[Herra Tohtori]

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

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.

...note the trucks for scale...

 

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.


Another quote, from BBC:

'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?

[aldo_14]

Bloody hell.

[Flipside]

Nasty.... I hope they can get it under control soon

[achtung]

 

[Flipside]

At a guess, I think they've drilled into something not unakin to Yellowstone Park, but on a smaller scale.

[karajorma]

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.

[Herra Tohtori]

Meaning that the uppermost part of the crust will fall into the pressure void left under it by the eruption? 

...


Unbelievable. Bore a hole, bury ~300 hectars of land under sludge - permanently. What a sick joke of geophysics that would be.

I wonder whether future civilizations will tell tales of the Great Sludge... :

[Flipside]

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.

[Herra Tohtori]

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...

[Flipside]

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.

[perihelion]

Sounds to me like someone either installed a damaged blowout preventer or didn't use one at all.

[Herra Tohtori]

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.

[MicroPsycho]

does anyone else think this is kinda cool (the strange mud spewing from the earth, not that people have meen displaced because of it)?

[Flipside]

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.

[perihelion]

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.

[Bobboau]

how big would you say it could get?

[Flipside]

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.

[perihelion]

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!

[Admiral Nelson]

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.

[Bobboau]

it's probly like a soda bottle, a lot of the gas is disolved into the mud.