The real reason they aren't stopping the leak. Damage below the sea floor.

BP Official admits to damage below the sea floor.

They not only aren't stopping it. THEY CAN'T!

The evidence is growing stronger and stronger that there is substantial damage beneath the sea floor. Indeed, it appears that BP officials themselves have admitted to such damage. This has enormous impacts on both the amount of oil leaking into the Gulf, and the prospects for quickly stopping the leak this summer.

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On May 31st, the Washington Post noted:

Sources at two companies involved with the well said that BP also discovered new damage inside the well below the seafloor and that, as a result, some of the drilling mud that was successfully forced into the well was going off to the side into rock formations.

"We discovered things that were broken in the sub-surface," said a BP official who spoke on the condition of anonymity. He said that mud was making it "out to the side, into the formation."

.......................

On June 2nd, Bloomberg pointed out:

Plugging the well is another challenge even after BP successfully intersects it, Robert Bea, a University of California Berkeley engineering professor, said. BP has said it believes the well bore to be damaged, which could hamper efforts to fill it with mud and set a concrete plug, Bea said.

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On the same day, the Wall Street Journal noted that there might be a leak in BP's well casing 1,000 feet beneath the sea floor:

BP PLC has concluded that its "top-kill" attempt last week to seal its broken well in the Gulf of Mexico may have failed due to a malfunctioning disk inside the well about 1,000 feet below the ocean floor.

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On June 7th, Senator Bill Nelson told MSNBC that he's investigating reports of oil seeping up from additional leak points on the seafloor:

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Yesterday, recently-retired Shell Oil President John Hofmeister said that the well casing below the sea floor may have been compromised:

[Question] What are the chances that the well casing below the sea floor has been compromised, and that gas and oil are coming up the outside of the well casing, eroding the surrounding soft rock. Could this lead to a catastrophic geological failure, unstoppable even by the relief wells?

John Hofmeister: This is what some people fear has occurred. It is also why the "top kill" process was halted. If the casing is compromised the well is that much more difficult to shut down, including the risk that the relief wells may not be enough. If the relief wells do not result in stopping the flow, the next and drastic step is to implode the well on top of itself, which carries other risks as well.

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Oil industry expert Rob Cavner believes that the casing might be damaged beneath the sea floor, noting:

"The real doomsday scenario here… is if that casing gives up, and it does come through the other strings of pipe. Remember, it is concentric pipe that holds this well together. If it comes into the formation, basically, you‘ve got uncontrolled [oil] flow to the sea floor. And that is the doomsday scenario."

Cavner also said BP must "keep the well flowing to minimize oil and gas going out into the formation on the side":

Overall Full Story

Damage to below the sea floor was something that even I had been hesitant to believe. But this looks like it proves it. I know there have been other threads on this type of damage. I have even responded to some of them asking for proof.

Well, unfortunately, I think I found the proof here. This is also why they won't or can't stop the flow of oil completely. If they do, the pressure will blow it out elsewhere and make the sea floor worse. There is sufficient evidence here to make me believe this now I'm afraid.

Even the relief wells won't be enough if the floor is damaged. Maybe stopping the flow is going to make it worse and the best they can do is just try to collect all they can. If this is true, then this is beyond the worst case scenario. This is truly going to ensure that it all hits the fan.

The only way to fully stop it then..maybe..is to implode the well. And that's quite possibly going to involve a nuclear device........



[edit on 12-6-2010 by webpirate]

I hate doom and gloom threads. But if the above is true, then we might as well write off the Gulf states as well as some of the Atlantic states too.

Just like we will have to write off California or portions of it when the big one hits....

I been having a good think about this.. the only reliable way is to compress the the rock around the well with explosives, to crush the fissures and pipe that the oil is escaping through.... we have 30,000ft or 10km of rock to play with before the oil deposit. A nuclear device will create an air bubble that will cause a tsunami, but a tsunami is better than no seafood for 30 years!

However a scalar device would be much better

This is indeed a doomsday scenario and I fear that it is all too true. If so, even a nuclear device would probably just make the situation worse. The oil, if unchecked, could flow for decades, if not longer. The damage to the Gulf would be beyond reckoning.

