Ana replaces John for SCS. Gov Jerry Brown has declared a state of emergency in Porter Ranch over a methane gas leak that has been going since October due to SoCal gas company’s broken pipe. Regulations are being proposed to lower the chances of this happening again. Ana points out that they should’ve implemented these regulations before disaster struck. Ohio’s Att General has dropped his lawsuit against PP over disposal procedures of their medical waste, which wasn’t conducted by the organization. The AG backed off of the lawsuit because Planned Parenthood went after him first, knowing they had legal ground to stand on. Bristol Palin is in the middle of a child custody and child support battle with her latest baby’s father. He’s asking for joint custody and child support now that the newborn is here. In response, Sarah Palin has lambasted the military veteran, questioning his heroism.
Texas zoos are grappling with a decision over whether to allow patrons to carry guns while visiting. The problem arises because firearms are allowed on gov’t property, but private businesses are allowed to ban it at their facilities. The zoos fall under to both scenarios. PETA challenged a photographer’s rights over a book that shows pictures taken by one primate that used his camera to take selfies. The court ruled against PETA, who wanted the picture rights to be given to the Macaque. A 31 year old cancer survivor is speaking out against internet ridicule of his picture that compared him to Steph Curry, on meth.
Comments
Do conservative politicians ever want to do something positive that all Americans care about? Like roads and bridges?
I doubt it, roads and bridges don’t kill people…unless they collapse, so I’d say they are in favor of underfunding infrastructure.
Mr or Mrs Jelly might have concerns with people handling the jelly that have poor hygiene skills. Maybe there are people in the office that use the same knife that they use for spreading jam to spread peanut butter. Now, at least one jar is corrupt, maybe both of them. And need I mention knife lickers and knife back scratchers?
I hope the knife back scratchers at least wipe of the knife before applying it to their backs. That could get messy.
Time stamp 2:40
Methane is nontoxic, yet it is extremely flammable and may form explosive mixtures with air. Methane is violently reactive with oxidizers, halogen, and some halogen-containing compounds. Methane is also an asphyxiant and may displace oxygen in an enclosed space.
Your sitting on a god damn bomb and your governor isn’t dong anything about it.
Light it on fire and the media (and hence the governor) will pay more attention to it. Plus it will stop the polluting of the atmosphere with methane. ^^
Methane has a molecular weight of 16 (one 12 for carbon and four 1s for hydrogen) so it is lighter than air, which is mostly N2, which has a molecular weight of 28 (two 14s). It will dissipate upwards except in a confined space. It has both a lower and upper explosive limit, meaning that it can be too concentrated to burn (upper explosive limit) in a normal atmosphere. If in the presence of a more concentrated oxygen source or other oxidizers, it would of course explode at higher concentrations. I was not aware of the asphyxiation hazard, but this is probably a displacement condition in which there is so much of the methane in the enclosed space that at one atmosphere of pressure the proportion of methane is so high that the proportion of other constituents is corresponding lower, including oxygen. You would have to confirm this as I didn’t look it up, but I think at one atmosphere that the number of air molecules in a volume is constant regardless of type, so an increase of one type displaces the other types. If this is not an exact relationship, it is at least partially correct as displacement is one of the factors OSHA training teaches about confined space hazards. I have not heard of direct toxicity, like carbon dioxide which at high concentrations paralyzes the respiratory system (Lake Nyos disaster in Nigeria).
There are additional gases being released, including hydrogen sulfide which is toxic in sufficient concentrations. This is the rotten egg smell at low concentrations. I recall some locals mentioning this in things I have read. At higher concentrations, it disables your ability to smell it and at higher concentrations it is toxic and can be fatal. I think it does paralyze the respiratory system, but I also did not look that up to confirm it. It certainly is fatal at sufficient concentrations and is heavier than air (molecular weight 34, one S at 32 and two Hs at 1 each). It has killed people in various places, such as Louisiana related to an oil well gas release. I think it was the hydrogen sulfide releases that caused the health problems with Chinese drywall, but again I did not look this up to confirm.
As with any release, it is the total amount and local concentrations that produce the effects for receptors. The receptors for the total amount are the atmosphere for global warming issues and possibly for acid rain from the hydrogen sulfide. For the local residents, determination of the distance for mandatory evacuation would be based on meteorological conditions combined with the characteristics of the release. The details of such evacuation planning mandated by state regulators are beyond my expertise. Self evacuation beyond the area requiring mandated evacuation is at the individual residents’ options.
The time required to shut off the release may be dependent on engineering or safety factors separate from simple indifference of the company responsible for the release. I don’t rule out the possibility of a lack of urgency in upper management and suspect that decisions were made for cost limiting reasons before the piping failure produced the release that made the release more likely. There is also a corporate culture issue of the relative responsibilities and lower-level manager evaluation procedures that can affect how well maintenance and other engineering issues with infrequent or low probability impacts are addressed. However, once the physical conditions were in place that resulted in the failure of piping, you now have an engineering problem of how to address this.
