BP Taking Suggestions From Public? Submit your idea!

I've got an idea, but only to ensure this doesn't happen in the future..

Have a plan b, c, and d for starters.

I wouldn't mind if we started plugging the whole with BP execs either.

Originally posted by SLAYER69
Freeze it!.

Drill holes fairly deep around the leak and just keep pumping Liquid nitrogen into them in theory the oil would slowly start to harden around the inner well hole wall as it does it would start to constrict it's flow like the clogging of an artery.

Sounds plausible. A method to contain the Nitrogen and keep it compressed into a liquid needs to be worked out, so that it maintains it's low temperature, rather than heating up and dissipating (sort of a 'boiling off'). Engineers could probably work the specifics like that out, working off of your basic idea. It seems logical that the water pressures at 5000 feet would aid in keeping the nitrogen, and any containing structure, compressed.

Once the flow is stemmed, it ought to be easier to repair/cap the leak, then the nitrogen could be allowed to dissipate. Everybody wins.

Yeah man, it's worth submitting. Go for it! Nothing to lose, lots to gain!

reply to post by SLAYER69



How deep is that well? The depth dictates the temperature of the oil coming out so that at 15,000 ft you are at 250 degrees. That's a lot of calories of heat coming out of a fire hose. Turn it off and it would freeze pretty quick.

My guess is in the end they will drill a couple of relief wells and inject shipfulls of cement into the well. That's what was done to begin with but apparently they didn't inject enough and the plug failed causing a blowout around the pipe.

I saw a blowout first hand in a rig. Here's the story:

I was headed out to go salmon fishing. I was flying down over the Cook inlet south of Anchorage on a Sunday morning at 1000 ft. in the vicinity of about 12 oil rigs. I noticed some commotion on a rig in front of the plane so I flew nearer. The rig was spewing huge amounts of natural gas from its base. There was a sort of hole in the water around the base of the well. Ships and helicopters were steering clear and I soon heard an Airmet on the radio to stay a mile away from the rig. It never lit off thank goodness and the blowout somehow repaired itself without having to inject mud into it! Whew!

They said later that the well pressures had risen suddenly and they couldn't burn off the excess pressures (of natural gas) fast enough. Had something ignited the plume of gas it would have melted the rig causing an unmitigated disaster. I was lucky to have stayed away as far as I did as I had no way of knowing what was happening.

Probably enough gas was released in an hour to supply Anchorage for several years!

My daughter and I did catch 3 cohos, BTW!




[edit on 16/5/10 by plumranch]

Well I think it's still is a better idea than as somebody recently mentioned.

"Better than BP trying to stuff it with a bunch of garbage."

reply to post by SLAYER69

Well I think it's still is a better idea than as somebody recently mentioned.

Darn good idea, Slay!

The best idea by far is for the american government to destroy bp, and make sure they are gone. But being an anglo american empire company i doubt that will happen.

reply to post by SLAYER69


Good idea Slayer. I have a few concerns, however:

Firstly, It's my understanding that the oil is not simply spewing forth from the ocean floor, but rather from the well head that the now-sunken rig would hook up to. There was a dead-man switch that was supposed to act as a cutoff were this very scenario to ever happen. It failed, and there were a couple attempts to use ROVs to manually actuate that valve which also failed. I'd like more information about this valve, whether it's operation can still be salvaged, etc...

Secondly, if it is still coming out of the well head, sufficient force applied the right spot on the pipe could crimp the pipe and slow or stop the flow.

Now, granted, smarter people than I are working on this problem and likely these things have been considered and discarded already. So on to the liquid nitrogen proposal.

The oil escaping is under pressure, so if you just squirt liquid nitrogen down into the hole, there will be hardening, but I suspect the solid chunks of oil will just get blown up and out. So what you'd want to do is encourage the hardening oil to form a mesh that can support itself against the pressure of the escaping oil. When thinking about your idea I envisioned some sort of grid-shaped heat exchange system that would pipe the coolant through and allow the oil to congeal on it's surface. This way the pressurized oil has a means of escaping while you're anchoring it to the well head, and once anchored you flip the switch and it starts gradually constricting the flow. This would also mitigate the problem I would foresee with the 'free-range nitrogen' solution wherein not just the oil, but the water as well begins to freeze at the nozzle, causing blockages.

In any case, very interesting, Slayer. I would like very much to see the details of your proposal. Got a PDF or something?

I'll probably take flak for this, but I would also support the nuclear option. If it's considered safe enough to test underground, I'd think an underground application could be handled appropriately. Lord knows we have enough data to model it. Then again I'm of the opinion that there's not much that humans can do to threaten the Earth. When you get down to it, we'd only be threatening ourselves. The planet would get along fine without us.

