Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: Herra Tohtori on September 27, 2006, 02:46:04 pm
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I just learned about this and couldn't find anything about it here, so I figured it was worth posting:
11,000 people flee homes as hot toxic mud engulfs villages and farmland (http://environment.guardian.co.uk/waste/story/0,,1857057,00.html#article_continue)
Four villages and 19 factories have been submerged in a 240-hectare (600-acre) sea of mud in East Java that is growing up to 50,000 cubic metres a day in a major environmental disaster triggered during an oil exploration venture.
A few rooftops are still visible, along with hastily constructed dykes which could not hold back the flow of toxic mud that began on May 29 around an oil exploration drilling rig.
Eleven miles of dykes are being built by 1,500 soldiers and labourers around the clock to contain the growing catastrophe, in which 11,000 people have lost their homes or been forced to evacuate.
(http://www.iltalehti.fi/uutiset/mutaaaindonesiassaJI_uu.jpg)
(http://www.iltalehti.fi/uutiset/mutaakraateriJI_uu.jpg)
...note the trucks for scale...
:eek2: :shaking:
Frak me.
The eruption was apparently caused by test bores in search of oil... Well, they sure found something.
I wonder what the drill users thought when this stuff started to pour up the hole by itself in huge quantities. This is, this is really something that couldn't really be imagined to happen until now.
What is more interesting is the composition of the mud/oil/sludge/mömbä. In addition to sheer quantities of it, it's also highly toxic, containing such substances as benzene, xylene and toluene...
Just unbelievable. :nervous:
Another quote, from BBC: (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4798501.stm)
'We just ran'
A few kilometres away is what one local person described as a "people market". It is a newly-built market place, not yet filled with shops.
Residents have been living in temporary shelters
Instead, most of the 9,000 people who have been displaced by the mud have ended up here, two families to one shop space. Motorbikes, clothes and plastic buckets mark the entrance to these new homes - a handful of belongings saved from the sludge.
"We were all scared," Suliati said, as she squatted outside one shop entrance, cooking up a dinner of fried eggs.
"The mud came up to our chest, we didn't have time to save anything from the house, we just ran to save our lives."
How much of that stuff must've erupted from the hole initially, if it suddenly rose up to adult chest height? :eek:
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Bloody hell.
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Nasty.... I hope they can get it under control soon :(
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:eek2:
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At a guess, I think they've drilled into something not unakin to Yellowstone Park, but on a smaller scale.
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Yep. I'd heard about this a while back. They nicknamed it the Indonesian Mud Volcano.
The company who drilled it are in all kinds of **** (literally and figuratively) and they figure that even when the damn thing stops spewing out mud the whole area is likely to collapse in on itself anyway.
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Meaning that the uppermost part of the crust will fall into the pressure void left under it by the eruption? :eek2:
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Unbelievable. Bore a hole, bury ~300 hectars of land under sludge - permanently. What a sick joke of geophysics that would be. :rolleyes:
I wonder whether future civilizations will tell tales of the Great Sludge... ::)
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It depends on how quickly the pressure built up in there, but it would certainly be sadly ironic if they had somehow managed to avert a major disaster in the Future by triggering a minor one now.
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Well, while having the sludge explode from its hole all in one burst doesn't sound actually better than this, I wouldn't call this event a minor one in any case... :lol:
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True it's pretty major, particuarly from the point of view of those experiencing it, I don't doubt, but I suspect (though I'll freely admit it's purely guesswork) that if it were going to keep building in pressure, the resulting explosion of hot Mud would probably have had far more reaching consequences. Not that this lessens the current tragedy in any way, I'm not even entirely sure how I got to speculating about the possibility of a pressure build up, I think it was thinking about Yellowstone that did it.
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Sounds to me like someone either installed a damaged blowout preventer or didn't use one at all.
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Or then the pressure just pushed it back up. After all, this is more of a vulcanic phenomenon than the ones normally encountered when working with oil, so probably the pressures are higher. At least that's what I think.
Perhaps the equipment just couldn't take it. But this is just speculation, obviously.
S***ty case altogether. But indeed, it might end up in a phenomenon where the heavier crust slowly sinks into the mud pit below it, when the pressure no longer keeps it up - and while the crust descends, it pumps more and more sludge on above it through the hole in it, until there's just a very deep hole of poisonous sludge, and below the mud there's the descended piece of previous surface.
