Ask HN: As a non-expert, what would you do to solve the oil leak in the Gulf?
You're not an idiot, what ideas have you thought of for fixing the leak that you haven't heard being suggested elsewhere?
(This question was inspired by the debate over whether news updates on the status of repairs were HN appropriate.)
130 comments
[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 179 ms ] threadWith little background in physics I would think that the pressure of the oil's need to rise to the surface would exceed the pressure of the water's need to collapse the cylinder.
Criticism of this or any other idea is more than welcome.
When that well blew out it popped off the connecting pipe and began releasing thousands of barrels of oil at very high pressures. Even if the "hole" were clean cut and they could easily mount a fitting to it, the pressure alone would make it extremely difficult (try turning the garden faucet on high and then connecting a hose to it, possible, but rather difficult).
This is why blowout preventers exist, if a blowout happens the well is sealed from inside itself (as I understand it). I think it is ridiculous that mandatory blowout preventers never made it into law. Bright side of it is this incident will (or should) inspire reform.
I think everything they are doing is about as much as you can do at that depth with such high pressure.
My naive thinking would be a cone with a large diameter and a relatively small hole at the top. Plug a hose (or rather a pipe) into that hole and suck off the oil into tankers faster than it would push out on the sides at the bottom of the cone.
This could surely not catch all of the stream, but perhaps a worthwhile percentage?
The oil is much lighter than water. Plus it has methane which is even lighter than that.
Maybe if there was a gradually thinning cone, you could get it back to laminar flow partway up.
Further more its not like the solutions that they have tried so far have been particularly high tech (put a cap on it and hope the water pressure with seal it, stuff the hole with crap and hope the water pressure will seal it, put fluid in the hole and hope the water pressure will seal it).
There are a lot of smart people on HN, so if nothing else it is good mental masturbation to make suggestions and then explain why those suggestions are or are not feasible.
No. The hope was that the weight of a column of heavy mud a mile long would be enough to counteract the pressure.
People spend years just studying fluid dynamics alone. People spend years studying mechanical engineering by itself. People spend years studying chemistry by itself. People spend years coming to grips with the operational difficulties of undersea operations.
What those people would see in this thread is like what we'd see from a bunch of laypeople designing the back-end of a Web app.
So my idea is halfway between the two: place a large, weighted concrete cylinder with no end caps above the hole - a hollow top hat, if you like. It needs to be big, like 25' x 25' or larger; height is more important than diameter. This in itself does nothing to stem the flow - but nor does it obstruct it. So the cylinder can then be sealed around the bottom and fixed to the seabed without interference from the pressure of the outrushing oil.
Then one can begin filling the cylinder with gravel or whatever is suitable - smallest material first, working up to rocks. As we begin covering the gusher, the pressure will obviously push some of the filler material out of the way...but as it's inside a cylinder, the filler is just going to get pushed against the side of the cylinder, where its weight is going to increase the downward pressure on the material at the bottom, which has nowhere to go except in towards the center. When the aggregate pressure at the bottom of the cylinder from the sides into the center exceeds the pressure of the oil, it will pinch off the flow, like a valve. This of course assumes perfect packing of the filler material; in reality the oil will diffuse through it, but in doing so the pressure will be distributed across the diameter of the cylinder, which will make it much easier to cap.
Or we could just go with Andy Borowitz's suggestion to plug the whole with BP executives....
You lost me there. The cylinder is open at the top, right?
Ever try to push your finger into a garden hose?
I have no idea with how much pressure the oil is coming out there, but it's probably more than enough to push any gravel out of the way before it makes it into the cylinder.
It turned out not to be, but that was the hope.
As you say, sticking something into it or even over the end of it to create a seal is not very practical. But suppose we took an oil barrel, which is about 2 feet in diameter, and drilled a hole in the bottom big enough to fit over the pipe. Getting in place would be a bit of a hassle but once you got the hole lined up with the pipe it wouldn't be too bad, right? OK water is still gushing but now it appears to be gushing in a narrow jet from the center of the barrel resting on the ground. It's still coming out of the same 3 inch pipe, rather than the whole mouth of the barrel.
