Uncle Guido Has Ideas About the BP Oil Spill. LET'S FIX IT!!!

Hi to all reading this message.
Most of you probably know by now that BP's latest attempt at plugging the run away oil well has failed. It sounds like they really don't have much hope of shutting it off any time soon. So, that's where my idea comes in. Actually, I heard another engineer from Germany proposing a version of this idea on a radio talk show two weeks age. His idea was dismissed as the host was most interested in getting him to quote Schwarzenegger. It is no matter who gets the credit, just let's get it plugged. The idea is to put a nitrogen freeze plug on the pipe. Being a retired nuclear engineer, I am quite familiar with this process. We use it all the time to block off large pipes leading to the reactor when we have to cut into a line to do repairs. Draining the water out of a nuclear reactor is something you don't want to do, so we know from much experience that this works. Basically what we do is wrap a coil of tubing around the outside of the pipe to be frozen and run liquid nitrogen through tubing for an hour or so. At minus 370 some degrees, it doesn't take long for the water to be frozen, forming a water tight plug. then we can cut into the pipe downstream of the plug to do our repair work.

The situation at the bottom of the Gulf is a little different, since very little of the line we need to isolate is sticking up out of the ocean bed, but since the end is already open, instead of putting the coil around the outside, the robots they have down there could be used to insert a loop of nitrogen piping down into the throat of the pipe as far as they can possibly get it. Then it's simply a matter of pumping the liquid nitrogen through this loop as long as it takes to form an ice (actually frozen oil) plug. The time it takes to do that is just a function of the surface area of the nitrogen tubing, the flowrate of the oil and the flowrate of the nitrogen, but it will do the job. We know from the many different piping configurations that nitrogen freeze plugs have been used successfully in the past. The last failed solution offered an inkling to this possibility. That plan was the 100 ton top hat that engineers placed over the busted pipe. The idea was to collect the oil in this big concrete box as it exited the pipe and then direct it through an outlet pipe from the box, to tankers on the surface. Well, why this failed was because hydrocarbon gases in the oil separated from the oil at the exit from the box and began to freeze due to the very low temperatures at these ocean depths. And we're only talking about temperatures of around 32 degrees folks, not minus 376 degrees. so the nitrogen will work. We just need somebody in a position of authority to pick up the ball and run with this idea as another approach if what they are doing next (putting a heated, smaller box over the broken well pipe) fails.

So this is where you all come in. Let's use this fantastic new social networking device to flood the people in charge of this environmental nightmare with requests, no scratch that, with demands that they put a team of engineers together to work out all the details of installing a freeze plug, should the revised top hat approach fail and have it ready to go immediately if not sooner. If after reading this and you agree with me that it's worth a try and know somebody who knows somebody who knows somebody who could get message into the ear of someone who could make it happen, I urge you to forward this to that someone. I thank you in advance for all the pelicans and oysters who are too busy trying to keep their young from dying to send you this message themselves.

Warmly,
Charles Edwards

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