Simmons Says Obama Should Detonate Nukes to Seal Oil Leak;

Simmons Says Obama Should Detonate Nukes to Seal Oil Leak;

globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com

News in the gulf regarding BP's oil leak is grim. The "Top Kill" plan has reportedly failed although BP says it will continue efforts.

Worse yet, Matt Simmons says "Top Kill" is a sideshow, misses the big problem, and we might need nukes to seal the leak.

Let's take a look at those stories starting with BP Engineers Making Little Headway on Leaking Well.
BP engineers struggled Friday to plug a gushing oil well a mile under the sea, but as of late in the day they had made little headway in stemming the flow.

Amid mixed messages about problems and progress, the effort — called

(visit the link for the full news article)

Mod Edit: Review This Link: Instructions for the Breaking News Forums: Copy The Exact Headline

[edit on 5/29/2010 by semperfortis]

More imporatantly, Talk now is about putting in one or two relief drills to bypass this line. The problem with that is it will take until August to put this into place.

NUKE it I say - EOS.

More.

“The spill is like the 1,000-year flood: it’s the worst- case scenario,” said Brian Youngberg, an analyst with Edward Jones in St. Louis. “It’s hard to prepare for those extreme situations like that.”

Obama dropped plans to open waters off the coast of Virginia to drilling, canceled a lease sale in the Gulf, and suspended the permitting process for Royal Dutch Shell Plc’s planned wells off of Arctic Alaska. He said new safety rules will be imposed on offshore drilling.

U.S. oil output may be cut by 160,000 barrels a day next year as a result of the ban, according to Deutsche Bank AG. A one-year delay to deep-water projects would reduce global supplies by 500,000 barrels a day between 2013 and 2017, Sanford C. Bernstein said.

Shell has five wells affected by Obama’s call to halt drilling at 33 exploratory locations. Eni SpA, based in Rome, and Houston-based Marathon Oil Corp. and Anadarko Petroleum Corp. each are shown as having three, according to an official with the Minerals Management Service who asked not to be identified discussing the specific companies.

“The impact is most likely going to be a significant decrease in activity, and we just don’t know if it’s going to happen this week, next week, or over the course of a month,” said Ian Macpherson, a vice president at Simmons & Co. in London. “It looks like deep-water drilling is going to essentially grind to a halt.”
Scientist Locates Another Vast Oil Plume

Please consider La. scientist locates another vast oil plume in the gulf
A day after scientists reported finding a huge "plume" of oil extending miles east of the leaking BP well, on Friday a Louisiana scientist said his crew had located another vast plume of oily globs, miles in the opposite direction.

James H. Cowan Jr., a professor at Louisiana State University, said his crew on Wednesday found a plume of oil in a section of the gulf 75 miles northwest of the source of the leak.

Cowan said that his crew sent a remotely controlled submarine into the water, and found it full of oily globules, from the size of a thumbnail to the size of a golf ball. Unlike the plume found east of the leak -- in which the oil was so dissolved that contaminated water appeared clear -- Cowan said the oil at this site was so thick that it covered the lights on the submarine.

"It almost looks like big wet snowflakes, but they're brown and black and oily," Cowan said. The submarine returned to the surface entirely black, he said.

Cowan said that the submarine traveled about 400 feet down, close to the sea floor, and found oil all the way down. Trying to find the edges of the plume, he said the submarine traveled miles from side to side.

"We really never found either end of it," he said.

This discovery seems to confirm the fears of some scientists that -- because of the depth of the leak and the heavy use of chemical "dispersants" -- this spill was behaving differently than others. Instead of floating on top of the water, it may be moving beneath it.
Simmons Calls For Military to Nuke Oil Leak

Inquiring minds are reading Simmons Calls For Obama to Take Over BP; Military To Nuke Oil Leak
Today Matt Simmons, one of the largest investment bankers in the energy industry appeared on Bloomberg. The chairman of Simmons & Co. INTL went on to explain that there is much more to the oil leak than the news has been reporting. Last Sunday, NOAA confirmed reports of a second fissure about 5-7 miles from the original. This new fissure appears to be releasing a plume the size of Delaware and Maryland combined! He went on to state that “the plume from the riser is minor thing… the best estimate is about 120,000 barrels of oil per day”.

