It reads like a script from some eco-disaster summer blockbuster movie. A 20 square mile methane gas bubble under astronomically high pressures is trapped deep below the surface of the earth. Along comes a greedy mega-corporation seeking more billions of dollars from extracting the oil trapped with the methane and it drills into the reservoir, ignoring warnings that its safety measures aren’t up to snuff. Suddenly, the well explodes, destroyed by a rupture to the pipeline. Government and company heads frantically attempt to assure everyone that everything is all under control.
Except it’s not.
You see, a new frightening possibility has recently been making its way around the internet sparked by a worst case scenario that the methane bubble trapped beneath the Deep Water Horizion site is so large and under so much pressure that it just might explosively erupt from the ocean bed creating a tsunami of monstrous proportions that literally kills millions of animals from the species homo sapiens.
I know this sounds like science fiction, but could it be science fact? Not according to DK Matai, of the Asymmetric Threats Contingency Alliance (ACTA), who has envisioned the real nightmare that may (and I stress may) be keeping members of the Obama administration up at night hoping that BP hasn’t unleashed the worst eco-catastrophe since — ever:
(cont.)
More than a year ago, geologists expressed alarm in regard to BP and Transocean putting their exploratory rig directly over this massive underground reservoir of methane. Warnings were raised before the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe that the area of seabed chosen might be unstable and inherently dangerous. […]
… So far, over 8 billion cubic feet [of methane] may have been released, making it one of the most vigorous methane eruptions in modern human history. If the estimates of 100,000 barrels a day — that have emerged from a BP internal document — are true, then the estimates for methane gas release might have to be doubled. […]
… Some speculate that the pressure of the methane at the base of the well head, deep under the ocean floor, may be as high as 100,000 psi — far too much for current technology to contain. The shutoff valves and safety measures were only built for thousands of psi at best. There is no known device to cap a well with such an ultra high pressure. […]
According to geologists, the first signs that the methane may burst its way through the bottom of the ocean would be manifest via fissures or cracks appearing on the ocean floor near the path of least resistance, ie, the damaged well head. Evidence of fissures opening up on the seabed have been captured by the robotic midget submarines working to repair and contain the ruptured well. Smaller, independent plumes have also appeared outside the nearby radius of the bore hole. When reviewing video tapes of the live BP feeds, one can see in the tapes of mid-June that there is oil spewing up from visible fissions. Geologists are pointing to new fissures and cracks that are appearing on the ocean floor. […]
A methane bubble this large — if able to escape from under the ocean floor through fissures, cracks and fault areas — is likely to cause a gas explosion. With the emerging evidence of fissures, the tacit fear now is this: the methane bubble may rupture the seabed and may then erupt with an explosion within the Gulf of Mexico waters. The bubble is likely to explode upwards propelled by more than 50,000 psi of pressure, bursting through the cracks and fissures of the sea floor, fracturing and rupturing miles of ocean bottom with a single extreme explosion.
What would happen then? Matai suggests that if a large methane bubble does explode it could create a tsunami traveling at hundreds of miles an hour and over 100 feet high straight for the coastlines of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida, with Florida being the most at risk because its elevation is so low.
The gas cloud itself that emerges from the eruption would be highly toxic killing everything within its immediate vicinity. A second catastrophic event could then follow upon the first as the result of vaporization of water rushing in to the giant fissures created by the initial explosion:
After several billion barrels of oil and billions of cubic feet of gas have been released, the massive cavity beneath the ocean floor will begin to normalise, allowing freezing water to be forced naturally into the huge cavity where the oil and gas once were. The temperature in that cavity can be extremely hot at around 150 degrees celsius or more. The incoming water will be vaporised and turned into steam, creating an enormous force, which could actually lift the Gulf floor. According to computer models, a second massive tsunami wave might occur.
Is this scenario unlikely. Well, in the words of Matai, while it was very unlikely during the initial stages of the disaster, as time goes on “the risk increases, this low probability high impact scenario ought not to be ignored …”
So these are the question I would like anyone in the media to ask. Will you ask BP and government officials the following:
What planning if anything for such a worst case event has been set in motion?
How do the BP and government geologists and other scientists with access to the data involving the leak and the extremely high amounts of methane found in the Gulf (up to 40% of all the “product” that has poured out into the Gulf) assess the risk of such a massive explosion of methane from the reservoir underlying the Deep Water Horizon site?
What is the scientific basis for that assessment?
And who warned BP that they were playing Russian Roulette by drilling at such depths into such a large reservoir of natural gas under pressures which might equal up to 100,000 psi (pounds per square inch)?