A really beautiful mental image, eh. :shaking:
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does anyone else think this is kinda cool (the strange mud spewing from the earth, not that people have meen displaced because of it)?
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It's certainly an imposing sight as a photograph. Not sure I'd want to be anywhere near it though, but I know what you mean.
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I've only recently gotten into the operations side of the business, so I'm by no means an authority on the matter, but I can tell you that we routinely deal in formation pressures in excess of 10,000 psi after you account for hydrostatic pressure from depth. That is, you've got static pressure from the fluid column, but the formation is actually at a higher pressure than that. That's why we use heavy weight drilling muds, to try and make the fluid column heavy enough to balance the pressure in the formation. (Sounds like mistake #1 to me.)
I haven't been able to get many details on this yet, but I bet we'll be getting a LOT of safety lectures about this in my group in the next couple weeks. This is an environmental catastrophe, but there's no way in hell it was unavoidable. The entire point of a gas well is you WANT to hit a pocket of gas. What is making this so bad isn't so much that the gas was under a lot of pressure. It's always under a lot of pressure. We have tool designs older than I am that are fully capable of dealing with that. The problem is the shear volume of gas in that formation and that they let it get out of control in the first place. Everything I'm hearing is pointing to a combination of shoddy tools and poor adherance to standard operating procedures.
Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe the locals are just looking to pin this on someone, but I rather doubt it. The fact that the companies involved are being so tight-lipped as to what happened at the rig itself doesn't do loads for their credibility.
The fact that it has hardly even slowed down is truly awe-inspiring. The gas gets in the mud and reduces its density so the whole mess rushes uphole. At the rate it is going, the borehole must be absolutely huge by now. I don't know what we can do to stop it.
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how big would you say it could get?
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Well, some of the biggest Gas pockets come in the hundreds of trillion cubic feet (About 10,000 cubic kilometers) of Gas, not sure how much of that would leak out though.
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I don't know yet. I haven't been able to get any details other than the approximate depth of the "fracture" (around 6000 ft). I don't know if they'd run in a liner yet or if it was open hole all the way down. All those things are important. Also important is how consolidated the various formations are. All I can say is that I never would have dreamed a well could go this out of control for almost two months and still show no signs of slowing down. They've tapped into a HUGE gas pocket is all I can say.
Depending on how thorough they were when they prepared the upper part of the well, it is possible that a packer set at shallow depth might be able to seal this thing off. Thing is, even if they had run in casing, I doubt they had cemented between it and the wellbore yet. So, even if you could set a packer in the casing it wouldn't do much good except to create a potential rocket.
I need to talk to some of the older engineers tomorrow and see what they think. There's got to be something could be done to stop this. Pumping the mud into the ocean cannot be the best answer!
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So how exactly does this happen? The gas under pressure is forcing soil up through the water table where it becomes mud? It seems bizzare that that amount of mud can be generated from a single borehole.
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it's probly like a soda bottle, a lot of the gas is disolved into the mud.
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There's that and also the fact that at that depth, the gas is under so much pressure it is (...I believe this is the case) in a liquid state. So, as it comes up and depressurizes, it eventually gets to a point where the pressure drops enough that it flashes to vapour. That's at least my current understanding. I'm back at work, and I'll talk this over with some of the more experienced guys at lunch.
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I was there twice this summer. My family live near it, some 30 kilometres away. It's pretty FUBAR, the levees are being built higher and higher as they are desperately trying to keep the tollway open, as it's pretty much a bloodline between Surabaya (Second largest city in Indonesia, where most of my family lives), Sidoarjo (where the rest of my family lives) and some city I forgot.
http://users.pandora.be/fragrag/New%20Folder/ (http://users.pandora.be/fragrag/New%20Folder/) This are some photos my dad made on the 24th of July (Thank god for my dad's naming conventions of the folder :P) So about two months ago. I went past it a month later, and the levees (which were hastily built) were twice as high and being reinforced with containers and moisture was seeping through the levees. An hour later they closed the tollway and all traffic was diverted to the streets.
