Question by Toni: Oil spill stopage question?
i work for an oil company and we made an oops causing oil to spill. since it is summer i want to drive around on my boat and drink some beers instead of dealing with the oil spill. how is the best way to stop it from leaking. we tried top kill junk shot and top hat but it is still leaking. what is best way?
Best answer:
Answer by ashar ali
i think you should continue what you are doing its the only best possible way
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4 Responses
You should report yourself for drunk boating and get 3 years in prison. When you get out the leak will be already stopped.
BP should force slow hardening Devcon into the oil pipe and when it hardens the oil leak will stop.
Do you even know what “top hat,” “junk shot,” and “top kill” refer to? I don’t think that you do. Who knows what the best way is, save to equalize the pressure. This can be theoretically accomplished by relief wells, which would distribute the same pressure over a larger area, thus lowering the overall pressure.
Here’s why it’s a tough problem.
The blowout preventor was there in the first place to stop this problem from happening, because it’s a major problem. BP has quoted that the oil is coming out of a 10.5″ radius pipe at 30,000 psi.
If you have heard BP give a different value for pressure coming out of the pipe, then you can go through the same equations below, but convert your psi (pounds per square inch) to Pascal by multiplying your psi value by 6.894757E+03. This will give you a value in units of Pascal.
Put everything (using my psi data) in international SI units, and you have:
r = 0.2667 m
P = 2.068427E+8 Pa
Now, we can solve and find out why this is a major problem. First, find the area of the pipe’s exit point, assuming that it’s a straight cut. This is 6th grade math.
A = π * r^2
A = π * (0.2667 m)^2
A = π * (0.7113 m^2)
A = 0.2235 m^2
Now using the given pressure and the calculated area, find the force of the oil coming out of the pipe.
F = P * A
F = (2.068427E+8 Pa) * (0.2235 m^2)
F = 46,220,607 N
This gusher is basically like a rocket engine flipped over. 46 million newtons is a full order of magnitude larger than the thrust of the early rockets that NASA sent into space. So you have to overcome that force. Doesn’t matter which way you try to do it, you have to overcome this force, and that’s obviously a huge problem.
To try to put things in perspective, look at it this way. If we were just to drop a single, solid block of mass into the pipe to stop it from flowing, the *minimum* equalization mass would be, according to Newton’s 2nd Law, where a = Earth gravity:
m = F/ a
m = (46,220,617 N) / (9.81 m/s^2)
m = 4,711,582 kg
I imagine you want that in Imperial units, which comes to about 10.4 million pounds. In other words, 5,200 tons (short). So what does 5,200 tons (short) “look like”? It’s the equivalent mass of *seventy-seven* of the US Army’s front-line M1A2 Abrams main battle tanks fully outfitted for combat with fuel and ammunition. Then you have to have them all stacked together in a single mass, because if you tried to just plop them down one after another, they’d just be blown aside by the oil “rocket.”
So even just saying “force slow hardening” fluids is not practical, because they will be blasted out long before anything could even begin to harden. This is the same reason that injecting drilling mud was a waste of time and effort, because there was no possible way for it to work. It was basically public relations to make us “stupid Americans” think that they were doing something useful.
I’d say take your worthless hide, roll it up and use it as a plug, tamping it into the hole with a jar hammer.