I for one would like to know.
Update [2010-6-25 21:13:11 by Steven D]: From the bio of DK Matai at Huffington Post:
DK Matai is an engineer turned entrepreneur, investor and philanthropist with a keen interest in the well being of global society. DK founded mi2g in 1995, the global risk specialists, in London, UK, whilst developing simulations for his PhD at Imperial College. DK helped found ATCA – The Asymmetric Threats Contingency Alliance – in 2001, a philanthropic expert initiative to address complex global challenges through Socratic dialogue and joint executive action to build a wisdom based global economy. ATCA addresses opportunities and threats arising from climate chaos, radical poverty, organised crime, extremism, informatics, nanotechnology, robotics, genetics, artificial intelligence and financial systems. ATCA has 5,000+ distinguished members from over 100 countries: including several from the House of Lords, House of Commons, EU Parliament, US Congress & Senate, G10’s Senior Government officials and over 1,500 CEOs from financial institutions, scientific corporates, NGOs and 750+ Profs from academic centres of excellence.
Further information about him can be viewed at this link:
I read this blog… I like you folks.
But please… seriously.
I am a geologist, i’ve worked in offshore drilling both for science and for industry. I am as green, and as red as you can get in this country and not be in jail.
This scenario is so implausible as to be patently, egregiously, stupendously ridiculous.
Basic issue: methane will not form “bubbles” 12,000 feet beneath the surface of the earth. Methane is a gas, and gas is compressible. It will compress. When it compresses, it will be dissolved into available fluids (water and oil). Gas under immense pressure has much higher chemical reactivity, so that methane (already a reactive chemical) will eagerly combine with any substance that has available oxygen (or sulfur or carbon or phosphorous or chlorine or whatever).
There are no giant underground bubbles.
Hopefully you are correct because if you’re not, and if this happens, one has to wonder the impact on the rest of the rigs sharing the Gulf which I will admit is a catastophe beyond my imagination to comprehend.
all the stuff coming out of the BOP right now looks like a liquid… yet the ratio of gas to oil at the surface collection point is between 2500 and 5000 to 1…
What that means is that the gas is coming out of solution as the pressure decreases.
The pressure decrease from the bottom of the ocean to the surface is one thing… and the pressure decrease from 12,000 feet below the ocean floor is another thing entirely.
There are no “bubbles” of anything. In fact, even the oil reservoir itself is not a giant cavity filled with oil.
It is a permeable sandstone with lots of pore space and connections between pore spaces. Those spaces are filled with oil, and the oil is under immense pressure… the gas is dissolved into the oil.
When the oil flows to the surface, the pressure is released and the gas comes out of solution. Kinda like when you shake a cola and pop the top off.
If you were to heft a chunk of that permeable sandstone at the surface, even in its “pristine” state, it would not actually leak a whole lot of oil.
There is a serious problem with the way these systems are explained and understood. The pictures you see on tv, the diagrams and cartoons you see in explanatory articles… most of then are pure nonsense… and that nonsense lends itself well to the kind of baseless fearmongering that this “engineer” is capitalizing on over at HuffPo.
Thanks. I was doing some Googling on the company mentioned in Steven’s post and upfront apology for not getting a link to bring home, but the company seems to the center of more than one controversy.
Trouble with this whole mess is that alot of the best minds on the planet are working on fixing it and coming up frustrated. Add to that BP’s lack of transparency and we’re all waiting for the next shoe to drop.
Just the name of it was a clue. I’m betting they like to think about possible worst case scenarios. There’s nothing wrong with that, it’s not like I haven’t gamed out the consequences of a zombie attack or climate collapse and these guys are just doing it with the spill.
But a methane explosion is by definition the least likely event to happen and frankly I’m not sure there’s much anyone can do.
RedDan how long can the well go on unchecked? Say the relief wells do not work. Will it spew oil for one or a 100 years? I have never heard anyone talk about it.
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A “bottom kill” is vastly easier and is what the relief wells are about. Unfortunately for that to work the relief well must intersect an 8 ¾” diameter well bore 3 miles underground in the dark. It has been and can be done, but the deep intersection is necessary so that the enormous bottomhole reservoir pressure can be offset with heavy drilling fluid. The drilling mud will then displace the oil and gas from the bottom rather than try to force somewhere it doesn’t want to go. Once the heavy fluid balances the bottomhole pressure then cement can be put into place that once set up will end the need for the heavy fluid.
Graph of drilling 2 relief wells intercepting original wellbore
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."
