Cita de: dani... en Lunes 24 Mayo 2010 21:40:03 PM
De todas formas aclaro que: si no se es capaz de controlar un fallo, quizás no debieran abrirse ese tipo de pozos.

Eso creo yo también.



Serio el tema, y más mientras siga sin cerrarse la fuga. Parece que parte de la mancha en superficie podría verse atrapada por la Corriente del Golfo, que la desplazaría rápidamente hacia los cayos de Florida...  

Parece que lo de cerrar la fuga va para largo

BP admite que es incapaz de detener el vertido en EEUU

http://www.noticiasdenavarra.com/2010/05/25/mundo/bp-reconoce-su-incapacidad-para-detener-el-vertido-en-eeuu

El miércoles van a intentar tapar el pozo con cemento y otros materiales. Sí algo se consigue, bienvenido sea.

HOUSTON — BP was poised Wednesday morning to decide whether to move ahead with its most ambitious — and potentially most consequential — effort to plug the mile-deep gusher of oil that has been streaming into the Gulf of Mexico for more than a month.


Times Topic: Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill (2010)The procedure, known as a top kill, would pump thousands of pounds of heavy fluids into a five-story tall stack of pipes in an effort to clog the well and stop the torrent of oil. But BP officials said the method of containing spills had never been tried so far underwater, and that it could take up to a few days to determine whether it had succeeded. They cautioned there was no guarantee that the gambit would work.

Tony Hayward, the chief executive of BP, said on NBC's "Today" Show Wednesday that he would review the results of 12 hours of tests before determining whether to initiate the top kill.

"Later this morning I will review that with the team and I will take a final decision as to whether or not we should proceed," Mr. Hayward said on the morning program. Even if BP determines it can begin the operation on Wednesday, Mr. Hayward said, "it will be a day or two before we can have certainty that it's worked."

Either way, President Obama will return to Louisiana on Friday to survey the spill's damage, the White House said.

The consequences for BP are profound: A successful capping of the leaking well could finally begin to mend the company's brittle image after weeks of failed efforts, and perhaps limit the damage to wildlife and marine life from reaching catastrophic levels.

A failure could mean several months more of leaking oil, devastating economic and environmental impacts across the gulf region, and mounting financial liabilities for the company. BP has already spent an estimated $760 million in fighting the spill, and two relief wells it is drilling as a last resort to seal the well may not be completed until August.

On Thursday, President Obama will call for tougher safety requirements for offshore oil drilling and will likely announce a more rigorous inspections regimen for such operations, administration officials said.

Mr. Obama's announcement is expected to come after he receives a report from the Interior Department.

The Interior Department is preparing more stringent regulations governing safety and environmental practices, replacing a system of largely self-regulation by the oil companies. Drilling companies objected to the new rules, saying they were overly prescriptive and would be costly to comply with.

The rules were moving slowly before the spill, but a senior interior department official said they would be accelerated. On Tuesday, engineers guided submarine robots through diagnostic tests in preparation for the top kill, a maneuver in which tubes will inject thousands of pounds of heavy drilling fluids into a five-story-tall stack of pipes to clog the well. A 30,000-horsepower engine on a ship floating above the well will shoot the liquids, known in the oil business as drilling mud.

The technique has been used successfully for other spills, notably for stopping the oil flooding out of Kuwaiti oil wells sabotaged by the Iraqi army at the end of the first Persian Gulf war.

Several veterans of that operation are orchestrating technicians in the Gulf of Mexico. To lead the effort, BP has brought in Mark Mazzella, its top well-control expert, who was mentored by Bobby Joe Cudd, a legendary Oklahoma well firefighter.

But at a mile below the gulf surface, the pressures of the surging oil and gas may be too much for the drilling fluids to counteract and reverse, BP officials warned.

"It has been done successfully in the past, but it hasn't been done at this depth," said Kent Wells, BP's senior vice president for exploration and production. "We always have to be careful about setting expectations."

BP said in a statement that the top kill could be combined with a procedure known as a junk shot, in which materials like golf balls and pieces of rubber are injected into the blowout preventer to bridge gaps in the rams and stop or sharply reduce the flow of oil.

BP officials said if the flow of oil can be stopped, cement will be poured into the well and the old, leaky blowout preventer, the stack of pipes above the well that failed to control the blowout, might be replaced with a new one as an added safety measure. The officials said the well would never be used for production purposes.

