Oil news

22nd June 2010

IT�S RAINING OIL IN NEW ORLEANS
http://www.brasschecktv.com/page/874.html


OIL DRILLING EXPERT: �METHANE BUBBLE A HOAX�

Respected author and militia expert J.B. Campbell has worked most of his life in the oil fields of the world, and has an insider�s perspective that many people, especially those manipulating the news, don�t want to hear. He writes:

It appears that BP drilled to 18,000' as claimed. I don't find any evidence they went deeper, as Williams and others have claimed. But that's from sea level, which means the well bore was about 13,000' from the sea bed. That's not very remarkable. But there are lots of bad things that happened. Rense asked me to write a "concise" piece, which went as follows:

Senator Nelson has suggested that the BP well casing, the steel tube through which oil and gas are produced, is damaged or in some way "pierced." What is likelier is that the cement job done by Halliburton did not produce a good bond between the casing and the earth surrounding it, allowing oil and gas to leak upwards from the production zone to the surface on the outside of the casing. If that is the case, the well has cratered and there is no way to control the flow. Reports of plumes of oil appearing some miles from the wellhead would indicate this, if the reports are correct. BP says they cannot find these plumes.

According to the electrical engineer interviewed on 60 Minutes, the annular blowout preventer had been ripped and wrecked by dragging 16' of drill pipe through it inadvertently during drilling operations The annular BOP, which we call a bag, is a very heavy duty rubber bladder that is expanded with hydraulic fluid and makes a pretty good seal around the drill pipe. It's usually about five feet tall and is right under the rig floor, on top of the mechanical rams, which are much more powerful. The one on the sea bed was probably a lot bigger. You can pull drill pipe through it without harm if you need to get the tool joint up high enough to connect or disconnect another joint. But you're not supposed to drag a tool joint through it (the upset ends of DP, where they connect). That can wreck the bag.

The guy said that pieces of rubber were fished out of the mud pit!

So they knew that the bag was no good. How drilling operations could continue, or casing could be run with a wrecked bag is not understandable. The MMS guy and the State of Louisiana guy were on the rig to observe the pressure tests on Halliburton's two cement plugs and the cement job on the casing. And, once you cement the casing (pump cement from the casing shoe up the outside between casing and earth, filling the space with fast-setting cement to prevent oil or gas from leaking up the backside to the surface or into other sensitive zones), then you run a cement bond log (CBL) to see how good the cement job was, to see if the cement may have channeled and left open voids in critical areas, or whatever. Halliburton and the company man figure the capacity of the space to fill with cement, based on caliper logs that were run on a wire line before casing was run into the hole. Then you pump maybe twice as much cement as needed just to make sure, in case you lose circulation and lose cement into the formation, failing to fill it all the way up. Schlumberger was hired to run the cement bond log and had been waiting on the rig for two days to run these logs.

BUT, the BP company man told them to forget it - go on home. We don't want a CBL! Of course, the federal guy and the state guy are there to approve the CBL and they let Schlumberger be run off? This is unheard of. ESPECIALLY considering that this well had been kicking for weeks, presumably ever since they drilled into the zone of production. So the drilling fluid (mud) was not quite heavy enough to control the gas coming out of the formation. The engineers may have wanted it slightly underbalanced to protect the zone (you try not to mess up the zone with mud if you can avoid it).

So, we don't know how good the Halliburton cement job was - no CBL. The danger here with such a high-pressure well is that gas may leak up the backside, between casing and earth, and then there's no way to control it. It can lead to the ultimate nightmare - a crater.

Halliburton also placed two cement temporary abandonment plugs, one down at TD (total depth) and one higher up. Both plugs had to have been pressure tested to the satisfaction of the government guys and the BOP had to be pressure tested, ditto. This is where it gets a little murky. All of the components of the BOP have to be tested: the bag, the pipe rams, the blind rams and the shear rams. But there was drill pipe in the hole so the blind and shear rams couldn't be tested. And we know the bag was wrecked, so it couldn't pass. So they could have tested the pipe rams (that shut around the drill pipe) but how could the government guys accept just one test?