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From the following article: Methane Hydrates: The Planet’s Largest Single Carbon Sink?
(Goddard Space Flight Center) – A tremendous release of methane gas frozen beneath the sea floor heated the Earth by up to 13 degrees Fahrenheit (7 degrees Celsius) 55 million years ago, a new NASA study confirms. NASA scientists used data from a computer simulation of the paleo-climate to better understand the role of methane in climate change. While most greenhouse gas studies focus on carbon dioxide, methane is 20 times more potent as a heat-trapping gas in the atmosphere.
Map of hydrocarbon seeps
Gas hydrates from the deep Gulf of Mexico
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."
In the Ergo Proxy anime, the Methane Hydrate layer blew up as a way of creating the post-apocalyptic situation.
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Earth’s surface veneer of seafloor sediment and extrusive volcanic rock represents the most recent snapshot of geologic time. Beneath that veneer, buried in sedimentary sections and the underlying crust, is a rich history of the waxing and waning of glaciers, the creation and aging of oceanic lithosphere, the evolution and extinction of
microorganisms and the building and erosion of continents.
More than thirty years of scientific ocean drilling have explored this history in increasing detail, revealing the complexity of the processes that control crustal formation, earthquake generation, ocean circulation and chemistry, and global climate change. Drilling has also revealed that deep within marine sediments, rock pore spaces and rock fractures is an active environment where ocean water circulates, microbes thrive and natural resources accumulate.
Executice summary with graphic of earth system processes [pdf]
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."
Hi there…
yes, methane hydrates, or gas clathrates (more specific and accurate term) are real and are a huge carbon reservoir. No question.
Clathrates exist throughout the continental shelf regions of the world ocean and are a “meta-stable solid” – basically methane molecules frozen into a solid matrix within a quite narrow pressure/temperature range.
Clathrates quickly dissociate once outside their pressure-temperature range, and generally exist at very shallow levels in the seafloor sediments.
They are not highly concentrated in any one place, but exist as thin stringers of solid clathrate or as disseminated, low-concentration layers of sand or volcanic ash with clathrates in the pore spaces.
The only reason why clathrates are not being exploited for gas resources as we speak is exactly because they are so widely disseminated, rather than concentrated, and because they are solid, rather than liquid or gas, at that temp/pressure.
A single drill hole, badly drilled or not, cannot release much in the way of gas from the clathrate layers, because they simply do not intersect a large enough volume of them.
The greater danger from clathrates is if the world oceans change temperature or depth enough to destabilize a large volume of methane ice (as is currently happening in Siberia)… or if some moron at an oil company decides to try strip-mining the continental shelf.
Thank you for piping up. I’m 9 feet above sea level on the west coast of Florida, and this post was seriously scaring the crap out of me.
If there is gas near you that is to be mined, now THAT would scare me, see GASLAND.
If I lived in a state with a completely caving housing market, that would scare me.
If a I lived in an area that gets crushed by hurricanes every decade or so, that would scare me.
Given all those more common threats that you deal with, what’s a one-in-a-million chance of a giant tsunami?
Rock on, brave soul, and I hope your water and land avoid all of this ‘doom and plume’ stuff, as well as all of the above ‘usual’ threats.
If the only difference between what there is (giant ‘deposits’ of methane and highly reactive/volatile stuff) and what this group talks about is some journalist’s use of the word ‘bubble’, then I hardly see your point.
For example, these aren’t baloon-like bubbles waiting to be popped:
Geology plus human activity is no longer the stable, predictable, ‘slow’ system you describe.
Are we trying to say there is no chain reaction, no series of physical events, no stupid human trick that couldn’t trigger a massive physical event that would result in Tsunami? It’s odd it couldn’t happen here, although it has happened all over the world.
I know rocks don’t move fast, but as far as I know geology is still science and good science doesn’t talk with this sort of certainty about theories of what is in the vast hidden depths of the Earth.
So, there are those who think if the relief wells fail we should just nuke the well, as the Russians have in the past? That might happen. In that case, would you want to start considering the sea of fuel down there? Or even the collapse of the sea floor due to destruction of these porous structures and the expansion of materials moving from solid to liquid due to temperature change or chemical reaction due to ‘much higher chemical reactivity’ at these pressures. Do we REALLY know that much about how nukes and giant non-bubbles of fuel react?
