METHANE BUBBLE caused rig blast.

BP executives were aboard rig celebrating safety record when methane triggered blast

The deadly blowout of an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico was triggered by a bubble of methane gas that escaped from the well and shot up the drill column, expanding quickly as it burst through several seals and barriers before exploding, according to interviews with rig workers conducted during BP's internal investigation.

While the cause of the explosion is still under investigation, the sequence of events described in the interviews provides the most detailed account of the April 20 blast that killed 11 workers and touched off the underwater gusher that has poured more than 3 million gallons of crude into the Gulf.

Portions of the interviews, two written and one taped, were described in detail to an Associated Press reporter by Robert Bea, a University of California Berkeley engineering professor who serves on a National Academy of Engineering panel on oil pipeline safety and worked for BP PLC as a risk assessment consultant during the 1990s. He received them from industry friends seeking his expert opinion.

A group of BP executives were on board the Deepwater Horizon rig celebrating the project's safety record, according to the transcripts. Meanwhile, far below, the rig was being converted from an exploration well to a production well.

Based on the interviews, Bea believes that the workers set and then tested a cement seal at the bottom of the well. Then they reduced the pressure in the drill column and attempted to set a second seal below the sea floor. A chemical reaction caused by the setting cement created heat and a gas bubble which destroyed the seal.

rawstory.com...

news.yahoo.com...

I had heard about BO officials on boards just before the blast, but that came from GLP and since I couldn't find it anywhere else I discounted it.
This pretty much backs the claims that they were aboard up.

It's still either very suspicious, or very funny...in a sick sort of way...that BP officials were on board celebrating safety when it went up. Especially when none of the backup safety features worked either....

but methane can't just explode right?

Doesn't it need some kind of spark?

Originally posted by jacktherer
but methane can't just explode right?

Doesn't it need some kind of spark?

Yes. It does. None of this is official, as BP hasn't released any findings yet. However here is another excerpt from the above mentioned articals that describes some witnesses accounts.

"A small bubble becomes a really big bubble," Bea said. "So the expanding bubble becomes like a cannon shooting the gas into your face."

Up on the rig, the first thing workers noticed was the sea water in the drill column suddenly shooting back at them, rocketing 240 feet in the air, he said. Then, gas surfaced. Then oil.

"What we had learned when I worked as a drill rig laborer was swoosh, boom, run," Bea said. "The swoosh is the gas, boom is the explosion and run is what you better be doing."

The gas flooded into an adjoining room with exposed ignition sources, he said.

"That's where the first explosion happened," said Bea, who worked for Shell Oil in the 1960s during the last big northern Gulf of Mexico oil well blowout. "The mud room was next to the quarters where the party was. Then there was a series of explosions that subsequently ignited the oil that was coming from below."

According to one interview transcript, a gas cloud covered the rig, causing giant engines on the drill floor to run too fast and explode. The engines blew off the rig and set "everything on fire," the account said. Another explosion below blew more equipment overboard.

Once again from Wattsupwiththat

This time, form the comments section:

