Archive for category Other Topics

Why we hate BP

Update on my post from yesterday is as follows. I have submitted my suggestion to BP through the process defined by them. However, they made it so difficult and bureaucratic, that I nearly gave up.

First, they wouldn’t allow anything but a US phone number in their electronic form, and with all the bells and whistles they had turned on it, it couldn’t be read by anything other than the latest version of acrobat.

Second, their form assumed I wanted to sell them something, despite being named a suggestion form. There were boxes for me to give all kinds of details on the parts or service I had, but no space for just a free form dump of the free and constructive suggestion I had.

So, I hacked their electronic form, got the email addy they could have just posted online, and now I will just sit back and “Wait for a response on your suggestion from BP, as we have received over 4000 and each will take some time to technically review”.

OK, thanks I will do that, you evil cocks

What is a dynamic plug?

I have been wanting to post on the BP catastrophe for some time, but had to clear the decks of work first.

What I am going to start with is a proposal for a fix. I reckon if the US government can get a movie director in for ideas on how to plug the well in the short term, perhaps they could use a suggestion from an engineer. I am not sure my fix will work, but I think it has a chance. In another post, I will deal with fixing the bigger issue with BP itself.

OK, so to start, I would try to stop the flow with what I will call a dynamic plug, a valve that will only activate after being inserted deep inside the well, and activated by a column of drilling mud at plug flow (or in a flow regime with a sufficiently high Reynolds number that it the velocity in the cross sectional flow is uniform, literally like a cylindrical plug of liquid coming down the tube)

To build the dynamic plug, I would start with something they have already tried somewhat successfully, the siphon tube. Before they tried the top kill, they stuck a flexible tube down the well bore and were sucking out an amount of the oil flow to pump to the surface. I would do that again, but this time I would attach to the tube a couple of expandable cones to the shaft of the tube, about a metre back from the end of it. It would look like this:
plug collapsed
The front expandable positioning (EP) cone would be flow through mesh, or just a cage that would position the siphon tube in the centre of the well casing. I would expand this when I was ready to make the attempt, after starting to pump mud down the hole, but before the mud reached the dynamic plug assembly, like this:
positioner open
Then, just as the plug flow of mud reached the dynamic plug, the rear expandable cone would be released from its closed position and would snap into place to seal the well and the dense mud flow behind it would hold the well closed until the well could be permanently plugged with cement above the dynamic plug. A tube with an inflatable end (like used in an angioplasty) might also work.
plug open
The key is that the plug it self doesn’t have to be strong enough to stop the flow of oil, but instead ust form the seal for the mass of mud that will hold it in place.

I would insert the tube down the well head through the blow-out preventer (BOP) and far enough into the well that I could pump mud down behind the siphon tube at a fast enough rate that the mud would reach plug flow, and also far enough down the well that the mass of mud behind the dynamic plug would be able to hold in the pressure of the reservoir:
insertion

Rants at 140 per go

Hey, for anyone following out there, I also want to let you know that I have also setup a twitter account – @willthiel (because some SOB had already taken SgtHulka).

So, when I don’t have time to do a nice full considered and researched rant, I can always have a mini spew of up to 140 characters.

Most of the first have to do with the BP leak, as I am paying quite a bit of attention to that recently.

[Bloom Box], Things which are probably bullshit . . .

. . . as our friends at Hungry Beast say. But hey, nobody does a launch of an 18 year old technology like the yanks. A former NASA scientist (to make it sound more sexy, no doubt) has brought us the trendily named Bloom Box, claiming it to be the big thing after ten years of development. Ah, unfortunately, not.

Oh, he has got a planar design, solid oxide fuel cell in those fridge size boxes, to be sure. The problem is, they aren’t new, having been first begun commercialisation in 1992 by companies such as Ceramic Fuel Cells Limited here in Australia, or UTC in America. These companies actually sell now what this bloke is saying you can have soon for $800k and hopefully for $3000 in a few years. Hell, the Australian company had their piece of kit doing demo work on top of the old office I had in the technology park back in 2000.

I don’t know exactly what CFCL sells their piece of kit at, and to my knowledge they are still only selling them to small companies, with a consumer product to be available “sometime in 2010”. My guess is that CFCL would probably offer their unit at a cost a bit less than what Bloom is saying for a similar sized application for small businesses. The big difference is that if you call CFCL or UTC, they actually have something to install when they take your money.

In my opinion, Bloom’s entrepreneur is most likely a hype merchant so insignificant I won’t even look up his name. My suspicions were raised when I first heard his release where he says he has some “proprietary software” that is the key to his Bloom Box. Uh huh, and mine has magic beans.

According to reputable news agencies on science and technology (National Geographic News), based on the information the company has made public, the Bloom Box technology is not revolutionary. They quote Friedrich Prinz, a fuel cell expert at Stanford University, the design of the Bloom Box appears to be fairly standard and that there was nothing obviously revolutionary about it. “They didn’t reveal any new physics or any new principles, but I don’t think they need to do that,” he said.

Note the end of the professor’s statement. What he means by “they don’t need to do that” is that solid oxide fuel cell technology is exciting and very interesting. It’s essentially “burning” something, but not in the physical sense, more in the chemical sense, through a reactor that can be coated onto thin plates. It’s basically a chemical engineer’s wet dream, so I will go on, or you can do your own research elsewhere. The heart of the fuel cell is a high rate chemical battery that produces the electricity

Solid Oxide Fuel Cell

You feed it the same type of stuff you feed an internal combustion engine (methane and air) and it produces electricity (only in DC form as opposed to AC) and it also produces waste heat you can recover at high temperature for other use (like heating water for your house). But the cost of the fuel cell to manufacture is pretty high, because the methane you use to feed it is just a good source of what you really want to feed it – hydrogen. So you basically have to put a miniature stripper and reformer on the front of the rig. Plus, coating the anodes and cathodes of the reactor and getting them spaced out exactly as you require is expensive assembly work.

