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Something Just Went BEZERK in the Gulf of Mexico. The US Navy just sunk a French Submarine
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[quote:tiomio:MV8xMTEzNTg2XzE5MDg4NzMxXzU3RTM0RUZD] Below is a portion of the transcript from Wednesday’s teleconference press briefing by Admiral Thad Allen, National Incident Commander for the Deepwater Horizon/BP oil spill. ........... Thad Allen's update from Sept. 1st from http://tentdwellers.org/bp_cams.php September 1, 2010 10:30 a.m. CDT Thad Allen: Thank you, Jeff. Good morning. As you know, I’m here in Houston today. This morning I met with the BP engineering team and their senior leadership. We had a conference call with Secretary Salazar and his science team going over the current conditions out on site and our current efforts at oil control. I’d like to give you an update on that and then I’d like to talk a little bit about subsea oil, which has been a topic of concern to a lot of folks and I’d be glad to take your questions after that. We are currently in a holding pattern offshore waiting to proceed with the replacement of the blowout preventer, the legacy blowout preventer from the Deepwater Horizon in advance of putting a new blowout preventer on that will allow us to have pressure integrity in the well, allow us to proceed with the oil kill itself. We’ve hit a weather window where it’s been difficult for us to move forward. I’d like to explain that briefly and then tell you how we think we’re going to move ahead. We anticipate removing the blowout preventer with the latching mechanism that will be attached to a drill pipe string that will be suspended from the Q4000. There’s a picture of the Q4000 right to my left here. The combined weight of the drill string, the latching mechanism and the blowout preventer itself is approximately a million pounds. When they released that blowout preventer from the well it will be suspended at about 5000 feet below the surface. There are two things we’re concerned about when this occurs, number one is the wave height. You can imagine the Q4000 riding up and down on the waves. When they ride up it exerts more dynamic loading on that pipe system. So we’re concerned about the weight and the ability of the pipe system to handle that. So there is a limit as far as the wave height for being able to recover the BOP. Secondarily, when you have something suspended 5000 feet below a drilling rig like this you have a pendulum motion. It kind of swings around and that’s related to the period of the swell – of the swells in the waves when they come through. So the combination of the period of the waves and the height of the waves creates a set of conditions that dictates when you can safely do this. We are in a window now where we cannot do that because it exceeds the safety factors. We believe, in the next 24 to 36 hours, we will enter a weather window that will allow us to proceed. So with that in mind, we are making preparations right now to take advantage of that weather window which we believe will last Thursday, Friday, Saturday, potentially into Sunday to remove the blowout preventer. The first step that will be taken will be tomorrow around midday. We will bring in the Discoverer Enterprise. They already have a riser pipe that’s been dropped down to about 4000 feet with a latching device and they will remove the capping stack. That is the capping stack we put on on the 15 of July that basically shut the well in. So we will remove that and the Discoverer Enterprise will then move away. At that point, the Q4000 will come in and latch up and will be ready to (lift) the blowout preventer when the reach the wave height and the period of wave that will allow them to be in the safety window. We’re moving in advance, knowing that when we get the window we need to be able to move right then. So the Q4000 will be hooked up, ready to release the blowout preventer and lift it, and we’ll be ready to do that when they achieve the weather window, which we think will come sometime in about 24 to 36 hours from now. Once that happens, the blow out preventer will be lifted, brought to the surface and to give you an idea, if you look at the photograph just to my left here—it’s kind of hard to see because the darkness of the photograph—but that’s a very large object and there are two tugboats underneath the Q4000 managing that so you can see how large the Q4000 is. It will literally raise the blowout preventer up through the Q4000 and if you look to the picture on the left, there’s a very high derrick there in the set of cranes. One of the interesting things about the Q4000 is that it has the height to be able to lift that blowout preventer completely up out of the water and place it on deck on the Q4000. Ultimately they will take apart the lower marine riser package from the blowout preventer, store those on the Q4000, get in closer to shore and then transfer those to other vessels or barges to be taken to a staging area. This will all be done under the supervision of the joint investigations team and under the conditions laid out by the Department of Justice regarding the evidentiary requirements for handling the blowout preventer, which is material to the number of investigations that are going on. Once the blowout preventer is removed, development driller two which was drilling the second relief well, will move in with the new blowout preventer and will place it on top of the well. At that point, there will be a series of diagnostics conducted to make sure that the well is – the blowout preventer is functioning properly, including testing the valves and ability to retain pressure and so forth. Once the blowout preventer has been tested we will be then in position to proceed with the killing of the well, if you will. And we are looking that the timeline to move forward, but it is contingent on completing these steps and these steps I would pass on to you that are contingent themselves on weather. And the removal of the blowout preventer could be impacted by the fact of whether or not the pipe that is suspected of being suspended below the blowout preventer is in contact with any cement that might have adhered to it while we were doing the static kill, whether or not we have to pull to get that free. One of two things could happen, the blowout preventer comes free and it’s not a problem. We lift it up and at some point we will cut the pipe below the blowout preventer and that will be taken to the surface by another vessel. If we cannot free the pipe from the blowout preventer by applying about 80,000 pounds of pull, we will manually open the rams, remove the blowout preventer and then cut the pipe off after we’ve removed the blowout preventer. So we will try to pull the whole thing up together. If we can’t, we will mechanically open the rams and remove the blowout preventer. SNIP We believe