We anchor the barrel with steel cables or whatever we can. Maybe we seal around the bottom of the barrel with concrete, so it's well and truly fixed in place. Water is gushing out the whole time, but money's no object here. When we are sure the barrel is sturdily anchored, we start shoveling gravel or lead weights it as fast as we can. As it fill instead of gushing in a narrow jet, the water will start (quickly) filling up the barrel - it's the same amount of liquid at the same pressure, but in order to get through the much heavier lumps of rock it's now flowing through a much wider pipe, at a rate proportional to the circumference of the original pipe/the circumference of the barrel.
If we work fast, we can get some kind of plug - perhaps on with an open valve on it - into the end of the barrel before it fills. OK, so then the liquid comes gushing through the open valve. But that means there is not too much pressure around the edges of the barrel, so we seal them with more concrete (I am of course assuming that the walls of the barrel can handle whatever pressure of water is coming out of the original pipe).
Come to think of it, we might as well just drop the barrel with the open valve on top of the thing. The valve prevents pressure buildup inside the barrel while we work on making a seal between the bottom edge and the ground. It just seems a bit easier to me to use filler material to step down the flow from a narrow jet to a wider tube.
Now we still have a gusher, but instead of coming out of a small hole in the ground it's coming out of a big faucet which we have built around the flow without making too much effort to halt it. At which point we close the valve at the top and hope the seal between the ground and the barrel is stronger than the pressure of the oil.
Okay, I was skeptical about this thread when I first saw it, but now I see the awesome potential for teaching physics here.
You can't "diffuse the pressure". At every point along the wall of a sealed vessel, the pressure is constant. So if, e.g., the pressure of the hole when sealed would be 100 PSI, then to stop it every square inch of the seal needs to withstand that 100 PSI.
If the top of your concrete cylinder has, say, 100 times the area of the hole, then the flow of oil may end up evenly distributed over that area. But if you then try to seal the top you must now provide the same strength of seal -- it must withstand the same pressure -- over a much larger area, which is probably harder to accomplish.
This seems counterintuitive, just as the lever is counterintuitive. But we use this principle all the time to lift things like elevators and cars. You push on a tiny-diameter cylinder with your arms (or with a little electric motor), and it pumps fluid into a much larger-diameter cylinder under the car, and the car rises. Of course, you have to pump up and down dozens or hundreds of times to lift the car one inch.
The pressure will try to push the gravel out. So maybe make it really sticky gravel, so that it glues itself together.
Now there are three things to say about this plan:
(a) we call this sticky, very fine gravel concrete and we use it all the time;
(b) a fun educational point: Even with really fine gravel, oil can still diffuse through it. Oil diffuses through "solid" rock all the time. The oil underground is actually trapped inside rock. The rock that holds the oil is relatively porous; the oil is kept underground because above that rock is a layer of denser rock that oil can't diffuse through very well.
(c) In case it isn't obvious yet: The reason your idea still doesn't work very well is that the first cupful of wet concrete you pour onto the hole will promptly get flushed away by the pressure of the leaking oil. ;) As will every successive cupful of wet concrete. Unfortunately, a giant slab of solid concrete must necessarily start out life as a thin layer of wet concrete, so the only way to put a concrete seal over a hole that is actively leaking is to cast it someplace else and then drop it on the hole.
The only point of the gravel (rather than sand) is to disperse the flow sufficiently that maneuvering is easier - same way you could wade across a stream but would be knocked over by the same volume of water aimed at your from a firehouse.
I wonder if Nanotech could come up with some kind of super concrete. Ie particles that stick together extremely well?
The first is to do with flow, as you mention. While all of a large cap needs to be able to withstand high pressure, that is not in itself an especially tricky engineer problem. But size doesn't hurt; in my experience it's rather easier to stop up a large pipe than a small one with the same pressure, simply because it's a less delicate maneuver. In the case of a domestic plumbing crisis, it's nice to be able to exert your arm rather than just your fingers.
The other reason is simply to do with bulk. The larger the cylinder, the greater it weight when finally sealed, the more room you have to anchor it, and the farther from the (presumably fragile) ground in the immediate vicinity of the gusher the circumference will be, if one is trying to bore into the ground with restraining pegs.
