Gulf Oil Platform Explosion and Spill

Back in June, Florida Senator Bill Nelson told NBC’s Andrea Mitchell he had gotten reports that the Macondo well BP has been trying to plug for months was damaged and leaking through the sea floor. By all accounts, Nelson’s statement was of major significance.

“If Senator Nelson is correct about the breach of fundamental well integrity, the game is close to over for the Gulf of Mexico,” Firedog lake reported. “In fact, I have confirmed with Senator Nelson’s office that they are fully aware of the breaking news and significance of what the Senator said to Andrea Mitchell.”

After BP announced a delay in performing a pressure test on the well, now under their newest containment cap, a comment on Nola.com validates Nelson's statement.

“ I think they started to see the pressure drop meaning the well has given way below the surface. Reports are that oil and gas are escaping from fissures in the sea floor many miles away from the damaged riser....NOT GOOD...I think BP is holding back info again so we just don't know how bad this really is. “

lawlessline wrote:I have not seen anything yet that say the cap has not worked. Are we second guessing that it hasn't work? The live shots show the second valve pipe chucking stuff out but apparantly that has to happen before they shut it off and move onto the third valve, where they can cap it totally.

Does anyone have any statements from offical sources saying the thing hasn't worked??

NEW ORLEANS — BP allayed last-minute government fears of making the disaster worse and began testing the new, tighter-fitting cap Wednesday that could finally choke off the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico.

Retired Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, the Obama administration’s point man on the disaster, said the government gave the go-ahead after carefully reviewing the risks.

“What we didn’t want to do is compound that problem by making an irreversible mistake,” he said at the end of a 24-hour roller-coaster of hopes raised, dashed and raised again along the Gulf Coast.

The cap — a 75-ton metal stack of pipes and valves — was lowered onto the well Monday in hopes of either bottling up the oil inside the well machinery, or capturing it and funneling it to the surface. But before BP could test the equipment the government intervened because of second thoughts about whether the buildup of pressure from the gushing oil could rupture the walls of the well and make the leak worse.

“We sat long and hard about delaying the tests,” Allen said. He said the pause was necessary in the interest of the public, the environment and safety, and that officials were convinced the test could go forward.

Will the oil gusher in the Gulf eventually destroy all marine life, as oilman Matthew Simmons asserts, or will the disaster instead be contained once BP’s relief well comes online sometime in July or August? Simmons, a peak-oil proponent and no stranger to controversy, has been warning that a second well cannot alleviate the problem because most of the oil, now estimated to flow at around 60,000 barrels per day, is coming not from the well bore but from innumerable ruptures in the sea bed around the Deepwater Horizon site. Because of this, he says, there are only two possible options: allowing the well to run dry — a process that would take 30 years and destroy the Gulf of Mexico and the ocean; or nuking the site, melting the fissured seabed into a glassy cap.

We have been attempting to verify his claims using our own sources. One of them is Dave Patterson, a petroleum reservoir and operations engineer who works for Moyes Co., a Houston-based energy consulting firm with no direct involvement in the BP project. In contrast to Simmons’ end-of-the-world talk, Patterson says he has “absolute confidence” that the relief well will work. Based on everything he has read, seen and heard, Patterson, a Moyes director, says there’s little evidence to support Simmons’ worst-case scenario. “Yes, it is a delicate operation, “ he notes. “Hitting a target 17 inches wide at 18,000 feet is always going to be difficult. But the people who are doing it have a 100% track record,” and there are two wells being drilled for redundancy. Patterson says that all the evidence he’s seen indicates that the main leakage is straight up the well-head and not through fissures. And although capping the gusher posed a risk of rupturing the casing and losing control of the shutdown, that’s why BP wasn’t more aggressive about it to begin with, he explained. Patterson also noted that the increased flow over time is attributable, not to a widening network of fissures, as Simmons has claimed, but to the severing of a bent “riser” pipe that had restricted output.

OIL WELL SEALED (FOR NOW).... As of an hour ago, the wellhead gushing oil since the Deepwater Horizon explosion was fully contained.

BP said Thursday that it has stopped oil from leaking out of its blown-out well in the Gulf of Mexico. The gusher has been throttled for the first time since the April 20 blowout on the drilling rig Deepwater Horizon.

Kent Wells, BP's senior vice president of exploration and production, told reporters that a new capping mechanism shut off the flow of crude from the Macondo well at 3:25 p.m. EDT. He made the announcement after engineers gradually shut off valves to test the pressure. The engineers are monitoring the pressure to see whether the new cap and the well bore hold.

...after 48 hours the engineers would open up the system again and begin capturing the oil through two surface vessels hooked up to the ruptured pipe and carry out a new seismic survey.

"That will tell us, as a result of that testing at high pressure for 48 hours, was there a change in the wellbore, did we have oil leak into the formation and form a pocket that could be a precursor for a breach in the ocean floor, is there methane gas coming up, which could be a precursor as well," Allen said.

The two container vessels, the Q4000 and the Helix Producer, at the site capturing the spilling crude from two lines connected to the blow-out preventer device below the capping stack, were shut down before the test started.

metaw3 wrote:Oil leak is blackmail? "As explained for months...Congress passes financial BS..Leak suddenly disappears"

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/15/AR2010071500464.html

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSLDE66E0MK20100716

http://forum.prisonplanet.com/index.php?topic=179818.msg1064991

Interesting. I can see that.

"Carol"
This is from GLP. Has it been verified?

ALERT!!! GULF STREAM SHUTTING DOWN BECAUSE OF OIL SPILL!!! AND IT'S HAPPENING FAST!!

anomalous cowherd wrote:

Meanwhile Carol, you may want to take a look at this on GLP regarding Camelot, Bill and what seems like A Nueman, a post saying it is from carol and family in hawaii, it all looks a bit odd and threatening , I somehow don't think you would write a capslock post, but who knows? http://www.godlikeproductions.com/forum1/message1002300/pg8

spiritwarrior wrote:mundra, all i can get from AGE NEWS is quote [Your search - ALERT!!! GULF STREAM SHUTTING DOWN BECAUSE OF OIL
SPILL!!! AND IT'S ... - did not match any documents.]

do you trust this report????