Robert Thomson says:
May 6, 2010 at 7:54 am

I am passing this on from someone who used to work for BP This well had been giving some problems all the way down and was a big discovery. Big pressure, 16ppg+ mud weight. They ran a long string of 7″ production casing – not a liner, the confusion arising from the fact that all casing strings on a floating rig are run on drill pipe and hung off on the wellhead on the sea floor, like a “liner”. They cemented this casing with lightweight cement containing nitrogen because they were having lost circulation in between the well kicking all the way down. The calculations and the execution of this kind of a cement job are complex, in order that you neither let the well flow from too little hydrostatic pressure nor break it down and lose the fluid and cement from too much hydrostatic. But you gotta believe BP had 8 or 10 of their best double and triple checking everything. On the outside of the top joint of casing is a seal assembly – “packoff” – that sets inside the subsea wellhead and seals. This was set and tested to 10,000 psi, OK. Remember they are doing all this from the surface 5,000 feet away. The technology is fascinating, like going to the moon or fishing out the Russian sub, or killing all the fires in Kuwait in 14 months instead of 5 years. We never have had an accident like this before so hubris, the folie d’grandeur, sort of takes over. BP were the leaders in all this stretching the envelope all over the world in deep water. This was the end of the well until testing was to begin at a later time, so a temporary “bridge plug” was run in on drill pipe to set somewhere near the top of the well below 5,000 ft. This is the second barrier, you always have to have 2, and the casing was the first one. It is not know if this was actually set or not. At the same time they took the 16+ ppg mud out of the riser and replaced it with sea water so that they could pull the riser, lay it down, and move off. When they did this, they of course took away all the hydrostatic on the well. But this was OK, normal, since the well was plugged both on the inside with the casing and on the outside with the tested packoff. But something turned loose all of a sudden, and the conventional wisdom would be the packoff on the outside of the casing. Gas and oil rushed up the riser; there was little wind, and a gas cloud got all over the rig. When the main inductions of the engines got a whiff, they ran away and exploded. Blew them right off the rig. This set everything on fire. A similar explosion in the mud pit / mud pump room blew the mud pumps overboard. Another in the mud sack storage room, sited most unfortunately right next to the living quarters, took out all the interior walls where everyone was hanging out having – I am not making this up – a party to celebrate 7 years of accident free work on this rig. 7 BP bigwigs were there visiting from town. The ones lost were the 9 rig crew on the rig floor and 2 mud engineers down on the pits. The furniture and walls trapped some and broke some bones but they all managed to get in the lifeboats with assistance from the others. The safety shut ins on the BOP were tripped but it is not clear why they did not work. This system has 4 way redundancy; 2 separate hydraulic systems and 2 separate electric systems should be able to operate any of the functions on the stack. They are tested every 14 days, all of them. (there is also a stab on the stack so that an ROV can plug in and operate it, but now it is too late because things are damaged). The well is flowing through the BOP stack, probably around the outside of the 7″ casing. As reported elsewhere, none of the “rams”, those being the valves that are suppose to close around the drill pipe and / or shear it right in two and seal on the open hole, are sealing. Up the riser and out some holes in it where it is kinked. A little is coming out of the drill pipe too which is sticking out of the top of the riser and laid out on the ocean floor. The volumes as reported by the media are not correct but who knows exactly how much is coming? 2 relief wells will be drilled but it will take at least 60 days to kill it that way. There is a “deep sea intervention vessel” on the way, I don’t know if that means a submarine or not, one would think this is too deep for subs, and it will have special cutting tools to try to cut off the very bottom of the riser on top of the BOP. The area is remarkably free from debris. The rig “Enterprise” is standing by with another BOP stack and a special connector to set down on top of the original one and then close. You saw this sort of thing in Red Adair movies and in Kuwait, a new stack dangling from a crane is just dropped down on the well after all the junk is removed. But that is not 5,000 ft underwater. One unknown is if they get a new stack on it and close it, will the bitch broach around the outside of all the casing?? In order for a disaster of this magnitude to happen, more than one thing has to go wrong, or fail. First, a #ty cement job. The wellhead packoff / seal assembly, while designed to hold the pressure, is just a backup. And finally, the ability to close the well in with the BOP somehow went away. A bad deal for the industry, for sure. Forget about California and Florida. Normal operations in the Gulf will be over regulated like the N. Sea. And so on.

The whole article and comments are worth spending time on. It ongoing, so updates all the time on this story from various proffesionals.

This is exactly what the op says, methane bubble, and the engines ignited the whole lot.

BP executives on board were celebrating 7 years accident free, at that precise moment. Thats eery.

Methane bubble my ass.

How many oil riggs operate in the world and this is the first time we hear such and explanation ?

How long did it take for them to "cook the story" before we heard this explanation.....weeks. why was this not mentioned before.

Oil drilling riggs are built to withstand extremely high pressure the oil under the surface exists at. Methane liquefies at 800 psi, well below the operating pressures of an oil well.

reply to post by webpirate


Methane deposits under the sea floor might represent a major danger if oceans warm enough to cause their release in large amounts. Existing for the most part as methane ice, methane is about 20 times more potent then Co2 as a greenhouse gas. It's believed the amount exceeds all other fossil fuels in volume and energy world wide. Not surprising given the oceans cover 70% of the planet.

What freaks me out about a methane deposit being ruptured by an oil well, or "percolating" up to the surface is the effect this has on buoyancy. With enough methane gas the water loses it's ability to keep a ship afloat. The result is a ship that can be in perfect working order, in calm seas, and it just sinks. No warning. For me, thats one of the most nerve wracking ways to go I can think of. Because one dies, and most likely has no idea why. It has been suggested many unexplained ship sinkings may have been caused by this. It would happen so fast a distress would not have been sent out. The Bermuda triangle is not considered a hot spot in this sense. Needless to we have barely explored the sea bed in that area. So the juries still out.

Also, some have suggested aircraft coming in contact with enough methane, engines would explode. I'm willing to bet that some sinkings may have been caused by this. But I would think for aircraft to be taken out this way, would also "gas" anyone on the plane But this might have happend. An aircraft taken down by this method, would not leave direct evidence to a salvage crew. Even if signs of a fire were seen, most likely they would have thought it was "just" an engine fire.

I'l post sources shortly.

reply to post by arbiture


Sorry I can't give you a direct thread, but google "Methane sinking ships"
"Methanes affect on water density",methane ice and the Bermuda triangle." Etc.

Mother earth is pissed off. That is what I see if this article is true.