The surgical approach has not been very successful so far. Given the urgent nature of the problem, I feel it's worth trying the crude but frequently effective approach of large mass + gravity.
I must be missing something, the parent is talking about wrapping the 21" (inch) diameter pipe in a 25' (foot) outer pipe, this is effectively 200 times the area. The force applied currently by the oil coming up is going to provide 1/200th of the pressure when applied over the end of the pipe.
It's like blowing out through a straw - you can feel the pressure easily. Versus blowing out through a dustbin with a hole in the bottom.
Mind you it's 4:30am ... perhaps I should go to bed and think about this another time.
Yes, it would have to be a big pipe, but is that possible? Or, could you not attach a cone to the top of the cylinder to condense the flow into a smaller (pipe size flow)?
I'm struck by the fact that there are other oil plumes nearby on the seabed, eg 400 feet away from the big one. If the borehole itself is damaged and oil is also leaking out through cracks in the ocean floor, then successfully capping the wellhead will just increase the outward pressure to other leaks, and we'll end up playing whack-a-mole. Depending on how porous or fractured the ground is in the area around the well, attempting to just cap it may be futile.
Indeed, it seems as if the latest strategy is the mentioned here of dropping a giant funnel on it and sucking up as much oil as possible through a pipe rather than allowing it to diffuse into the water, while we try to get an/other rig(s) in place to drill relief wells. And the estimate of having that done by August is based on the time it took to perform a similar task in much shallower water. The explosion in April took place about 3 months after drilling began, and while BP began drilling a relief well around the first week of May, there's no guarantee that any individual drill will tap into the same pocket on the first attempt, which I presume is why the government has ordered they get a second one going ASAP. The Ixtoc I oil spill in the 1970s, which was also in the gulf, took 10 months to bring under control. Although our drilling and seismic imaging technology has improved significantly since then, they're also applied to wells at much greater depths.
The problem with asking non petroleum engineers this sort of question is that you get incorrect and useless answers based on very limited "intuition and common sense" and not based on actual knowlege of the discipline.
Of course, the oil would probably start leaking through the sand/rubble after a few days.
This could be trivially solved by applying nuclear explosives to weld everything shut, with the added benefit that local fishermen could stop to worry whether they'll have a job again soon. </sarcasm>
At least if they use the nuke method no one will care about the oil spill anymore whether it works or not.
But I do have this picture in my head of throwing a bunch of gigantic parachute things into the water. Perhaps with tubes in their centers that lead to the surface. Or, throw so many parachutes down that it creates a canopy that directs where the oil goes. Or put some kind of super heating devices on these things and I don't really know what that would do....
Or they can build a huge cone from the surface downward.
Like you said, I'm no expert.
It would be difficult to control the "canvas" underwater though because of current and other unknown variables.
That is all.
"I say we take off, and nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure." - Ripley
How many times has this attitude been proven pointless and ineffective? As I understand it one of the great things about "startup cultures" is the utilization of the outsider's prospective. Why can't that mentality be applied to this problem?
There is a great difference between not trusting experts (what you are accusing me of) and having ideas of my own and asking others for their opinions of my ideas.
I don't do surgery on myself but if I had a deadly uncured disease I would question the doctor as to why various treatments won't work to cure me. In all likelihood he would answers for all of my questions (which in itself would put my mind at ease a little), but it is possible that he wouldn't have all the answers (leading me to want a second opinion).
If you can't at minimum do the physics required you can't play this game.
More seriously, the biggest barrier to laypeople coming up with practical solutions to this is that all of the forces involved are orders of magnitude outside of our experience. None of us has any intuitive concept of what things are like 5000 feet below the surface of the water. None of us has any idea what oil is like in that volume, let alone at that pressure and temperature.
I'd be more charitable about common sense solutions to the cleanup, since that seems like the type of thing we can have an intuition about. The bottom of the ocean however is an entirely alien environment, with (for all intents and purposes) different physics.
The only people with an intuition for this are the ones working on the solution professionally.