then if we do that then we can go ahead and proceed with killing the well sometime after Labor Day weekend. But again, this is conditions based on weather and then the condition of the pipe as it relates to blowout preventer when we attempt to remove it. That’s the current status. I was out at the well site on Monday. I was aboard the Q4000. I climbed down below on the catwalks to take a look at the area underneath there where they bring the blowout preventer up. And it’s hard to see now, but in a six foot sea state you’d be amazed at how much up and down vertical movement there is that is hard to detect unless you’re sitting right on top of it. So this is a good safety call. We’ll have to wait for the right weather window to proceed. I’d like to talk also today about subsea oil monitoring. As you know, there’s been a lot of conversation about the potential and the extent of any hydrocarbons that might be present in the Gulf of Mexico. This relates also to the discussion of the oil budget that took place several weeks ago. There’ve been several academic institutions that have set research vessels out. There’s been extensive monitoring by NOAA and EPA since the start of this event. Several weeks ago, I sent a letter to Rear Admiral Paul Zukunft, the Unified Area Commander, and directed him to come up with a comprehensive hydrocarbon monitoring plan. My goal was to take all the extensive efforts that are going on and see if we could unify them into a comprehensive knowledge management based picture of the Gulf of Mexico as it relates to the presence of hydrocarbons in the water column. To date, there have been over 27,000 samples taken in over 182,000 miles in the Gulf of Mexico, but my goal is to bring all this together and get it into one coherent picture that both the government and the academic community can look at, understand, discuss and draw conclusions from. To that end, Admiral Zukunft is preparing an implementation plan for this unified testing program and this week we are socializing that plan with academic institutions around the Gulf. Yesterday, we had meetings at the University of South Florida in St. Petersburg. Today, we are meeting with the Gulf of Mexico institute in Biloxi Mississippi and we will also be meeting at Tulane University. The goal is to understand the work in progress, the aspirations, and any value added we can gain by talking to the academicians that are involved in trying to understand the presence of hydrocarbons. Moving forward, this will allow us to better understand what kind of threat remains out there and this will also set the stage for long-term natural resource damage assessment and any long-term sampling requirements that might need to be carried out under the shift to the natural resources damage assessment. I’ve got a couple of charts up here that just kind of indicate the density of some of the testing that’s been done and these relate to testing anywhere from using autonomous underwater vehicles to collect sample to putting down crab traps in and around the coastal areas of what we call snare boom. It’s the pom pom like booms, you’ve probably seen that where oil sticks to it and you pull them up occasionally to see if there’s been any oil in contact with it. It also includes testing that has been done with the NOAA oceanographic vehicles and just an array of some of the different types of technology that’s been used out there. A lot of folks have been working on this very, very hard since the start of the spill with the wellhead under control and the shifting concerned to long-term impacts of hydrocarbons in the water column. This is a prudent thing to do at this point and we’re anxious to move forward and unify the technology effort in support of understanding better either the presence or the lack thereof or the disposition and the fate of the oil in the Gulf of Mexico. With that, I’d be glad to take any questions you have for me today. If you could identify yourself? You got a microphone? Please go ahead. Female: (Inaudible – no microphone). Thad Allen: Well, it will largely be within the purview of what we call the joint investigation team. That’s a joint team that was established by the Department of Interior, the Department of Homeland Security and that team has been holding hearings not only in New Orleans, but here. That was the body that issued the subpoenas for the blowout preventer. There’ll be a chain of custody to make sure that we know exactly the condition and that there is continuous monitoring. They’ll be including ROVs when we start to actually move it. Ultimately it will be taken to a point somewhere on land where everything we put together with the other debris and pieces that have been recovered from the rig itself. A lot of this right now is currently at the U.S. Coast Guard station, at the (inaudible) facility, the Nassau facility on the Mississippi River Gulf outlet in New Orleans exactly where it finally ends up I think is yet to be determined but that’s the nominal plan at this point. Is that responsive? Female: (Inaudible). Can you just elaborate on the risk of using (inaudible), what actually (inaudible). Thad Allen: Well, what you don’t want to do is try and lift a heavy object and have the lifting device capability be exceeded by the weight loan on it. In other words, you don’t want the pipe to break. And what they’re looking at, they’ve already – what they’re actually engineering in between a 1.5 and a 1.75 margin of excellence. In other words, if you’re going to be lifting a million pounds, they want – the pipe will stand 1.75 million pounds. Male: Admiral, this is (inaudible) from Dow Jones. I understood, well, you are planning to remove the capping stack before the weather window appears, or do you have to wait 24, 36 hours to start doing that? Thad Allen: That’s a good question. We can remove the capping stack a little before the Q4000 because the Discoverer Enterprise and the riser pipe can withstand greater sea states. OK? The riser pipe coming down from the Discoverer Enterprise was designed to actually fit on the well. If you remember, we used it to produce oil coming up. The latching device is going to lift the blowout preventer to the Q4000 is a drill string. So it is not the same type of mechanism to lift it and it has different sets of parameters in which they can operate in. We can remove the Discoverer Enterprise and remove the capping stack in advance than have the Q4000 ready to go when we hit the weather window. Good question. Male: (Inaudible – no microphone). Thad Allen: Tomorrow at noon we will start. If everything holds according to plan, tomorrow around noon we will start removing the capping stack with the Discoverer Enterprise—move the Q4000 in and have it in position to be able to lift the blowout preventer when we get the weather window. SNIP..... [/quote]
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