However, the real current manufacturers (CFCL and UTC) of solid oxide fuel cells do intend to get their equipment down in cost for home application in the next year. And then let them work the kinks out of the technology at their demonstration plants and then we will see whether I will be buying one for my back yard.

But you know, probably I will anyway just to mess around with it. Either that, or I am starting the home nuclear reactor this year. Besides, all the cool kids will have one. I thought so enough at the depth of the financial crisis that I started buying stock in the company. There’s your free stock tip for the day, for those tuning in that made it this far.

The Liberals Next Terrible Idea

The Liberals have announced that if they take government, they will quickly move to sell Medibank Private and use the money to pay off government debt. This is another simple sounding “we are fiscally responsible” proposals from Abbot’s team that is meant to gain them populist support from Joe Six-packs that have to live within their family budget, and therefore see the model easily extrapolated to the government finances. The truth is that the sale of Medibank Private would have almost no effect on government finances, according to all independent experts surveyed, and will lead to the worst effects on the finances of the middle class over the medium to long term of almost any change the government could make.

Currently, competition in health insurers in Australia is very high, with many providers (30) nationally and 5 of them being larger companies, but none of which has a dominant position and all with highly competitive offers characterised by lots of attempts to differentiate form one another through minor tweaks in their plans, and lots and lots of spending on advertising. The Australian health insurance market would be the envy of places like the US with respect to competition, if their consumers were to examine it.

The Liberals have announced the industry is healthy, as well as competitive, so there is no continual need or interest in maintaining its ownership in one of the large health insurance companies. Their earmarking of where the funds raised from the sale would go may have some populist support, but their long term economics are also bad for the public purse. Once again, I think you need to see who is for this type of thing to fully evaluate it. Large health insurance company CEOs, like NIB’s CEO, are all for the sale, and he says that the government has no real role in the industry. He has lots and lots and lots of interest in a possible sale of Medibank, so he is not an independent observer, but his opinion is where the Liberal’s opinion comes directly. I don’t know, but I would suggest that his company so spends as much on lobbyists for its position as it clearly spends on advertising to convince you it has the best deal.

If the sale took place, the Liberals estimate that it would raise about $3.5-4.5 billion dollars in revenue. Independent estimates put the value down closer to the $2 billion dollar mark. But really, neither amount seems like a big deal as far as the government’s budget, or in the wider market of a $1.2 trillion dollar economy (US$1,055 billion[1]). More importantly, it will remove something I will call “the public option”, from the marketplace.

The public option company, Medibank Private, doesn’t exist to dominate the market, pay excessively large salaries to it executives, and even though it makes a tidy $120 million after tax a year, to turn the most fantastic profit, given that it should really be spending the whopping majority of its budget on paying actual medical claims from its subscribers. I mean come on folks, isn’t that what you buy into one for, the catastrophic assistance, along with your glasses and physio? So, if the government is going to allow the silliness of private health insurance to exist, it has to participate. And it has to compete and even spend as much on advertising, on average, as the private insurance companies, and continually try to rebrand its product as better than the others, when all of them are essentially only selling statistics.

If the proposal were to go forward based upon the Liberals winning government at the next election, Medibank would probably be broken into two smaller private companies through IPOs in order to make it look like they will further maximise competition. In fact, the lack of a public option company in the marketplace would (I think) lead to very fast consolidation of these highly competitive medium-sized companies and their tiny brothers. Whatever money is required to be spent in the short term by this all-private marketplace will be spent in order for companies to cannibalise and join with others in order to gain the largest market share possible. Following that, maybe 3 years later, and maybe as many as 10, we will then start to see the kinds of rapid rate rises in premiums that we see in the USA, where a very small number of insurers hold near monopoly power over US consumers.

An essentially not-for-profit supplier is what keeps cost down in health care in Australia, and this is exactly what the “Public Option” is in the debate in the USA over health reform. The public option there has amazingly stable public popularity throughout the acrimonious debate there since August (56% presently and as much as 80% over all the polls in the last 7 months [averaging somewhere in the 60s]), despite a huge amount of disinformation and outright lies by those who oppose health care reform in the USA. Major health care and insurance companies will spend hundreds of millions of US$, maybe even billions, by the time the argument is finished there, to defeat a public option from coming into being.

The bottom line though is this; these companies provide to consumers a service that you cannot live without sometimes, health care. And while I will not oppose those who wish to waste their money doing so, I personally will never voluntarily participate in a system where a private company with a profit motive can sit in judgement over whether I get a specific piece of health care, or not.

[1] CIA World Factbook

Where Paths Diverge

Hey, all of you (or probably more accurately, both of you) who have been reading my prototype set of articles here, I have just heard word today that the blog is ready to start up at An Meá (my company) where all of my articles on climate change will be published. However, as some of them may be considered inappropriate for publication there, due to my sometimes colourful use of language, or the fact that they have nothing to do with climate change. That’s cool, since it is a company site, but frankly it takes a shitload of work to think up something to write, and then draft an article on it, so I plan to publish all my work here. It will also allow me to publish articles on other topics I think are important or interesting, and as I have become sort of addicted to the cathartic nature of doing so, and will therefore continue.

Feel free to comment at will as you wish, and provided you aren’t a troll or spammer, I will likely not censor your work either. But keep in mind this isn’t a democracy. If you comment enough and have something useful to contribute (whether I agree with you or not), I can also possibly make you a contributor.