I know too little about this to be sure, but assume the failure occurred underground and has blown out the grout (cement around the vertical casing) above the break. I don’t work in this industry, so have to speculate, possibly incorrectly, on how they would approach this. There is currently no fire at the well head, so this area could potentially be approached by workers using supplied air and special non-sparking tools and special expertise (and possibly a death wish) for evaluation and possible remedial work. This is an OSHA IDLH situation (Immediately dangerous to life or health), and will probably be done by specialist firms that deal with oil well fires and such emergencies. They would approach from the upwind side and have to determine the pressure of the gas release that has to be shut off unless records already exist from activities prior to the release. If the pressure is low enough, they may be able to put a heavy cap over the well, similar in concept to the one lowered over the Macondo well. However, if the well casing is missing near the ground surface (blown out), blocking gas flow out the existing hole will cause gas pressure to rise to the maximum in the reservoir and unless the surrounding soil or rock is strong and heavy enough, the gas pressure will blow out through this outside the area weighted by the cap. It is mostly the weight of the soil or rock plug that can resist such a blow out and it doesn’t take much gas pressure to lift this.
When I was drilling shallow geotechnical borings at a site in Arkansas coastal plain stiff clays, we used an air rotary rig. This pumped air down the drill pipe that lifted the cuttings generated by the bit to the ground surface, because you can only drill a hole by removing the stuff that was in it as you break it up with the bit. If you don’t successfully remove these cuttings continuously, they will lock up your bit and drill string and you can’t get them out of the hole, let alone drill the hole. At one point, we briefly did have the cuttings jam in the hole (called “bridging”) so they could not get out. This occurred probably around 20 feet down, I don’t remember as this occurred in 1974. The pressure build up quickly caused a burp of compressed air that lifted us and the entire drill rig as the air propagated cracks along a cone upward from the blockage. In that case, it was a minor blockage that the driller remedied by backing off the bit. I don’t know the pressure of the compressor in that case, but it was much less than the pressure of the current blowout. The force exerted by gas is the product of the gas pressure multiplied by the surface area of the crack it creates, and may both propagate a crack and lift a conical mass to bypass a simple weight placed over the well. Once a crack starts upwards (has greater pressure than the confining pressure in the soil or rock) its pressure does not decrease significantly as the gas rises, but the confining pressure of soil or rock is derived from the weight above it, and this decreases as the depth decreases.
If the release cannot be blocked directly over the well because the gas pressure is too high and well casing is no longer present, then the other option is to drill an angle hole from a distance that is guided to intercept the well at depth and block it there. That was done at the Macondo well in the Gulf. For this to work, you have to have on record an accurate survey of the location of the well and a downhole log that mapped the position of the casing all the way down, because the hole deviates from vertical (wobbles) to some degree due to various drilling reasons. This well is a very small target to hit with an angle hole, so unless you know exactly where you are trying to go, you don’t have much chance of getting there.
The downhole well position or orientation log is a special probe lowered into a borehole on a cable that descends due to its own weight and tracks the depth, tilt and other factors that maps to position of the borehole throughout the depth logged. It is possible that such a log may have previously been run at an intermediate stage of drilling the well, and thus would be on record, but this could only be done if all the drill rods and bit were removed from the hole temporarily to allow this, say during grouting of an intermediate casing. I don’t know whether this would have been done at this well for the interval including the location of the casing break. I also don’t know that such a downhole position log could be run now in the present hole against the drag of the upward flowing gas, as that would tend to lift such a probe rather than allowing it to move downward due to the probe’s weight and whether the shaking of the probe by turbulence as the gas rushes past it might also preclude such logging under present conditions. If the well with the gas release was in the process of being drilled, such a downhole log may not have been done yet. Once a hypothetical angle hole hits the well, they would then have to pump in a fluid dense enough to overwhelm the gas pressure and block off the release.
My speculation on what they will need to do to shut off the release is based on a modest knowledge of what is done by oil field and drilling engineers. Those are specialized fields and I have not studied the details of their procedures. I present my speculation to simply show that having a projected date to shut off the discharge may well reflect the engineering constraints of the task rather than simple indifference of the management. Management would definitely be paying attention now and it is costing them both money and a public relations hit. Blocking the well will not be cheap or easy. The time required involves both characterization of the physical conditions at the well, mobilizing specialized personnel, equipment, and resources needed, and then the time needed to implement them. Another possible time factor may be a need to allow the pressure at the well head to decrease with time, as the release proceeds, because the current pressure is too great for available methods to block. I doubt this latter is the case, because I doubt that the release pressure would drop quickly enough for this to be useful, but again I am speculating outside my expertise.