I won't bother with a long intro, here's the video:
It took them long enough, but with enough pressure they finally cracked. Now we have a video of the oil volcano in all of its glory. Something important to note here is the seemingly large amount of gas that is coming out of the pipe. This gas is what makes putting a box over it and then sucking out the oil hard. Its a very gassy well, which has been reported elsewhere.
This comes after releasing the photo earlier today:
Update:
To get a good idea of how large this spill is, compare it to a major city of your choice here:
www.paulrademacher.com/oilspill
Video released by BP showed oil spewing from a yellowish, broken pipe 5,000 feet below the surface. The oil looks like steam rushing from a geyser. The stream occasionally can be seen becoming lighter as natural gas mixes into the gusher. Natural gas has been flowing from the well since the beginning. Suttles said the rate natural gas has been flowing out hasn't changed in the 21 days since the Deepwater Horizon exploded.
http://www.cbsnews.com/...
As you can see, it really is the presence of that gas that makes this much harder to cap. Gas is extremely pressurized at those depths.
Here is the info on the rig, as another commenter noted:
http://www.deepwater.com/...
And Crashing Vor noted this:
Note the variation in pressures as gas or oil predominates in the flow. Whether they try the "top hat" dog house or jamming a pipe in the pipe, their latest brilliance, they're going to have to vary the back-pressure from above to match the varying pressure of the flow.
This just sucks. Or blows, I guess.
Someone in the diary mentioned that the riser pipe has a 21 inch OD. Can someone somehow calculate how much oil is coming out of that thing from the video? I know it would be very difficult... but impossible?
Update: Some posters have taken a crack at estimating the leak from the video:
remember it is a fluid and compressed gas mixthe gas part will expand as it rises.
your guess of 10 gallons a second is way way way off.
our artisan spring can yield a gallon a second and that is a 1.5" pipe. that is under less pressure (far far less) than this 21" DIAMETER pipe.
to find the volume being released one must first find the area of the opening of the pipe.
21" diameter, 3.1415 = pi, radius = 10.5" (subtract 1 inch of piping from radius) radius of opening is 9.5"
area of pipe = pi * r^2
area of opening = 3.1415 * 9.5^2 = 283.5 inches^2
assume 1/2 of the area of the pipe is moving gas not oil
oil portion of area of pipe is = 141.8 inches^2
so the area of the pipe opening that is pumping oil is 141.8 inches squared
one gallon = 231 cubic inches.
that means that each time the pipe moves 1.6 inches of material through the pipe it is moving one gallon.
how fast is the fluid going from the pipe?
it looks to be moving 4 feet per second (based on a 21" pipe diameter.
4 feet = 48 inches per second.
48 inches / 1.6 inches per gallon = 30 gallons per second.
note: this is the larger of the two leaks and is 85% of the flow. so add another 15% = 34.5 gallons per second.
there are 86,400 seconds in a day.
86,400 seconds X 34.5 gallons per second = 2.98 million gallons per day
this equals approximately 70,000 barrels per day.
I would say that this is a conservative estimation
by innereye on Wed May 12, 2010 at 04:25:48 PM PDT
And anybody can see at a glance that the daily (1+ / 0-)
total from that one leak alone must be more than 5,000 barrels.
Any engineers here who can do a quick calculation based on the volume of a barrel, the time of that video, and our knowledge that it is a 21-inch pipe?
That looks to me like AT LEAST (and maybe more than) 100 gallons a second. But I'm not adept enough to calculate that very accurately.
There are 86,400 seconds in a day. So that looks to me like at least 8,640,000 gallons a day: that's 43 times what the media keeps mindlessly repeating.
Boycott Arizona!
by Timaeus on Wed May 12, 2010 at 03:46:46 PM PDT
My CONSERVATIVE calculations are still 100,000 bbl/ day of stuff coming out.
19" interior diameter
40"/sec ejection rate
0.14 %oil (based upon a gas expansion of 225/36)
40*(9.5*9.5*pi) = 11,340in2/sec
= 49.1 gal/sec
= 4.24M gal/day
at 1/6 oil:
= 678K gal/day
= 16,150 bbl/day
Happy little moron, Lucky little man.
I wish I was a moron, MY GOD, Perhaps I am!
-Spike Milligan
by polecat on Wed May 12, 2010 at 05:28:40 PM PDT
for two reasons:
1. It doesn't look to me like it's flowing at 4 feet/sec. I'd guess 1/3~1/2 that. I could very well be wrong, but without being able to run it in slow motion, I'd say it looks considerably less than that. Look only at the oil (black) -- the gas will accelerate as it leaves the pipe due to expansion and buoyancy (the oil's not nearly as buoyant as the gas).
2. The gas content: a fair amount of what's flowing out appears to be gas. Even when a lot of oil is flowing, it appears to me that there's a lot of gas in the mixture also (note the white flow -- bubbles -- behind the black flow of oil). That, of course, will have a much greater volume per unit mass. I don't have any way at all of estimating that, and I don't see why the behavior seen (fluctuating between almost pure gas and a lot of oil) would not be representative of what's happening. I suspect that by volume a lot more than 50% is gas, but I could certainly be wrong.
My guess would be between 5000 and 20000 bbl/day, but you could certainly be correct.
(I'm rec'ing the comment, even though I come up with a different estimate, because it represents a serious attempt to estimate what's flowing.)
by rlk on Wed May 12, 2010 at 05:29:09 PM PDT
By the way, I know these are seat of your pants estimate with very little numerical data. BP can provide us with the numerical data if they want. Until then, this is the best we can do with what we have been given.
More info. If the well pressure is 16,000 PSI, would that help you guys with your calculations? Just a number from off the grapevine... la de da.
After being given the 16,000 central well pressure PSI, polecat redid his calculations and got:
I get 16,000... (0 / 0)
2400 PSI at this depth with 6.25:1 volume expansion of the gas on exit...
Happy little moron, Lucky little man.
I wish I was a moron, MY GOD, Perhaps I am!
-Spike Milligan
by polecat on Wed May 12, 2010 at 05:45:27 PM PDT
First part of the video, stratified flow, natural gas on top, oil on bottom. The pipe area looks to be split roughly evenly between them. Oil velocity looks to be at least a couple of feet/second exiting the pipe(eyeballing).
Pipe area (20" ID) = 2.17 ft2
Assume velocity 1 ft/sec.
Volumetric flow rate = 2.17 ft2/2 * 1 ft/sec = 2.17 ft3/sec = 970 gpm
That would be about 33,000 bpd.
Not good.
Which sounds a bit closer.
New Video:
Lowering the cofferdam. You can much better see the magnitude of this spill with this video:
This cofferdam is 4 stories... look how fast oil just starts pouring from under it.
