow rate, which would mean it would jump from the current estimated 5,000 barrels a day to possibly 130,000 barrels a day.
That's why they are fucked. They can't fix the BOP and trying to replace it could make things infinitely worse, if one can imagine that.
A viable option that surprisingly doesn't get talked about it to collapse the well pipe with a nuclear explosion below the sea bed. The radioactive pollution would actually be mostly contained underground. The Russians have done this a few times successfully in the past.
Either way, it's a nightmare of apocalyptic proportions.