President Obama takes questions on the Gulf Oil disaster.
Video Rating: 5 / 5
BP will leave the cap on the oil well while it vacates the area for a number of days to avoid the coming tropical storm. What could possibly go wrong? One expert warns that increasing pressure might have an unintended danger: Bill Gale, a California engineer and industrial explosion expert who is a member of the Deepwater Horizon Study Group, said… that gas hydrate crystals could be plugging any holes in the underground portion of the well, and they could get dislodged as pressure builds. (Gale was formerly Chief Loss Prevention Engineer for Bechtel in San Francisco, obtained his undergraduate degree in Chemical Engineering, Masters in Civil Engineering and PhD in Fire Safety Engineering Science from the University of California, Berkeley. Gale is a registered professional engineer in both mechanical engineering and fire protection engineering, and has more than forty years of industrial loss prevention, process safety management, and fire protection/fire safety engineering experience.) In other words, there may have been a destruction of a portion of the steel well casing which was temporarily plugged by methane hydrate crystals. Leaving the well cap may slowly raise the pressure in the well to the point where the hydrate crystals are dislodged, in which case the well might really start leaking. Sound farfetched? Maybe. But remember that the “top hat” containment dome failed because it got plugged up with methane hydrate crystals. And remember that there’s a lot of …
Video Rating: 4 / 5