Which, if you have ever been to Indonesia, were already quite frantic, add the trucks and cars usually going through the highway. When I left Indonesia, I'm not sure what happened but some of the levees broke and submerged a village near it. (Which gives my uncle some weird anger management problems whenever he's driving, normally he's a calm man but on the road, Jesus Christ :nervous:)
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Well, the guys I talked to weren't of much help. They hadn't heard much about it, and I couldn't provide much useful information. The two recurring comments were, "Yeah, we do this sort of thing everyday and it is easy to forget just how dangerous it really is," and, "Where in hell is that mud coming from?" Briefly speculated that they may have drilled into an existing gas well, but that seems unlikely.
So, no help here. I need to talk to someone involved with the drilling side of things.
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Personally, I suppose it's a pocket of loose substance, that has during millions of years gathered water and became more and more soft and muddy, mixed with hydrocarbon substances and natural gas generating pressure (in addition to the existing... solido-static pressure? :nervous: I dunno if that's a word, but what I mean is that there's quite high pressures underground, created by immense amouts of land above - similarly to hydrostatic pressure in fluids.
So, in addition to gas pressure, the pressure is definitely also partialy caused simply by the weigh of land resting above the mud pocket. I would think it's much similar to that if you fill a tube with water (or mud) and then put in a piston and apply pressure, the intact mud pocket prevents the piston from falling. But Lords of Kobol need to be particularly merciful to help you when you bore a hole through the piston with huge wight attached to the piston - or in this case, break the mud pocket and release the horror in the deep. ::)
I think that's what happening there. The part of the soil above this particular mud pocket is both the piston with this new hole in it, and a huge weigh.
So, time only will tell how much of that mud stuff is going to spew up from that hole, and what will happen to the area around and above the mentioned mud pocket below the surface. Depends of how big the mud pocket actually is, of course.
Alternatively, it might be that the humanity has found the site of R'lyeh.
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Personally, I suppose it's a pocket of loose substance, that has during millions of years gathered water and became more and more soft and muddy, mixed with hydrocarbon substances and natural gas generating pressure (in addition to the existing... solido-static pressure? :nervous: I dunno if that's a word, but what I mean is that there's quite high pressures underground, created by immense amouts of land above - similarly to hydrostatic pressure in fluids.
Gathering water is quite plausible, as before the diggings were conducted, I believe the flooded areas were rice paddies. But your theory does seem farfetched.
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...your theory does seem farfetched.
What, the R'lyeh part? :p
Other parts of my message were based on sound physics. It's not so much as a theory as it is a hypothesis heavily relying on my (albeit questionable) knowledge of geophysics. :D
The mud is determined to be coming from an ancient pocket of liquid sediments (ie. mud). It is estimated to be down to 9000 feet deep.
In large proportions, the crust of earth is not exactly solid, it's more elastic. So, if this liquid sediment pocket is wide enough, it has a lot of ground area above it - as a thick plate of stone.
If you hold any plate just from its edges, the center of the plate is bound to bend down due to gravitation. How much, depends of the elastic properties of the plate, and the size and width of it.
So - if the mud pocket is on wide enough area, the "earth plate" on top of it is certainly supported by the pressure inside the mud pocket. Thus, the weigh of the ground above the pocket certainly causes (some) pressure to the pocket. If the pocket's area is not too big, then the crust above it doesn't apply much pressure to the pocket because it can support itself well enough. As the area of the pocket increases, the stress on the ground plate above it increases, and slowly the plate is more and more suported by the increasing pressure in the pocket.
Natural gas and vulcanic phenomena are other things that can cause pressure inside such a pocket. However, it is more than likely to me that all three are involved here, to some extent. As vulcanic activity is quite high at the area, that definitely plays a big role in this... mainly geothermic heat generating pressure in the mud pocket. Natural gas surely adds to the mix, since carbohydron substances are encountered.
Aside from that, the sludge will probably be followed by the great and ancient divine Cthulhu, who will eat our brains while we worship him.
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I'm just hoping that the underground mudpool isn't big enough so when enough mud has escaped and the ground begins sinking, that it won't engulf my family, especially my grandma and my uncle and aunt..
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http://www.eng.walhi.or.id/kampanye/cemar/industri/060718_lbmud-gasleak_pp/ (http://www.eng.walhi.or.id/kampanye/cemar/industri/060718_lbmud-gasleak_pp/)
Not very well written or coherent, so take it with a grain of salt, but it gives a better idea of what probably happened. The whole truth may never come out, unfortunately.
[shakes head]