Simmons is quoted as saying, “Obama could remove BP today… tell BP it is time to leave”. Some questions were also brought up that pertained to a nuclear device and how the military could lower one 18,000 feet into the well bore.

Simmons went on to say ” Such techniques have been used by the Russians on several different occasions”.



globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com
(visit the link for the full news article)

Mod Edit: Review This Link: Instructions for the Breaking News Forums: Copy The Exact Headline

[edit on 5/29/2010 by semperfortis]

Matt Simmons Video on the Nuke Option

Mat Simmons "... From all of the best scientists who have thought about this in the past few days, probably the only thing we can do is create a weapons system and send it down 18,000 feet, detonate it and hopefully case in the oil."

That we would even have discussions about setting off nuclear explosions in "hope" they would accomplish something is certainly not encouraging to say the least.

Fantastic idea...

Not only will there still be oil (that which is already in the water) washing up on the coastlines all around, we'd then have some nice radioactive isotopes to deal with too!

/sarcasm

Putting a nuclear bomb down there really should be the last option considered in my view after all other methods have failed.

I'm glad they're finally considering the nuke option, I just hope it doesn't take 6 months of BP trying alternative methods, for it to be used. Really they should have been using nukes from the start, that way the oil coming out at the surface would never have built up.

I don't fear the radiation from nukes because if detonated high enough, most of this radiation is sent into orbit, yet heat still hot enough to burn.

See the first, British, H-bomb test here to see a real life example of what I mean (all of Britains nukes have a variable yeild, one up to 13.5 times more powerful, than this explosion)...
www.youtube.com...

Yeah, let's collapse the sea floor into the methane reservoir and release it all at once. Why wait around for it to leak out slowly when we could just cut the whole shebang loose?

reply to post by Elysarian

Putting a nuclear bomb down there really should be the last option considered in my view after all other methods have failed.

What options are left besides nuking it?

reply to post by Liberal1984


ummmmm they wouldnt be detonating it OVER the oil spill.........they would be detonating it close to the sea bed..........

What good would it do to set off a nuke in the skies over the oil spill?

???????

[edit on 29-5-2010 by ManBehindTheMask]

I have been an advocate of this from the start. It is time; BP and our administration need to seriously bring this option to the table.

Now do not get the idea in your head that they are just going to strap a bomb to the BOP and detonate. That is not how this will work.

They need to drill to a sufficient depth where the nuke will be placed deep down -adjacent- to the well. If I recall correctly, the original oil bore hole is a depth of around 10-15 thousand feet. The adjacent nuke bore hole will have to be at a certain depth in order to seal off the adjacent well bore hole.

The makeup of the sea-floor in the area must also be taken into consideration for blast placement.

This has worked in the past.

It is a risky option, and originally may have done more environmental damage than was already present. However, with this idea sitting on the shelf for over a month, the impact from use now may end up being negligible in comparison.

It is time.

It is time for BP to stop their secret salvage program, and just seal the damn thing.

I for one am going to probably start shooting off some letters to my reps concerning a serious investigation into this nuke option.

How long do we wait with one failed solution after another?

I live in south Florida and have family that lives in New Orleans. Seeing this in our backyard is reprehensible.

[edit on 29-5-2010 by xmaddness]

reply to post by john124


Two relief wells are being drilled which won't get there till august. In the mean time they're planning on a dome to go over the well head to pump up the oil.

Then we can bring it to the surface where it will be refined and introduced to the atmosphere in the way we deem appropriate.

He said 120,000 barrels a day leaking, by some estimates based on the size of the plumes...

...that's the worst (i.e. largest) estimate I've heard yet. It's more than 4 million gallons a day, which means almost a Valdez sized spill worth of oil every 2/2+ days.

They should have nuked it long ago. That would definitely solve it...you blow it up then when it all (seabed) settles, it seals itself off. No brainer.

Pardon me, but... WTF ?

Nuclear weapons to stop the oil leak are they freak'n insane?