Even the most cynical of minds cannot possibly conjure up the conspiracy theory that everyone is just sitting around doing nothing. It is in BP's own best interests to fix this ASAP - the magnitude of fallout this creates for them increases as the problem drags on.
One of the less impressive aspects of our new information culture is that every Joe Schmoe now thinks he is an expert materials engineer, rocket scientist, political expert, economist, sociologist, historian, physicist, chemist, biologist, medical professional, and general.
As a trained mechanical engineer turned software guy, I find it ironic that we softies bitch about laymen's assumptions about our field, and we are aggravated constantly by other people who assume that everything just takes "a couple of days" to build... yet we are so quickly to leap to the same conclusion when it concerns a field that is not our own.
Also, I'm not sure these experts have really "tried". If someone's hair catches on fire on Monday at 3pm, then BP's first attempt to put out that person's hair fire is at 8pm, then next on Wednesday, then next about 2 weeks later (failing again), then 2 weeks later the next attempt, etc. -- it makes one wonder whether there could have been more attempts made earlier -- I mean, afterall, this person's hair is on fire. And whether they could have had more backup/failover techniques sitting on the sidelines ready-to-go quickly during the first few hours and days after the leak began. All the talk about the challenges of having the depth and pressure constraints are legitimate, but what should also be obvious to any reasonably intelligent person is that another constraint is time. Regardless of what particular technique is use to stop/reduce the leak, the most effective thing you can do is to implement it very early. The total damage to the environment will be proportional to how many hours/days/weeks the oil is left to leak into the sea. So making the investment in process and equipment and people and training to be able to stop this very early will pay off. Since a decent engineer could probably have told them there was a chance the blowout preventer could fail (for a variety of reasons) they should have had several alternate/backup plans to execute very soon afterward. Given that the magnitude of the downside impact could be so obviously huge.
Also, this is one of the cases where the fundamental elements of the problem are actually pretty simple: oil leaking into water. Just stop that flow from happening. Lots of ways to do that. Yes it is deep. Yes high pressure. With a decent background in physics and engineering I think one can come up with lots of solutions and tactics that would work. But they all need to be tested (at 5000 foot depths) and fine-tuned and resourced and have people trained on before a real accident occurs. What angers a lot of people in this case is the sense that BP and friends did not do this.
Also there have been big oil spills in the past and the companies involved almost always live to fight another day. Exxon Valdez was one of the biggest spills in US history. In the recent news about Apple overtaking Microsoft in market cap, that still only brought them up to #2. Know who was #1? Exxon. All costs/penalties/grief BP will get from this is really just going to turn into a dollar charge against their balance sheet. And they already have billions in cash. The negative PR/psych effect will slowly fade away. And if they have to raise prices, they just pass it on as a cost-of-doing-business to the folks who buy their product. Us.
Fixing a large fissure deep under the ocean is not at all like putting someone out of fire. To even make such a comparison betrays a severe lack of understanding about the magnitude the difficulties of such a problem.
Honestly, I'm trying to be as civil as possible here, but your attitude aggravates me. You are laying down serious claims of impropriety on the part of all of the scientists and engineers who are working on this problem based on your, let's be honest, uneducated notions about what plugging an underwater leak is like. If you are going to accuse others of such grievous impropriety, you should at least make some effort to be qualified to make the judgment. As it is you are, like many others, armchair geological engineers.
> "Also, this is one of the cases where the fundamental elements of the problem are actually pretty simple: oil leaking into water"
Jesus. Fucking. Christ. I'm not sure how much more you can oversimplify that. Would you also characterize your car's engine as a fire burning in a confined space? Or how about let's use your extensive experience with bottle rockets to criticize NASA engineers? I suppose absolute zero is a lot like the inside of your freezer, too, just colder.
> "Lots of ways to do that. Yes it is deep. Yes high pressure."
Uh-huh. I really like how you've just completely dismissed two of the most bleeding-edge limits of human technology, understanding, and ingenuity with a wave of your hand. Yep, it's deep, yep, it's high pressure, but surely our trained scientists will breeze right past those minor inconveniences! Otherwise what the hell are they good for, if they can't even make mincemeat of such minor roadblocks like being 5000 feet under the ocean?