However, the damage and toxins would affect all of the ocean, just as the economic devastation would affect all of the United States. As someone who lives on the Gulf Coast, in one of the affected areas, I must take exception with your statement that the rest of the nation would be able to "write off the Gulf states." If only it were that simple.

Picture millions of refugees fleeing to other states; states that are already cash-strapped. Imagine the cost of hundreds of thousands of people dying of cancer and other diseases from the toxic air. The devastation would not be contained to the affected states but would likely be the last stake in our already crippled economy. Not to mention the environment.

While reading I saw that there were large salt formations below the floor of the ocean there. The high pressure jet of oil and gas was estimated at 20,000 psi or more... and you tried to keep that inside a steel pipe and it managed to escape to the outside of that casing it might not get through solid rock, but boy would it be having a party if it found salt to push through like warm butter.

Geez these are the days my stress-level tends to rise because of ATS... I dont see anyone deducing this with reasonable arguments... All we can do is wait until things start to get worse if it hasn't already. Everyone knows how much effort BP is putting into keeping any news about The Spill quiet. Heck even the OP testifies of that fact... such a major happening and they keep a lid on it?

BTW S&F for the effort put into this... great job

The movie 2012 depicts a very real position the government and corporations would take on catastrophic events like these... who knows how far things have progresses down there... intel is only dripping in with delay.

[edit on 12/6/2010 by faceoff85]

Yes it's looking really bad isn't it. On that article page some poster called NONI linked to an article that she described as the worst case scenario ...the article at the link she gave had been taken off so I googled its title and found it on a different page. Here's the article in full :
-----------------------------------------------
www.opednews.com..." target="_blank" class="postlink">source

By Chris Landau
For OpEdNews: Chris Landau - Writer

B.P, Halliburton and Transocean have unleashed Armageddon and now there is no stopping it. Senator Bill Nelson has told us how bad it is.



This is our worst nightmare. The oil industry has killed the Gulf of Mexico.My worst fears have been realized. If this link is true and the oil is coming through the sea floor, they have either blown out the formation or blown out the cement (which we know they did anyway to get the blowout to occur). I am beginning to realize why they have not wanted toclose the valves on the cap. The more theyclose it, the more oil is going to come up through the sea floor, next to the well casing. I listed 12 points in my attached article. The really big concern here is that their directional wells are now pointless. They are GUARANTEED to fail because you can not pump mud or cement into a blown out well. It just does not set with oil and gas roaring past.

The next biggest concern is that they have to get 8 new wells in immediately to relieve the background oil and gas pressure. The oil is going to start coming up at an ever increasing rate along the casing and theblowout preventer.The oil and gas is going to act as ahigh pressurepressure washerand erode away all the sandstone and mudstone.There is nothing they can do about it.


This is also the end of B.P. The claims will go on forever.


What these guys do not understand is that it is much worse than they think. Here is the reason why.


They need to date the oil to find out how old the oil is. The rock formation might be 30 to 200 million years old here. I do not know and have not looked at under sea maps.


The oil is either old oil, say almost as old as the formation, or they have drilled into a massive active fault zone that is reducing carbon dioxide to methane. If it is high inhydrogen sulfide, it is reducing calcareous sediments to oil and more natural gas in the presence of salt solutions. Now they are providingmore saltwater, so via the Wurtz Synthesis more oil is going to be created than natural gas. The methane is going to be converted to ethane, propane, butane, pentane and other long chain organic compounds.You see if oil is being made now, at a very rapid rate in this area, the pressure is never, ever going to drop off along the casing and the oil is going to flow into the gulf forever.The only hope to reduce the pressure will be by sinking more new wells into this area and try and drain off the oil and gas as quickly as it is being made.

You see oil is basically inorganic. It is not made from dead squashed plankton. It is not a fossil fuel. It is an inorganic chemical compound reduced from calcareous sediments and carbon dioxide and methane gas. My peer reviewed published papers using chemical and thermodynamic equations show how this occurs. The link to the papers is available below. Of course although I was published by The American Institute of Professional Geologists in 2009 and the Association of Environmentaland Engineering Geologists in 2008, it does not mean that my theories are accepted by the majority of geologists. It will probably take 50 years, as with the theory of Continental Drift to get accepted by geologists in general. Maybe this disaster will shave off 20 years. Things evolve slowly in geology!