How can they even begin to believe, that they can comprehend the over-all effects of detonating a nuclear weapon, that deep?

More so, how is destroying everything down there going to plug a hole? if you put a firecracker on a milk container that is leaking... would it stop it? or make the hole bigger?

Why not just cover it?
Why not insert something into it that expands and blocks, akin to a tampon?
Actually, I have a better idea, how about we stop MESSING AROUND WITH science we dont understand for the sake of a quick buk?

.... no no no, I have it.
Lets take ALL the CEO's, and richy rich's of BP, Caltex, Chevron and Exon... and jam them all into the hole. im sure those rich SOB' greedy oily pigs would plug it good, and we'd be doing mankind a favour.

I see a slight problem with this idea. What else is almost always found with oil? Natural gas. And that will explode with an ungodly fury if it gets nuked.

And also, look at Bikini Atoll. The fallout from the tests there seeped into the bedrock and is still contaminating ground water to this day.

Nuking the well shut may be a good option but isn't the abnormally high methane content complicating matters? From what I understand the reason BP cannot cap-off the well is precisely due to the tremendous pressure exerted from the methane deposits. We are talking about 270,000 psi?

Isn't there anyway to relieve the pressure but subdo the oil flow? There has to be a way! If they detonate a nuke, instead of sealing the hole they may actually explode the methane and cause the entire seabed to collapse meaning tsunamis and earthquakes.

I think they need to scrutinise everything thoroughly before giving the green light!

Originally posted by john124
reply to post by Elysarian

 

Putting a nuclear bomb down there really should be the last option considered in my view after all other methods have failed.

What options are left besides nuking it?

I'd rather do nothing than nuke it, there's you an option. I'd rather real scientist make decisions instead of the psuedo-scientists advocating this...thank god they aren't in charge, or we'd turn a huge problem into a worse problem.

[edit on 29-5-2010 by yellowcard]

Well, the Russians have done it several times and if it worked for them then why not? In fact, the deeper you put a nuke into the earth, the "safer" it is anyway. Not sure what the big deal is.

Its not like we're surface detonating them as we did MANY times in the Bikini Atolll nuke tests.

Have I entered the twilight zone?

Do people really think a nuke will solve the problem? and with no after effects?

What about the relief well? why not focus everything on that, wasnt that what stopped the leak 30yrs ago in the gulf?

Sounds like something a ten year old kid would come up with, ' ah lets just blow it up'

reply to post by princeofpeace


Each case is different. Did the russians face a similar problem with uncontrolable methane gas? If the seabed collapses you could see earthquakes of 9 richter or more and huge tsunamis killing millions everywhere.

This isn't science-fiction.

It is very unlikely that there are any off-the-shelf nuclear weapons which are able to be placed and will function---and be controllable---at those depths and pressures, and extreme environments. How do you get it down? How big is it? How do you trigger it at the RIGHT place? And how do you get really really really really really really REALLY sure it doesn't go off prematurely?

Remember in existing subsurface nuclear explosions, they drilled a well---in DRY rock---in the middle of nowhere. They had technology which was designed (with years/decades of forethought and experience) to work in that particular condition.

Here, you have miles of water, a well spewing massive amounts of hot oil in super high pressure.

In an all-out rush, in the middle of the cold war, perhaps one could design and fabricate one in 6 to 12 months. Now the facilities and expertise doesn't exist.

The relief wells will get there long before any farcical nuclear 'solution' is feasible.

I'm no petroleum engineer (I am a physicist), but the lack of progress on all the hacks so far says to me that they aren't going to work.

What WAS working---but only partially---was siphoning some of the existing flow from a smaller pipe. That seems to be the best option---suck out as much as you can (which may be only half) and wait until the relief wells get there. (two more months).

As I understand it, these relief wells will intersect the main well fairly far down. Through them they will inject heavy drilling fluid ("mud") which at first will be pushed up, but eventually the weight of it (a few thousand feet of hit, denser than oil) will eventually slow the leak. Then they can cement the well permanently.



[edit on 30-5-2010 by mbkennel]

[edit on 30-5-2010 by mbkennel]