> "With a decent background in physics and engineering I think one can come up with lots of solutions and tactics that would work."
As someone with a decent background in engineering, I would like to know what in the blue hell would lead you to believe this. Our scientists and engineers are smart, talented people, they are not magicians.
> "What angers a lot of people in this case is the sense that BP and friends did not do this."
Good misdirection. You started off by criticizing the people in charge of plugging this hole, saying that because of the long delay between each try to plug the well, they are clearly not trying hard enough, and that lay advice would be useful to these people who clearly don't know WTF they are doing. Now you're steering this into a criticism of oil regulations - which has nothing to do with the original topic at hand.
Free speech is awesome - everyone should have the right to say whatever they want. It does not, however, make you a qualified commentator on everything and anything. "It can't be that complicated" is all too common a sentiment with laymen, and I'm particularly disappointed that a tech-savvy crowd, who has to deal with the limitations of scientific and engineering understanding everyday, is so easily susceptible to this.
Also, I don't think he refuted my points. He certainly did not do so politely. Let's agree to disagree. Just keep it civil.
I did not accuse any scientists/engineers who are actively trying to solve the leak now of doing anything unethical. I do not and cannot know for sure the details of exactly which person did what, when -- none of us can, and much will be hearsay. However, I thought it was clear from my post that I think it appears more of a lack of preparation before the accident, and/or a lack of will after the accident began, at a leadership level. At the level of an individual engineer, he may want to do the smart/cautious thing, but if he is overruled by executives or accountants, etc. then his intent has no effect.
I did not completely dismiss the challenges of depth and pressure. I even cited them specifically. But if you focus on the core goal we have right now, it's that there is oil flowing into water at a certain location. Just stop that flow and/or contain it to a finite controlled volume, and prevent it from spreading out into a much larger area. It doesn't matter exactly how quickly you stop/contain it, and it doesn't matter exactly the volume of the containment zone, or even whether you use 1 technique or 3, together or in sequence, just make it happen and do it quickly. And they fundamentally know how to put and operate equipment down there, and lay pipes, and draw oil up to the surface for further processing and transport. What BP needs to do is basically just a variant on that same fundamental task. Again: there is some fluid in another fluid. Bad stuff getting into some good stuff. Keep it from spreading in an uncontrolled manner. That is not fundamentally impossible, even at 5000 feet depth. Walls. Pipes. Suction. Seals. Tanks. Valves. This is all well understood technology and can be put together in a variety of ways.
Also, all your claims about how lay people (such as myself, you imply) are inherently unqualified to talk about this subject would apply equally well to you. However, in reality, I would argue that a reasonably intelligent and educated person can come up with a decent analysis and decent solution ideas, comparable to that of professionals within a field, given that the constraints that that field operates within are sufficiently knowable and understandable by said lay person. In essence, Mother Nature doesn't know or care what degree you have.
You and I may have differences in how solvable or preventable we perceive this situation to be, but frankly you keep going overboard and saying rude things. Imagine you are sitting across a table from me, speaking to my face, and adjust your words accordingly. Free speech is awesome. But with it should come the sense of responsibility to not be rude to whom you are speaking.
Transit time alone is not a factor to dismiss. It's not too hard to see how time adds up, really.
On the point about transportation time being a factor: in getting resources to accident site, there are many well-known ways of mitigating that. They can keep things cached on site, or use equipment from other nearby platforms that are not in accident mode, or, they can keep stuff based at a closer port, like New Orleans rather than New Jersey, for example. Plus they can fly in as much as they can, which would be a matter of hours in those cases. Lots of other things they can do, have trained teams and ships on standby, ready to deploy quickly to any of say 5-20 wells (or whatever) in their service area, if an accident occurs. The cost of keeping those people and equipment sitting idle and nearby can just become a cost of the operation, and considered to be justified as a net-win in accident scenarios. And again, we're talking about a company making billions in profits every 3 months -- they probably have enough margin to divert some of it upfront to buy better preparation and reduced accident-containment-latency.