Mr. Wells said that if the top kill fails, the next option would be to place a containment dome over the well. This approach was tried three weeks ago, but an icy slush of gas and water clogged the dome. Officials said a different approach might avoid that problem.


Matthew L. Wald and Helene Cooper contributed reporting from Washington. Liz Robbins contributed reporting from New York.

Del NEW YORK TIMES

Cita de: lantxurda en Martes 25 Mayo 2010 11:46:04 AM
Parece que lo de cerrar la fuga va para largo

BP admite que es incapaz de detener el vertido en EEUU

No solo BP, sino todo el mundo esta muy desesperado porque no se sabe a ciencia cierta como taponar el vertido. PBS ha abierto una canal en youtube con una camara en directo del vertido. Y sale muuucho crudo. No pienta bien la cosa y el ecosistema va a quedar muy mermado. Por cierto, en el mismo link, abajo de la camara piden ideas y ayudas para cerrar el escape. A ver si algunos de nuestros genios del foro se le ocurre y le dan un premio los americanos 

http://www.youtube.com/pbsnewshour?feature=ticker

saludos

ve avances esperanzadores seis horas después
BP realiza el tercer intento de sellado de la fuga de crudo

La petrolera británica BP aseguró este miércoles que creen que seis horas después de que empezara su nuevo intento de sellar el vertido de crudo en aguas del golfo de México, en este momento sólo saldría de la fuga lodo, y no petróleo, lo que consideran "un éxito" en su tarea de frenar el escape.

   "Lo que han estado viendo subir a la superficie es muy probable que sea lodo", afirmó el jefe de operaciones de BP, Doug Suttles, en una rueda de prensa celebrada por teleconferencia desde su cuartel general en el estado de Louisiana.

http://www.europapress.es/internacional/noticia-bp-ve-avances-esperanzadores-seis-horas-despues-comenzar-tercer-intento-sellado-fuga-crudo-20100527081211.html

¿Que creeis?? ¿Es solo lodo??

http://www.youtube.com/pbsnewshour?feature=ticker

¿Y si la multinacional BP no logra tapar el agujerito ese? ¿Podrían las corrientes oceánicas trasladarlo a otros lugares del planeta?

Cita de: eguzkia en Jueves 27 Mayo 2010 13:52:53 PM
¿Y si la multinacional BP no logra tapar el agujerito ese? ¿Podrían las corrientes oceánicas trasladarlo a otros lugares del planeta?

Yo no creo que tenga esa potencia el vertido, además aunque es un desastre no es combustible, ni petroleo refinado, es en bruto, vamos que no deja de ser un producto "natural" y por tanto entiendo que se degradara antes.

Aunque alguna "galletita" seguro que a Groenlandia, o Europa del norte llega.

No encuentro un artículo que hablaba de la imposibilidad de tapar el agujerito. Sigo buscando...


British Petroleum, concesionaria de la plataforma petrolífera que explotó el pasado 20 de abril y se hundió dos días después, ha estimado que vierte cada día unos 800.000 litros de petróleo al mar. Algunos expertos consideran que esta estimación es extremadamente baja, y calculan que la cifra de vertido podría ser cinco veces mayor, 4 millones de litros (4.000 toneladas) de crudo diarios. Con un vertido de cuatro millones de litros diarios, según el profesor Ian McDonald, en estos momentos podría haber flotando en el golfo de México unos 34 millones de litros de crudo (34.000 toneladas). Esta cifra está aún por debajo de la catástrofe que protagonizó en marzo de 1989 el buque norteamericano Exxon Valdez, que chocó contra un arrecife en el estuario de Prince William Sound (Alaska) y vertió al agua 42 millones de litros  (42.000 toneladas) de petróleo, lo que causó el mayor desastre ecológico en la historia de EE UU hasta el momento. No olvidemos que durante los primeros días de la catástrofe del Prestige (que transportaba 77.000 toneladas de fuel) fluían unas 125 toneladas diarias.

