6,700 psi
As Coast Guard admiral Thad Allen has explained, sustained pressure readings above 8,000 pounds per square inch (psi) would show that the wellbore is more or less intact, while pressures of 6,000 psi or less would mean there could be major problems:
We are looking for somewhere between 8,000 and 9,000 PSI inside the capping stack, which would indicate to us that the hydrocarbons are being forced up and the wellbores are being able to withstand that pressure. And that is good news.
If we are down around in the 4,000 to 5,000, 6,000 range that could potentially tell us that the hydrocarbons are being diverted someplace else, and we would have to try and assess the implications of that. And as you might imagine, there are gradations as you go up from 4,000 or 5,000 PSI up to 8,000 or 9,000. …
We will at some point try to get to 8,000 or 9,000 and sustain that for some period of time, and these will be done basically, as I said — if we have a very low pressure reading, we will try and need at least six hours of those readings to try to ensure that that is the reading. If it’s a little higher, we want to go for 24 hours. And if it’s up at 8,000 or 9,000, we would like to go 48 hours just to make sure it can sustain those pressures for that amount of time.
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If 6,000 psi that is 3 tons per square inch – the amount the Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen wants ~1000 tons per square foot. That’s an immense pressure to cap at any depth! Amazing what BP has accomplished given the initial info leaks before the truth was capped.
“I’m an engineer with 25 years of experience. I’ve worked on some big projects with big machines. Maybe that’s why this mess is so clear to me.
First, the BP platform was drilling for what they call deep oil. They go out where the ocean is about 5,000 feet deep and drill another 30,000 feet into the crust of the earth. This it right on the edge of what human technology can do. Well, this time they hit a pocket of oil at such high pressure that it burst all of their safety valves all the way up to the drilling rig and then caused the rig to explode and sink. Take a moment to grasp the import of that. The pressure behind this oil is so high that it destroyed the maximum effort of human science to contain it.
When the rig sank it flipped over and landed on top of the drill hole some 5,000 feet under the ocean.
Now they’ve got a hole in the ocean floor, 5,000 feet down with a wrecked oil drilling rig sitting on top of it that is spewing 200,000 barrels of oil a day into the ocean. Take a moment and consider that, will you!
First they have to get the oil rig off the hole to get at it in order to try to cap it. Do you know the level of effort it will take to move that wrecked oil rig, sitting under 5,000 feet of water? That operation alone could take years and hundreds of millions to accomplish. Then, how do you cap that hole in the muddy ocean floor? There just is no way. No way.”
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The Gulf Stream current circles the Gulf of Mexico and exits at the southern tip of Florida where it follows the eastern coastline of the United States before heading across the Atlantic Ocean to Europe.
How much oil would it take to contaminate this river in the ocean?
http://shortlink.info/?9f30ab42
And if this isn’t bad enough, Corexit 9500, the dispersant being used, is many times more damaging than the oil itself. It’s highly toxic. At the temperatures in the Gulf waters this toxicity is magnified and turns into a gas that can be picked up by clouds and return to Earth as a toxic rain. This “death from above” precipitation may have the ability to destroy life from micro organisms up through the entire entire ecosystem. So the chemical “solution” to the hydrocarbon Extinction Level Event may turn out to be a localized environmental holocaust.