I had this idea this morning but i think this pipe on the sea floor is too deep and too far out for it to be feasible:

Three or Four Mechanical Arms, One to lift pipe from Sea Floor, another to hold pipe a further 3,500 feet up to surface, another to hold pipe while cap is fitted, while this is being done another Arm attaches flexible pipe to other end of cap to create one long pipeline which reaches to land, from here you can filter out the oil into barrels or containers!

However if they could use a couple of submarines placed 3,500 feet apart in deep water it's possible but the mechanical arms would need to be huge in length!!

[edit on 17-5-2010 by TruthxIsxInxThexMist]

Here was my suggestion:
Rocket scientist needed for part 2. Part 1, have all of the wealthiest oil tycoons
jump into the ocean and suck as much oil as they can through their one
hundred dollar bill. Take the tycoon with their mouthful of oil & oil soaked
clothes and place them on a rocket ship. Part 2, When the ship is filled with as
many tycoons (soaked with oil) that it can hold, proceed to force another 100 or
so inside, then launch the rocket towards the nearest blackhole. This eliminating
the oil and the greed from our universe. Rinse and repeat.

reply to post by keepureye2thesky


Great suggestion.... now all we gotta do is get those people you speak of to a function which we'll set up

Originally posted by TruthxIsxInxThexMist
Great suggestion.... now all we gotta do is get those people you speak of to a function which we'll set up

True... We could tell em it's a Bilderberger meeting.

I like the nitrogen option Slayer suggests.

Those cylinder thingamajigs they sent-down failed because they didn't lower them on the leak with a hose to allow the pressurized oil to flow to the surface. They left the cylinders capped, thereby not accounting for the added flow pressure. For the cylinders to work, they have to be sank into the sea floor, not just resting on top of the sea floor surface. The pressurized oil simply lifted the cylinder off the sea floor, enabling the oil to seep out underneath it. Together, with a relief hose/pipe attached so the oil can rise to the surface and be collected into a waiting vessel, anchor the base of the cylinder/housing deep into the sea floor. This will cause a vacuum effect, like siphoning gas from your car.

With the hose/pipe attached to the cylinder, that hose/pipe can first be used to fill the cylinder, and keep the nitrogen pressurized. When the seal is reestablished, they can begin to pump out the nitrogen from the cylinder, the oil will then flow freely to the waiting vessel on the surface.

Now, I'm totally against off-shore drilling, for this single reason. But if they're going to drill off-shore, they should have this cylinder anchored to the sea floor before the drill even penetrates the sea floor.

Stick the swelled head of BP's CEO in the pipe.

That thing is big enough to clog up anything, & it wasn't being used for anything useful anyway.

Originally posted by marsvoltafan74
I say we kill those responsible, take their money to build a sub capable of transporting material in deep depths, and plug it up with the bodies and rocks. Two birds with one stone, ya know?

[edit on 15-5-2010 by marsvoltafan74]

I think this needs to be submitted to their website 4800 times or more.

My personal opinion is nothing will be done to fix the problem unless American citizens do something about it.

Ok me and a a few buddy's discussed this at length you can forget silly ideas like nukes which would just make the hole much bigger.
There is really only one real solution to this problem and it is dolphins.

Basically we need to train a dolphin to swim into the hole and then we inflate a remote balloon like device the dolphin has strapped on. This expands and the dolphin and inflatable baloons seal the hole.

Very simple and problem solved depending on the size of the hole we may need more than one dolphin but that shouldn't be a problem.

OK I agree on the fat headed BP CEO

That's a big negative on the poor dolphin!

reply to post by winterwarlock


Thats pretty crule mate unless you are going to give the dolphin all the protective gear it needs to come out alive!

Yes the dolphin would die probably drowned in oil or squashed inside the pipe by the pressure bags it carried in but I still think this is the best idea it's one dolphin versus hundreds of dolphins especially if the oil continues or a nuke is used.

After the dolphin is sealed in place we can fill the rest in with cement and the jobs a good one. I think dolphins are intelligent enough to be trained to to do this especially if we train them oil pipes have tasty fish.

I agree with Slayer. They should freeze the damn thing then do what they gotta do. There are no environmental ramifications for releasing liquid nitrogen into the ocean. The nitrogen would just return to the atmosphere which is primarily comprised of nitrogen anyways.

Inventors say BP ignoring oil spill ideas

I meant to post a view days ago that this was BP's corporate pr kumbaya, touchy-feely feel-good moment, meant for the "stakeholders" to sit around and email ideas.

At this point, I'ld rather sit around a campfire singing Kumbaya with dirty, stinky, dope smoking, Commie/Nazi, hippie environmentalists who warned us about these things, than sit around a corporate board room table with dirty oil fracking BP executives giving them ideas to stop the LEAK, which is quite different from a SPILL!

A SPILL is a volume of liquid from a container, like a milk carton. A LEAK is when the black water pipe breaks and continues to spew forth all manner of filth.