Sigue: http://www.madrimasd.org/blogs/ciencia_marina/2010/05/04/131485

Parece que han dao con la tecla.

http://www.publico.es/internacional/315968/vertido/crudo/parado/momento

Cita de: eguzkia en Jueves 27 Mayo 2010 17:16:19 PM
Parece que han dao con la tecla.

http://www.publico.es/internacional/315968/vertido/crudo/parado/momento

Pues no se que decirte. Por un lado algunos medios dicen que estan taponando el escape

http://news.google.com/news?ned=es

pero en los medios americanos no hay (por ahora) ni una palabra sobre eso. De hecho hasta Obama ha pedido ideas a la gente para ver como taponarlo.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/05/27/obama-federal-government-charge-oil-spill-response/

http://www.cnn.com/

O unos han sido demasiado rapido en echar las campanas al vuelo o bien los otros estan poco actualizados.
En fin, que se solucione pronto

saludos

HOUSTON — BP on Thursday night restarted its most ambitious effort yet to plug the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico, trying to revive hopes that it might cap the well with a "top kill" technique that involved pumping heavy drilling liquids to counteract the pressure of the gushing oil.

BP officials, who along with government officials created the impression early in the day that the strategy was working, disclosed later that they had stopped pumping the night before when engineers saw that too much of the drilling fluid was escaping along with the oil.

It was the latest setback in the effort to shut off the leaking oil, which federal officials said was pouring into the gulf at a far higher rate than original estimates suggested.

If the new estimates are accurate, the spill would be far bigger than the Exxon Valdez disaster in 1989 and the worst in United States history.

President Obama, who planned to visit the gulf on Friday, ordered a suspension of virtually all current and new offshore oil drilling activity pending a comprehensive safety review, acknowledging that oversight until now had been seriously deficient.

Mr. Obama said at a news conference in Washington that he was angry and frustrated about the catastrophe, and he shouldered much of the responsibility for the continuing crisis.

"Those who think we were either slow on the response or lacked urgency, don't know the facts," Mr. Obama said. "This has been our highest priority."

But he also blamed BP, which owns the stricken well, and the Bush administration, which he said had fostered a "cozy and sometimes corrupt" relationship between oil companies and regulators at the Minerals Management Service.

The chief of that agency for the past 11 months, S. Elizabeth Birnbaum, resigned on Thursday, less than a week after her boss, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, announced a broad restructuring of the office.

"I'm hopeful that the reforms that the secretary and the administration are undertaking will resolve the flaws in the current system that I inherited," she said in a statement.

Mr. Obama plans on Friday to inspect the efforts in Louisiana to stop the leak and clean up after it, his second trip to the region since the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig on April 20. He will also visit with people affected by the spreading slick that has washed ashore over scores of miles of beaches and wetlands.

Even as Mr. Obama acknowledged that his efforts to improve regulation of offshore drilling had fallen short, he said that oil and gas from beneath the gulf, now about 30 percent of total domestic production, would be a part of the nation's energy supply for years to come.

"It has to be part of an overall energy strategy," Mr. Obama said. "I mean, we're still years off and some technological breakthroughs away from being able to operate on purely a clean-energy grid. During that time, we're going to be using oil. And to the extent that we're using oil, it makes sense for us to develop our oil and natural gas resources here in the United States and not simply rely on imports."

In the top kill maneuver, a 30,000-horsepower engine aboard a ship injected heavy drill liquids through two narrow flow lines into the stack of pipes and other equipment above the well to push the escaping oil and gas back down below the sea floor.

As hour after hour passed after the top kill began early Wednesday afternoon, technicians along with millions of television and Internet viewers watched live video images showing that the dark oil escaping into the gulf waters was giving way to a mud-colored plume.

That seemed to be an indication that the heavy liquids known as "drilling mud" were filling the chambers of the blowout preventer, replacing the escaping oil.

In the morning, federal officials expressed optimism that all was going well. "The top kill procedure is going as planned, and it is moving along as everyone had hoped," Adm. Thad W. Allen of the Coast Guard, the leader of the government effort, told CNN.

And Robert Dudley, BP's managing director, said on the "Today" program on NBC that the top kill "was moving the way we want it to."

It was not until late afternoon that BP acknowledged that the operation was not succeeding and that pumping had halted at 11 p.m. Wednesday.

After the resumption, Doug Suttles, BP's chief operating officer for exploration and production, struggled to offer guidance on whether the latest effort was likely to succeed.

"It's quite a roller-coaster," Mr. Suttles said. "It's difficult to be optimistic or pessimistic. We have not stopped the flow."

Por lo que se ve aún no están seguros de si da resultado o no.