Is it 2012 yet?

Conspiracy Show from what I understand.

Archimedes Petroleum wrote:

Re: http://www.petroleumworld.com/sf10062001.htm

Such deep, deep pseudoscience. For example:

The problem is that this methane, located deep in the bowels of the earth, is under tremendous pressure...Some speculate as much as 100,000 psi

I'm not aware of any theory of geophysics that would allow a pressure of 100,000 psi to exist in the earth's crust at the depths this well reached. That sort of pressure is unlikely to exist much shallower than about 20 miles below the surface. 100,000 psi is in the range of pressure needed to turn carbon into diamond (http://hypertextbook.com/facts/1998/Ile … raub.shtml).

"It is a dangerous game drilling into high pressure oil and gas zones because you risk having a blowout if your mud weight is not heavy enough. If you weight up your mud with barium sulfate to a very high level, you risk BLOWING OUT THE FORMATION.

What does that mean? It means you crack the rock deep underground; as the mudweight is now denser than the rock, it escapes into the rock in the pore spaces and the fractures. The well empties of mud. If you have not hit high pressure oil or gas at this stage, you are lucky.

But if you have, the oil and gas come flying up the well and you have a blowout, because you have no mud in the well to suppress the oil and gas. You shut down the well with the blowout preventer. If you do not have a blowout preventer, you are in trouble as we have all seen and you can only hope that the oil and gas pressure will naturally fall off with time, otherwise you have to try and put a new blowout preventer in place with oil and gas coming out as you work. "

This is so full of half truth and lame, uninformed speculation. Yes, many times, drilling into high pressure areas creates a dangerous dance between the mud density needed to control pressure and the strength of shallower, lower pressure formations that can't withstand the pressure (which is why I mentioned "underbalanced drilling" back when, since it is a risky, repeat RISKY strategy to drill wells when the mud density and formation strength are not compatible)  . This is another one of those "you need to take the two day well control class to understand these things" problems. But I have done so, and it is obvious to me that whoever wrote this article has not and is simply trying to be as panicky as possible to create interest in his business of extracting money from investors by selling stocks and pocketing his broker fees while (I've put together a list of oil cleanup stocks for the readers of my Crisis & Opportunity . Many are running, and one has pulled back into a solid buy range. Three more are on my buy list) not solving any sort of problem. The prose is as gaseous as the well itself.

And, yes, I would like to see the mud logs myself, as well as all the daily drilling and mud reports. But, quite like the rest of the well reports, unless you are well versed in the jargon and the technical stuff, all it'll produce for you is goofy articles like this, And, of course, it took years for the report on the 1960 Santa Barbara blowout to be published, by which time nobody cared about the details.

Ignorance is a poor base for sound decision making, yes?  Much like "this is costing too much money" when you are handling a difficult oil well, yes?

Last edited by sigmoid freud (2010-06-30 01:17:05)