[ROCKMAN]

Couldn't remember if I started a thread here or at TOD but couldn't find one here. I was drilling a well nearby when this happened and participated in a few joint task force meetings. My well had no bearing on the sinkhole and visa versa so never got very involved. Lots of stories to search but this new one from Al Jazeera is short and informative. Also has the best video footage I've seen. A very sad story for the small subdivision next to the sinkhole. One of the prettiest spots in the parish.

http://america.aljazeera.com/watch/show ... siana.html

And my well? Making 400 bopd. Great news for my formerly poor land owners. No good news for the folks that have probably permanently lost their homes at Bayou Corne.

[ROCKMAN]

Obviously oil/NG development can be the Mother of All Double Edged Swords. Life will never be the same for the residents of Bayou Corns. And then magnify that tragedy thousands of times for the Macondo blowout. But then there are the beneficiaries. My land owners I mentioned will make about $9200/day in royalty from the well I mentioned. Or over $3 million per year. One of the more satisfying aspects of what I do. One of my landowners is a sweet little Cajun grandma that lives across the street from the well in a run down old house. Her single mom daughter lives behind the house in an equally run down trailer with her three kids. Between the two of them I doubt they have more than $20k coming in per year. Teresa is getting a check for $70,000 each month now. Life changing for her, the daughter and grandkids to say the lease.

The offshore fed royalty is the second largest gov't income after taxes...about $10 billion per year. But given it's impossible to conduct oil/NG operations without humans and nearly all environmental damage happens as a result of human error it will remain impossible to avoid all the bad for the sake of the good. And always will be difficult IMHO to come up with a consensus given the huge range of good/bad between individuals.

[kuidaskassikaeb]

Dear Rockman:

You can pick em can't you. It must be nice to find one that isn't from oil extraction. I read the Mother Jones article ( In stores now).

Once again something happened that geologists thought was impossible. The side of the salt mine collapsed. I guess Texas Brine isn't admitting fault, but has paid everybody off. That actually seems about right to me, since the company really didn't screw up in a massive way. They really didn't see it coming.

People are demanding more regulations, which make sense, but now the whole salt dome is unstable. Anyway, I found this, which is not surprising, but may have been missed.

Plasticity of Rock Salt Crystals

E. N. DA C. ANDRADE

Top of page
Abstract
THE plasticity of rock salt crystals when immersed in water has been the subject of much attention recently1. The fact that the effect takes place more easily in hot water suggests that the rate of solution of the surface is a factor. I have therefore tried bending small plates of rock salt under running cold water from a large tap, and have found that the plasticity is surprising. Under these conditions it is quite easy to make a right angle bend in a plate of rock salt more than a millimetre thick in a matter of seconds.

Kind of cool in a lab.

[ROCKMAN]

K – Facts are facts…should never run away from the truth. But I doubt you would find any geologist with Gulf Coast salt dome experience that would ever say what happened was impossible. I don’t know what the regs were when Texas Brine created their “capsule” in the salt. If I recall there are at least 10 capsules cut into that dome. Today the regs require capsules to be washed no more than 300’ (?) from the edge of a dome.

Salt, on a geologic time scale, is mobile. But it also has significantly different strength character than rock. Given the limited amount of space in the dome due to other capsules I suspect it led TB to get too close to the edge. Whether that violated regs at the time I don’t know. I can’t remember the details but recall thinking that TB had tried to expand their capsule a few years ago by solution mining some more salt out. Just my WAG but I suspect that activity might have precipitated the current problem. BTW TB won’t be getting away with anything. La. is very protective of landowners. Additionally there is a very sophisticated subset of lawyers in La. that specialize in suing the crap out of operators that screw up. I have little doubt that TB won’t get dinged for at least as much as they should…if not a lot more.

Pretty dramatic video of those trees getting sucked down, eh? That was the main reason I posted. Had not seen such shots before.

BTW it's not just us operators that can screw up like this. A couple of yeasr ago I was drilling close to the Bayou Choctaw SPR run by the feds. It didn't get much press at the time but they discovered they had leaked perhaps as much as 7 million bo from the dome. Not sure where it went but at least it didn't make it to the surface...so far. They quietly began transferring oil from the BCSPR to other storage facilities.

[kuidaskassikaeb]

Salt, on a geologic time scale, is mobile. But it also has significantly different strength character than rock. Given the limited amount of space in the dome due to other capsules I suspect it led TB to get too close to the edge. Whether that violated regs at the time I don’t know. I can’t remember the details but recall thinking that TB had tried to expand their capsule a few years ago by solution mining some more salt out. Just my WAG but I suspect that activity might have precipitated the current problem.

It was something like that. They were too close to the edge, but they weren't required to monitor where they were. When TB wanted to expand, they did a pressure test, which failed, and so there was no expansion. TB just closed the well, and a couple of years later it failed. As far as I can see TB followed all the regulations.

I'm not really worried about them getting away, since they are already paying compensation. Morally, I guess if your profit making opportunity causes some harm you should pay, even if you really weren't negligent. But I don't think the company was particularly out of line in terms of their knowledge of the rock system. I blame the geologists.

