Effort to contain Gulf oil stalls with stuck saw

Source: Associated Press



Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_gulf_oil_spill

And this is where it would have been good to have someone with experience cutting trees....they started the cut at an angle to the bend in the pipe and so the weight of the pipe caused the bind.
they should have started the cut opposite of the bend so the weight of the pipe would tend to open up the cut instead of close.

I have to wonder how much pipe-fitting experience the ROV operators have. I would think they'd be required to have some, but they may not have such a background.

out here in the real oilpatch, we use a torch to cut pipe in the field.

And yes, I worked out there for ten years and cut many a casing stub myself, so this is not a rumor.

and when there's product in a line with no way of purging it, you used air-powered saws, so as to not develop a spark. Granted, underwater, you won't have oxygen, but if you're talking about an oxy-acetylene torch, you would be providing an ignition source. Better would be to use a plasma cutter :)

A new estimate from energy investor Tudor Pickering Holt & Co. in Houston says the oil leak could last until Christmas:
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-06-02/bp-oil-leak-may-last-until-christmas-in-worst-case-scenario.html

BP’s attempts so far to cap the well and plug the leak on the seabed a mile below the surface haven’t worked, while the start of the Atlantic hurricane season this week indicates storms in the Gulf may disrupt other efforts.

“The worst-case scenario is Christmas time,” Dan Pickering, the head of research at energy investor Tudor Pickering Holt & Co. in Houston, said. “This process is teaching us to be skeptical of deadlines.”

Ending the year with a still-gushing well would mean about 4 million barrels of oil spilled into the Gulf, based on the government’s current estimate of 12,000 to 19,000 barrels leaking a day. That would wipe out marine life deep at sea near the leak and elsewhere in the Gulf, and along hundreds of miles of coastline, said Harry Roberts, a professor of Coastal Studies at Louisiana State University.

The so-called relief well being drilled to intercept and plug the damaged well by mid-August might miss -- as other emergency wells have done before -- requiring more time to make a second, third or fourth try, Dave Rensink, President Elect of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, said.


. . .


The ultimate worst-case scenario is that the well is never successfully plugged, said Fred Aminzadeh, a research professor at the University of Southern California’s Center for Integrated Smart Oil Fields who previously worked for Unocal Corp. That would leave the well to flow for probably more than a decade, he said in a telephone interview.