We can only hope it is old oil. We can only date oil back 100 000 years by carbon dating, but that is fine. We need to know if this oil is 10 to 100 years old and if its age is changing as it escapes. Is the escaping oil getting older or younger? So we need to start dating the oil on a weekly basis to see what is happening.


I volunteer for the job.


One last point that the public does not understand. It is not about deep water drilling where the problems have arisen. It is about high pressure oil and gas drilling that creates the problems. These zones can be found on land as well as at sea and can start from as little as 10000 feet, not the 20000 of this well. These high pressure wells have always been a problem. Of the millions of wells drilled, there are thousands of these ticking time bomb, high pressure wells in existence and new ones are being drilled every day. New risks are being taken daily.


The world has to make a concerted effort to get off oil. It is killing us.

I hope Ihave not been too technical, but the matter is grave.

____END ARTICLE____











[edit on 12/6/10 by cosmicpixie]

Basically, BP has already admitted this, a long time ago...you just need to be able to uunderstand WTF they are talking about. This article in the Wall St. Journal describes the rupture disc being damaged, and or missing after the initial blow out.

online.wsj.com...

"The disk, part of the subsea safety infrastructure, may have ruptured during the surge of oil and gas up the well on April 20 that led to the explosion aboard the Deepwater Horizon rig, BP officials said. The rig sank two days later, triggering a leak that has since become the worst in U.S. history. The broken disk may have prevented the heavy drilling mud injected into the well last week from getting far enough down the well to overcome the pressure from the escaping oil and gas, people familiar with BP's findings said. They said much of the drilling mud may also have escaped from the well into the rock formation outside the wellbore."

Everyone missed this on JUNE 2, OR WHAT???...as they are missing the reasons the ROV's were so busy using inclinometers for the 10 days. What this means is two things: the 16" casing was/has been breached for quite some time now. Oil & by products (an excellent solvent by the way...) from the well is flowing on the outside of the casing around the well bore. The problem isn't really that oil is leaking from the sea floor, which I'd bet my last dehydrated meal IS occurring in a phenomenal...this is trivial is light of the XX,XXX barrels per day that are all ready flowing from the well head.

A MATTER OF TIME, THE WELL HEAD IS GOING TO COLLAPSE ON IT'S OWN ACCORD!!! A NUKE??? ARE YOU CRAZY??? THEY AREN'T GOING TO NEED THAT, GUARANTEE YOU!

So let me calm down by saying, all you are doing in the OP is citing the mainstream clues, just like they were released on 6/2, now being made public in a "understandable" form the roughly 5% who give a rat's a$$ can understand, a week or so later.

WHEN, NOT IF the well collapses, we then have a 30 foot, yes 30 feet!!!! of gaping spewing hole.

This isn't a doom thread, this is not fear mongering, this is reality...AND OF THOSE dis-info agents & skeptics & MINIMIZERS diligently at work around here can STFU...

YEAH, cleaning up oil NOW...is liking raking leaves in a wind storm...why bother...

We gonna have some VERY OILY, MUCH BIGGER FISH TO FRY soon!

Has anyone condsidered that the explosion at the rig could have been sabotage? By whom? Who knows? It could have been a submarine, sapper, aircraft, speed boat...

By blowing the well it impacts the US and for that matter parts of Mexico in a number of ways.

Economically - tourism, food sources, fuel supplies...

Transportation - shipping, military and sport vessels movements are restricted.

Illness due to the oil - we are hearing about the cleanup workers getting sick. Probably contamination to seafood.

Confusion - finger pointing - diversions ...

Originally posted by SpectrumX
As someone who lives on the Gulf Coast, in one of the affected areas, I must take exception with your statement that the rest of the nation would be able to "write off the Gulf states." If only it were that simple.

Picture millions of refugees fleeing to other states; states that are already cash-strapped. Imagine the cost of hundreds of thousands of people dying of cancer and other diseases from the toxic air. The devastation would not be contained to the affected states but would likely be the last stake in our already crippled economy. Not to mention the environment.

Oh, I know. I was speaking more metaphorically than anything. I didn't really mean we would lose those states. I meant more that we are going to lose the fishing industry as well as a lot of the tourist industries from those states. We will have to spend billions of dollars as a government to make up for it. Cause if we really believe BP is going to fully pay for this then we are all sadly mistaken.