In the meantime they're attempting to keep their PR as good as possible by a) downplaying the size of the spill and b) taking mediagenic actions that are unlikely to succeed, but are useful distractions. Giving them names like "Top Hat" and "Top Kill" and "Junk Shot", and whatever they will be calling "lower marine riser package cap" in a few days.
Then I would make a contraption consisting of three parts:
1) similar flange to the one on the ocean floor that can be bolted on to the one welded on the pipe
2) a cylinder welded on top of the flange
3) some sort of closing mechanism on top of the cylinder.
Get divers (or ROV's) down to attach the contraption to the pipe by bolting the two flanges together. This should be possible since the oil will just rise out of the cylinder, so the pressure of the oil shouldn't be a problem. When the contraption is secured activate the closing mechanism.
The only requirement here is that you can weld something onto the pipe below where the leak is. I don't know whether that's possible at that depth though.
Worse, it sounds like the state of the art for atmospheric diving suits will only get you half-way there: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_diving_suit
No idea how to deal with the `plumes`, though. <silly> Add detergent? </silly>
http://www.bp.com/liveassets/bp_internet/globalbp/globalbp_u...
And btw if you are Empire/D Walter Bright I'm a big fan of your work. :)
I would think that they could hook a giant pump onto one or more pipes and collect it somehow. At 145gpm, it would take 7000 years to fill up one of the super tankers.
Likewise, I wonder if they could put a heater on the top hat pipe. Maybe the oil is thick at that temp/pressure. Or maybe there are ice crystals, but it seems like they could solve that somehow. We have wires up North to thaw frozen pipes. Shop vacs have larger diameter hoses to not get clogged so easily. Maybe they could bundle lots of smaller pipes together.
Ironically, I accidentally poured a few cups of oil into my truck's coolant reservoir. I thought it would all float to the surface, but lots of it just stayed at the bottom. Blowing bubbles into the tank made it float up sort of like the bubble "pumps" in a fish aquarium.
At this point, they should just create a contest and let school kids come up with ideas.
Find a few empty supertankers (which I'm certain BP can round up if they need to), mount a bunch of large industrial pumps on top of each one, plant them strategically around the leak site, and start sucking up the oil-water mixture from the surface (and stop with the dispersant - we want the oil to stay together in this scenario). Once they're full in a week or so, bring another three or four supertankers in to take over. Meanwhile, send the full ones to a nearby port, offload the oil-water mixture, and deal with processing it to separate out the oil and the water there. We won't get all the oil; if we're lucky, maybe 75%. But whatever that percentage is, it's miles better than what we're getting now.
This is apparently what was done in the early nineties off the coast of Saudi Arabia when they had a similar problem. I'm not saying this would be cheap - supertankers and pumps don't grow on trees - but BP needs to fix this and show they're making a good efforts. Plus, you could probably recover a good deal of the oil as a part of the onshore processing and sell it like any other oil.
BTW: I think it's curious to compare the 19,000 bpd with the 645,113 bpd that the Alaskan pipeline moved in April. http://www.alyeska-pipe.com/Default.asp I can't visualize how much we must be consuming/burning every day.
I think the trick is that it needs to be intercepted deep enough into bedrock to not risk having the whole BOP crater.
Those are truly ideas I had instantly. What's terrifying is that my ideas bare any resemblance to the supposed experts's.
Done.
Then I'd find out what my budget was, and who else I had to deal with afterwards.
Etc...
"But managers did learn to type. And Goldcorp did use the internet to mine gold: in 2000, it abandoned the industry's tradition of secrecy, making thousands of pages of complex geological data available online, and offering $575,000 in prize money to those who could successfully identify where on the Red Lake property the undiscovered veins of gold might lie. Retired geologists, graduate students and military officers around the world chipped in. They recommended 110 targets, half of which Goldcorp hadn't previously identified. Four-fifths of them turned out to contain gold. Since then, the company's value has rocketed from $100m to $9bn, and disaster has been averted."(http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/sep/05/news.netric...)
TL;DR Hey BP take advantage of someone who needs some cash more than you do in order to find the solution