That’s all this guy’s outfit is doing – gaming out the extremes. They don’t seem to be asking for anything more than consideration of this scenario or that. The fact that some journalist’s interpretation of his folks’ work into a 4th grade reading level (using ‘bubble’, replete with it’s recent pejorative meaning) is no longer super accurate doesn’t matter that much compared to the fact we SHOULD be considering doomsday scenarios as we confront doomsday.
Or we can just trust the knowledge and systems that have got us here, because there are obviously sound (ugh. sarcasm. so sorry.) and one’s closes held assumptions can never be the log in one’s eye, right?
Have we not learned that our own shallow hubris is our worst enemy of all?
Please do not misconstrue:
There are plenty of clear and present dangers, this catastrophe, irresponsible drilling and fracking, and any number of ridiculously stupid things going on…
As a professional geologist with experience on drillships and in oil companies, and with intimate knowledge of these systems, I know full well what the various risks and dangers are. I know full well just how criminally irresponsible BP was, and how stupid the current method of gas extraction is.
However, I also know full well that hyper-alarmist, reactionary, apocalypse porn like the linked article are irresponsible and completely useless.
Why do we insist on spreading panic, running around screaming that the sky is falling and that all is coming to a horrible end — things are bad enough, the spill is bad enough, the current state of affairs is bad enough: why do we need nightmare doomsday scenarios that have no connection to reality?
We don’t.
So you know what BP knows. That’s more than me, but I can tell you here and now, anyone who ‘knows’ how the geology a mile under the sea ‘works’ might want to voluntarily take their confidence level down a notch consider a little doomsday ‘porn’ that isn’t produced by BP or the gov’t before we nuke this damn hole..
Have you checked out the geologists who worked on this bit of research or is it an assumption that it’s novice hype because it seems outlandish?
Let me put it this way, when the 1 in a trillion chance that a giant rock is about to hit the Earth tomorrow comes true, would you rather we not have thought about what to do or would you want that one missile at the ready, JIC?
If considering how to protect what is left of the gulf when Lady Fortune doubles down on the doomsday is porn, then so be it. I am glad someone is considering it and if they believe there is even a .1% chance of something that nasty, I hope it stays in the conversation until there is no chance. BP and the MMS might have been right to be less confident and open to spending money on preventing even remote possibilities of catastrophe.
(just as an aside, I thought ‘Red’ means you are commie or a Repug, not a Dem, who are ‘Blue’ because some news organization back in the day didn’t want to imply they were commies because they were left of the Repugs..)
I’m a commie, hence the “Red”
I’m a geologist, worked on both scientific and industrial drilling rigs, and study tectonics, structure, sedimentation, and so forth.
The most damning, criminal, disgusting part of this whole business is that (and anyone honest in “the biz” or in academia will echo this) BP, their geologists, geophysicists, engineers and so forth know damn well, and knew damn well what the risks and hazards were. They cut corners so criminally that I cannot believe that they won’t go to jail … well… who am I kidding. Of course they won’t.
bleah.
Anyway, my point is this: deepwater drilling, onshore hydrofracking in gas shales and for coalbed methane, and so on and so forth: ALL of these methods could be practiced in ways that have essentially 0 environmental impact. I’ve seen it done, and I’ve done it myself: you set up, you drill, you case, you cement, you pump, you produce, you finish, you kill, you cement, you cap, and you go home… and the only way you could find that drill site is with a metal detector. It really can be done.
The problem is that doing things that way cuts into the profit margin. So it isn’t done.
If that fossilized sunlight is so critically important to our species that we must risk so much to get it, then why the hell is it being left to greedy, lazy, negligent fools to try and get it?
ALL of this, of course, completely avoids the main issue, which is that regardless of how big this particular spill is… we burn 100’s of times more oil than that well is spilling… and we do that every day. We’re putting more carbon into the atmosphere every DAY than this entire well will put into the oceans and atmosphere over the entire lifespan of this spill.
And, again… please, please, there is no need to latch onto apocalyptic fantasies and errant nonsense: this situation is already bad enough without crazed theories about multiple mega-tsunamis with giant poison gas clouds. The stuff in that article is just plain wrong. Not “under debate” not “unknown”… wrong.
The things discussed in the linked article are based on incorrect understanding of basic physics, geology, and chemistry. The earth does not work like that.
Thanks for the sanity. I was a little worried until I saw this was the work of a lone former engineer (not a geologist) and had nothing to do with scientific consensus.
Do you have a blog of some sort? I’m interested in informed commentary on what’s going on.
This leaking oil is just a complete disaster for human, wildlife and the entire earth. We need to do everything we can in order to end this crisis and make sure such horrible mistakes won’t happen again.