COLUMN: How to kill the well from hell: A proposal from one scientist

Yes, we’ve all been assured that this couldn’t possibly happen — a deepwater well gone wild, its effluent threatening coastal wetlands and beaches, and the prospect of stopping the gusher still lying several months in the future.  And no, I personally have never been a big advocate of deepwater drilling, because there seem to be a number of friendlier ways to satisfy our nation’s appetite for energy. 

So please don’t tag me as an oil zealot because of what I’m writing here.

But I did happen to notice that the Coast Guard posted a solicitation for possible solutions to the crisis.  As a former physics professor, of course, I couldn’t resist.  I wrote a proposal and sent it to them. 

My solution? Freeze it using liquid helium.

Okay, there’s a bit more to my idea than that. The fundamental problem, it turns out, isn’t how to seal off the drillpipe.  Everyone knows how to do that.  You inject a couple of plugs of wet cement separated by a column of drilling mud, and when the cement hardens, the pipe has been sealed.  Later, the well can be reopened by drilling out the plugs.  It’s done all the time.  British Petroleum already had the equipment on hand and was about to do exactly that when the well blew out.

Once you have a violent blowout, however, and the riser pipe is also gone (lying kinked up on the Gulf floor along with the wrecked drilling platform), there is no longer any simple way to force in wet cement against the extreme pressure of the oil gushing from the wellhead.  Remember BP’s “junk shot” attempt?  The engineers were attempting to shoot golf balls and bits of rubber into the wellhead to temporarily dam up the flow.  And if that had succeeded, then they would have followed up that stoppage with their conventional permanent cement plugs.

In other words, it’s all about temporarily stopping the flow.  And the technology does exist to insert a variety of materials into the wellhead.  BP just wasn’t prepared to inject the right stuff.

My proposal is to inject something really cold — cold enough to get the oil to congeal and block its own flow.  The substance that is guaranteed to accomplish this is liquid helium, which is at a temperature of just a few degrees above absolute zero. (Some less-exotic substances like liquid nitrogen might also work, but they’re more iffy.)

Yes, liquid helium is quite expensive.  But nowhere near as expensive as the daily damage caused by the current spill.

Liquid helium has several unique properties that are perfectly suited to BP’s wild-well problem.  First, it is a “superfluid,” which means it flows with zero viscosity.  This will allow it to be easily injected deep into the wellpipe through a narrow tube.  Secondly, liquid helium naturally flows from cold places toward warm places.  Although the gushing oil is cold by human standards, it’s quite toasty by liquid helium standards, so that’s where the liquid helium will want to go. Finally, liquid helium is an extremely good conductor of heat — about 100 times as conductive as copper, for instance.  This means that a stream of liquid helium will quickly suck heat out of the oil flow and immediately freeze that oil in place.

 Yes, of course this frozen oil will eventually thaw.  But by that time, the BP engineers can complete their conventional concrete plugging.  All they need is to get the gusher stopped just long enough for the concrete to set.

Okay, there you have it. Not only will this procedure seal the current wild well, but it can be a backup system for every offshore well that is ever drilled in the future.

And what does the U.S. Coast Guard think of my great idea?  Two weeks later, I’m still waiting to hear.

Oh, well…

Dr. Ernest Zebrowski is a former physics professor and author of seven books on applied science and disasters.  His eighth book, which deals with global climate change, is scheduled for release this fall.  Dr. Zebrowski lives on St. George Island and is an occasional resident of Miramar Beach.