Then, the incredible order by the company man to displace the well with sea water when they're already very underbalanced, or maybe exactly balanced. Sea water is forty percent lighter than the mud they were using! This order reportedly led to a shouting match between the company man and the toolpusher and driller, who must have told him he was insane. The company man has admitted that he was inexperienced! But that's no excuse for a suicidal order that is guaranteed to result in a blowout. We go to well control schools all the time, just to stay sharp and practice on BOP simulators with very difficult problems thrown at us. We practice the ways to circulate out the gas bubble before it can rise and expand uncontrollably. We have to be certified on this every two years.

Now, I'm still wondering where all this kicking gas was coming from in a cased and cemented and plugged well. They say it was methane, but how does wild methane get into a cased and plugged well? The plugs were obviously no good, so how could they proceed without running new cement plugs? Where were the government guys?

So, they were drilling a high-pressure well with a broken, untested BOP with the knowledge of the federal and state reps. BP ordered critical heavy drilling mud (weight unknown) to be replaced with sea water, during which changeover the blowout naturally occurred. That's why there was the shouting match, and I'm surprised the Transocean hands would even follow such an insane order. The pusher should have called his supervisor and had the company man run off, or at least bawled out by BP for issuing such an order. Saving money by reusing the mud is one thing - we do it all the time - but never on a kicking well. The question is, how could a cased and plugged well kick? Where was the gas coming from?

Was the company man actually following orders from above? Now we learn that BP's CEO is also CEO of Goldman Sachs International and that GS shorted Transocean before the blowout and sold 40% of its stock in BP! This is just too much. Leuren Moret calls this sort of thing Disaster Capitalism which always has a hidden purpose, usually having to do with making obscene profits.

I'm still wondering why the Texas-proved oil-eating microbes are not being used. Who benefits from destroying the Gulf Coast?

When I was with ARCO (today BP), I was ordered to drill with water instead of mud on a six-well program near Santa Maria, in order to save money because we were in a lost-circulation area where mud just disappears into the formation. But you still need mud for lubrication and to prevent sticking. When you get stuck in the hole, you have to use dangerous jars and sometimes the rig falls over from the violent action and guys get hurt or killed. So I refused the order to use water, much to the consternation of my boss, who was trying to have me do exactly that - get stuck in the hole and justify firing me. I continued to use drilling fluid and drilled all six wells to completion successfully. There wasn't anything my boss could say because there's no way to justify such an order. The BP company man could have told his BP bosses to get stuffed, but he didn't have the knowledge or experience or guts to do it.


Rense didn't like it - no comment. I suspect a lot of oil and gas have been leaking out of the sea bed forever, just as you see out here in Santa Barbara, both on land and in the SB Channel.

I am thinking that the methane bubble thing is a hoax, along with the "drilled to 30,000' secretly" and the tsunami. The casing did not get a good cement job by Halliburton, and even Halliburton wanted Schlumberger to do the cement bond long to check how good the cement job was. But the BP guy deliberately disobeyed the casing program and he had to have been authorized or ordered to do that. It is really incomprehensible. It appears to be Agenda 21, which I wasn't familiar with until recently.

Attached are some of the crazy objections we've been getting from the professional environmental orgs, and the UN on our Ocean Plastic project.

All the best,

B


ILLUSION OF A FALSE SPILL: THE ASPHALT VOLCANO
http://shtf411.com/bp-illusion-of-a-false-spill-t7065.html-sid=75f49d984d7e8acccaec5214bb60fbfa

TOXIC IRRATIONALITY DRIVING AMERICA
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/an-invisible-gorilla-is-killing-americas-soul-2010-06-22

THE SPILL, THE SCANDAL AND THE PRESIDENT http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/17390/111965

GULF COAST WEATHER EYE http://www.myfoxhurricane.com/

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