There are already some far right wing senators calling for taxpayers to help pick up the bill for this. However, if the sea floor did collapse, or there was a big wave from an explosion, then there might actually be more damage to the Gulf states than just oil.

And I don't want to even think about a tropical system in this area....

reply to post by odd1out

I don't think we missed it. I just don't think the full implications of this fully sunk in before....

[edit on 12-6-2010 by webpirate]

well
when people start calling something an EXTINCTION LEVEL event
I had just assumed that they weren't talking about the fire

Im thinkin:
the corporate meth odology
and faith in some wacko religious belief
that certain people can be as off the charts
as they want to be
because
some divine intervention
is going to elevate
their bone headed ss'es
out to some mythical happy place in the sky
was bound to lead to a problem that needs
that mythical kind of solution
sooner or later.

reply to post by cosmicpixie
Thanks for that, not too technical, i needed someone to explain to me exactly what was going on, and know i think i do. ps im a neighbour im down the road in swansea.

reply to post by webpirate


Web-Pirate...I wasn't actually calling out anyone here by saying that...I mean the public at large seems to be completely out of the loop on this one...It's kind of a perfect storm, being that most folks don't understand anything about this industry, myself included. That means, they can say whatever they want and it falls on deaf ears. Actually, this thread is very important to bring the next scenario to light...All I did, I realized later was echo what the OP (you) had already said, adding my belief, that the well head is going to topple over here pretty soon, all by itself...

I hope we are wrong...

Some of the more "fear-mongering" scenarios I've heard people denying any plausibility, are starting to sound very plausible indeed.

[edit on 12-6-2010 by odd1out]

Remember the Gulf of Mexico sea floor is not like any other in the world. It is far more fragile, and underneath it deposits of oil are under spectacular pressure.

Volcanism underneath the oil deposits in the Gulf of Mexico -- yes, underneath the oil -- is an issue not being reported though it is being discussed among some of us.

I was long opposed to drilling in the Gulf of Mexico based on what we knew half a century ago. With what was learnt since that time it is clear that drilling was a catastrophe waiting to happen.

Or maybe BP just wants to blame all this on the natural causes??????

OK, if this is true then they had better use a nuke NOW if they are going to before it is too late if it is not already too late to nuke it. If so they they do not need to be drilling two relief wells but 20 or 30 relief wells to drop the pressure ASAP before it pushes up the sea floor. I know there is 30,000 feet of rock from the sea floor the main oil pocket but if there is a 100 foot wide hole a hundred feet deep there where the Blowout Preventer is now it is going to be all but impossible to cap off.
The planet is bleeding to death and it seems we are powerless to stop it.

Originally posted by fixer1967
OK, if this is true then they had better use a nuke NOW if they are going to before it is too late if it is not already too late to nuke it. If so they they do not need to be drilling two relief wells but 20 or 30 relief wells to drop the pressure ASAP before it pushes up the sea floor. I know there is 30,000 feet of rock from the sea floor the main oil pocket but if there is a 100 foot wide hole a hundred feet deep there where the Blowout Preventer is now it is going to be all but impossible to cap off.
The planet is bleeding to death and it seems we are powerless to stop it.

Quite a few people keep talking about dropping a nuke on the affected BP site. I have a small little question.....What about all of the GAS that is coming out of that area. Would a bomb ignite it and perhaps cause a larger issues than they are currently dealing with at the site?

I am certainly no scientist but from what I've read about the situation, the nuke solution may not be a user friendly option....it never is though.

reply to post by webpirate


I hate to say it but...I ff'n knew it. I keep trying to focus my energy else where but my family is in TX.
At this pt. my thoughts run this way:
Everything about BP is a lie.
Their live feeds are suspect and include a completely different view of the leak(s)...
Since the above is true BP should not be allowed to even finish "cleaning up" the supposed "spill".
Have someone else do it. We need someone else's camera down there monitoring whatever is happening b/c thats my family in TX we're talking about. And I just cannot stand the dishonesty and shadiness of BP business. I don't want to have to keep refreshing CNN to make sure nothing has blown up. BP needs to concede to some other entity!

Looks like we're going to be screwed for years to come...

Way to go, BP.