It is about to become utterly obvious that I am no petroleum engineer. How about we stop trying to plug the Gulf oil leak, other than the major relief well effort that will take until August and which, by all accounts, is a high percentage play to solve the problem entirely. All these interim plug the leak measures are failing anyway.
Instead, how about we focus on containment? Implement strategies to contain and gather all the oil coming out. My high school daughter had what I thought is a great idea. The leaking well is, what, 21 inches or so in diameter, right? Why don’t we simply lower a pipe that’s, say, 5 feet wide over the leak, a pipe that runs all the way to the surface? Then we would be able to collect the oil under surface conditions and under much less pressure.
There are probably innumerable versions of this same concept. I had envisioned a huge parachute-like thing lowered over the leak, the size of a couple of football fields maybe. Trap the oil in that. Then you have hundreds, or thousands even, of relief valves in the “parachute,” with hoses to channel the oil to the surface to be collected.
Who knows, maybe they’ve all thought about that already, and there are engineering reasons why such solutions would fail. But maybe not. When you’re a drilling company, you think like a drilling company. Not an environmental disaster averting company.
It seems all the efforts have been to plug the leak. All I’m saying is, maybe we should just try to contain the leaking oil instead. Or in addition to. If the new government estimates are right, and if it takes until mid-August to finish the relief well, we could avert more than 1,000,000 more barrels of oil leaking into the Gulf. The entire Exxon Valdez spill was about 250,000 barrels.
From the Center Square 
May 31, 2010 at 3:54 pm
From my understanding, the next plan is to do exactly that, contain the leak, not plug it. They are basically going to cut off the damaged pipe so that they can attach a new one that will reach the surface and collect the oil.
They have tried a couple of other containment solutions. (I think one was called “Top Hat”. BP sure do come up with some nifty names for their solutions that don’t work!) The problem before has been the formation of frozen crystals that clog the works up.
May 31, 2010 at 5:46 pm
What a great idea! A 5-feet wide pipe a mile down, and a gigantic upside-down beachball-like container on top!
That can’t be so hard?
May 31, 2010 at 6:30 pm
Well, in my defense, I meant those as two separate ideas. The cool thing is, they are, at worst, the exact equal of everything that’s actually been done. And me, with no relevant training at all!
June 1, 2010 at 2:28 pm
I meant it – think it’s a good idea.
But,
I just did a little post on the numbers; The cost by now is about $1 billion, but BP profits first three months was $6 billion.
Relief well is august.
Maybe there’s ways to stop it, but so expensive they rather just wait out a few weeks.. and get the rest of the oil at the same time. BP don’t care about some coastline and seabirds..
June 1, 2010 at 8:53 pm
Sorry, I wasn’t sure if the original comment was sarcastic or straight. Thanks for the clarification. Now you have me picturing sort of this mega turkey baster, shoved down to the ocean floor around the leak. All we have to do is figure out how to squeeze the gigantic bulb on the surface, and voila, problem solved!
I don’t have a sense that BP is dismissive of the problem just because they make a lot of profit though. Whatever anyone may think of their motives, I’m sure BP would rather have another $6 billion in profit this quarter than $5 billion. Would rather have spent the, who knows, $100 million on disaster prevention than be facing this business crisis. And, would rather not be facing the future unknown costs in terms of boycotts and lost customers, the inevitable litigation that will dwarf what they have incurred so far, and the negative impact of future permits denied by the US and other authorities. The reality is, BP had every business incentive in the world to have gotten this right, and still they didn’t. That is the nature of business decision-making. That is how BP makes decisions — and Toyota, and GM, and AIG, and every other corporate enterprise. They make decisions that yield a reward 99.99% of the time. But, whooo boy, when the wheel comes up to that other 0.01%, it’s a doozy.
And that is why, as Moe has called for, we need to treat energy extraction more like a public good and regulate it as such. I think we’re all in agreement in this cozy little corner of wordpress.
June 1, 2010 at 9:21 pm
Glad we got it straight 🙂
And you’re right about the BP decisionsmaking I guess.. spills like this is bad for business and strategy. I was just struck by how little financial impact it seems to have.
And the cozy corner is nice – an enlightened and civilized republic of reason and positive thinking – with good life as the common purpose for everyone 🙂
June 5, 2010 at 6:00 pm
Don’t think that will work. Too much water pressure.
I think the best approach is to obliterate all of the pipes until you have only a single hole on the bottom of the ocean. Then, plug the damn hole. E-Z.
Best bet: Cover it with football-field sized metal plates. Pressure increases exponentially with area. the tremendous downward pressure of the ocean would SMOTHER the damn hole.
It ain’t rocket science: You have a hole at the bottom of the ocean. Oil is gushing out of it with a given pressure. However, you have ENORMOUS potential countervailing downward pressures from the ocean. (2 tons per square inch?).
These countervailing downward pressures can be multiplied exponentially by using football-field sized metal plates to cover the hole.
Bring in the freekin NAVY!!! Why is Obama freekin around with the damn Coast Guard? Coast Guard is cool, but is Navy Lite. Bring in Aircraft Carriers to drag in the flat metal plates.
Stage 2: Gather up scrap metal (rusted cars, for example), put it on barges and dump it on the hole. Dump all of America’s garbage on the hole.
What’s so difficult? Get rid of the dumb pipes and you have a HOLE on the bottom of the ocean. Suffocate the HOLE. Dump all of America’s garbage on it! Solve two problems with one stone.
I think BP is trying to protect their undersea pipe infrastructure, and they care more about that then about stopping the leak.
Maybe if they know that they’re going to jail they might change their priorities! Maybe if they know that their company could go as belly-up as one of the fish their damn oil has killed?
June 6, 2010 at 6:56 pm
Well, again, I do not lay claim to any scientific or engineering expertise. The concept of my megahuge balloon, with a thousand valves, is exactly what you reference: diffuse the pressure. Maybe we can’t cap the entire leak at the source at one time, because there is too much pressure coming forth. But distribute that same pressure over much vaster area, and then divide it by 1000s for recovering the oil, and maybe that could work. For the same reason, maybe the smother-it-with-Kansas-sized metal plates plan would work.
I’m glad that the containment measure they put in most recently is capturing maybe half the leaking oil. Best news since the beginning. As for jail: They are either going to jail or not; that was determined by decisions they made over the past years. I don’t see how that is relevant to priority-setting now.