[ROCKMAN]

k - Actually geologists probably had little to do with the project from start to finish. The project was handled by engineers for the most part. There is a rather sophisticated system for determining where the edge of the salt is and how close the capsule is to that edge. Much more complex than pressure measurements. There were some aspects of TB's recent history indicating that they suspected a problem IMHO. In reality there's a fairly wide gap between the oil/NG exploration and production industry and the salt dome storage folks. I've been doing this for 38 years and I've never even met one of them let alone worked with one. They aren't a part of "my" industry anymore then the folks that build drilling rigs. We work in the same neighborhood but are separate businesses.

[kuidaskassikaeb]

Actually geologists probably had little to do with the project from start to finish. The project was handled by engineers for the most part.

Thems fightin words.

http://theadvocate.com/news/neworleans/5218655-148/shape-of-salt-dome-factor

The above article probably the best explanation for what happened. Slide show at the top has some cool pictures. The cavern was where it was supposed to be, but the salt dome wasn't. Improvements in imaging technology show the problem, but a little too late.

When these things happen you always wonder if somebody cut a few too many corners, but the only person I think could be responsible was the geologist who assumed that the dome was dome shaped down, not mushroom shaped. It wasn't the engineer, no way . Actually, I think the company acted as well as they could have, sometimes things just go wrong.

[ROCKMAN]

K – That is a valid point about the difficulty of determining exactly where the salt/sediment interface is located. Especially since seismic data tends to do a poor job of seeing the salt edge under an overhang. But that also means they didn’t have a proven picture of where the interface was when they washed the cavern out. But the regs, until very recently, didn’t require them to know:

“The new requirements include a minimum 300-foot separation between the walls of new brine caverns and a salt dome’s outer edge. The current rules for brine caverns have no minimum separation.”

So if a geologist didn’t have an accurate map and everyone knew it wasn’t accurate then they decided to take a chance and make a bet. A bet they eventually lost.

Interesting work by Sandia but then Borns completely blew his credibility with me: “Borns, of Sandia National Laboratories, said the idea of a salt dome with smooth outward sloping edges permeated industry for 40 years even as seismic studies have shown domes are far more irregular in shape. “I don’t know if everyone has changed the conceptual model in their minds,” Borns said.”

That is an absurd comment. When I started at Mobil Oil almost 40 years ago one of my first projects was chasing reserves under a salt overhang. Any geologist that had mapped salt domes in S La. understood just how irregular and unpredictable the slope of the dome might be. In fact, the majority of salt dome projects I’ve seen in the last 40 years involved chasing overhang plays. Either drilling directional to get under the overhang or drilling through the salt and then popping out under the overhang looking for reserves. His statement actually offers some cover for geologists. But he’s wrong. If Texas Brine was using a geologist that didn’t appreciate the possibility of an overhang then they were using one that had never worked on a salt dome in S. La. And that would have been a very foolish decisison IMHO.

BTW the last Deep Water well I worked on drilled through 24,000’ of salt before we busting out into the underlying rocks. Thickest salt section ever drilled in the GOM if not the world. Would have been even more impressive had it not been a $148 million dry hole. LOL.

[Keith_McClary]

I was drilling close to the Bayou Choctaw SPR run by the feds. It didn't get much press at the time but they discovered they had leaked perhaps as much as 7 million bo from the dome. Not sure where it went ...

[ROCKMAN]

We were actual drilling for traps up against the salt face. Had a fantasy that the oil had leaked into some of our sands. Unfortunately not at least where we were drilling. No big deal...they only loss $700 million. Not a lot by gov't standards. LOL

[kuidaskassikaeb]

Dear Rockman

You are probably right. I was going to comment on how easy it would have been to move the well 200 feet. Then I found these maps.



Yellow Circle = Bubble SItes, Blue Line = Salt Dome 10,000′ Depth Contour, Yellow Patch with Orange Outline = Sink Hole, Red Line = Salt Dome 1000′ Depth Contour, Orange Circle = Oxy Geismar Well No. 3, Blue Circle = Brine Well, Red Circle = Gas Storage Well, Light Blue Circle = Plugged and Abandoned Well



This one also has water wells and gas wells.

I looks like it was only a matter of time before somebody reached the edge of the salt dome. I notice that the topo-lines for the dome show the earlier size, which was an overestimation. But I think we long ago passed peak salt dome.

[ROCKMAN]

k - In a couple of months I'll spud another well offsetting the one I was drilling late last year about 6 miles from the sinkhole. That well got me invited to the weekly sinkhole meeting even though there was zero potential connection between my well and the sinkhole. Easier to just shut up and do what the state requested then trying to explain the situation. But I may be able to skim some off the record conversations I can pass on a out the current status.

[Phaethon]

the conspiracy theories related to this disaster have been hilarious and ominous at once. Rather entertaining...

[ROCKMAN]

P - I've haven't seen them. Any links? Maybe I'm one of the Men IN Black mentioned. LOL.