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HALLIBURTON Explains Exactly What Happened That Caused the Oil Rig Disaster (No Investigation Needed)
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[link to seminal.firedoglake.com]
[link to www.aade.org]
What More Can Halliburton Tell Us About the Horizon Oil Blowout and Its Risks?
A publicly available Halliburton PowerPoint presentation from last November might tell us a lot about what could have caused the oil blowout, fire and massive oil gushing at the Horizon rig.
Suppose you’re that division of Halliburton that has the dangerous job of "cementing" the drilling hole and the gaps between the hole and pipe. You’ve done this lots of times in shallow water wells, but you’ve learned through previous experience in deep water there’s a particularly difficult problem having to do with the presence of gas that has seeped to the ocean floor and been captured in essentially "frozen" crystallized formations.
The problem is that when you drill into these formations, and then try to inject cement into the hole/gaps to prevent leakage, the curing process for that creates heat. That heat can, if not controlled, cause the gas to escape the frozen crystals. If a lot of gas is released all at once, as could happen during the cement/curing process, it can cause a blowout where the cementing is occurring, or force gas and/or oil up the pipeline to the drilling rig on the surface. And the heat created by the process may be just enough to ignite the gas [or more likely, a spark at the rig -- see comments 81, 85], causing the explosion and fire.
Did this happen at the Horizon rig? And if Halliburton already knew about this problem months (years) ago, and knew the risks it might create, why are we just now learning about this?
From Halliburton’s presentation (large pdf), page 10, last November (my bold):
[link to www.aade.org]
Here's a sample of what they knew they were getting into:
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