Deepwater Oil Spill - mud motors and PDC bits

Tonight’s post will largely deal with the development of two tools, the mud motor and the drill, which will allow John Wright to make the co...

Deepwater Oil Spill - making the connection

The Deepwater Horizon relief well is approaching the point where it will intersect the original well bore. At the moment production is bein...

Deepwater Oil Spill - closing in on the well

Well with Alex trundling off towards Mexico , the second area of concern having dissipated, and the two +3 earthquakes in Iceland being Nor...

Coal Mining - robbing the pillars

In recent posts I have written about room and pillar mining, where the miners drive tunnels through the relatively horizontal coal seam, unt...

Deepwater Oil Spill - a little more progress

Travelling today we discovered that all the hotels in Urbana are full, due to a softball tournament, so this will be short. One thing that ...

Deepwater Oil Spill - Weather looks worse, as the solar race goes on

The weather situation in the Gulf is getting a little worse, as the National Hurricane Center has now classified the wave I have been writi...

Deepwater Oil Spill - Future storms, current production, the relief well and the car race

Perhaps the most worrying thing that has happened in the past 24-hours is the change in designated color of the storm moving through the Car...

Deepwater Oil Spill - Problems with the LMRP cap

BP issued a press release this morning that read: NEW ORLEANS -- This morning at approximately 8:45 a.m. CDT, a discharge of liquids was...

Deepwater Oil Spill - Entering the old well, and the solar car race

UPDATE 3 pm: I have looked at the fuller comments that were apparently made at the phone conference this morning about the need to remove th...

Deepwater Oil Spill - The Admiral on casing and connections, and an update or two

I am following a number of different events this week, and so today is as much a set of updates, as anything. Firstly the oil in the Gulf. ...

Deepwater Oil Spill - Improving the Clean-up

Flow recovery update from the Gulf: For the first 12 hours on June 20 (midnight to noon), approximately 6,790 barrels of oil were collected ...