Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling unit on fire 2010

Oil well fires are oil or gas wells that have caught on

fire Fire is the rapid oxidation of a material (the fuel) in the exothermic chemical process of combustion, releasing heat, light, and various reaction products. At a certain point in the combustion reaction, called the ignition point, flames a ...

and

burn A burn is an injury to skin, or other tissues, caused by heat, cold, electricity, chemicals, friction, or ultraviolet radiation (like sunburn). Most burns are due to heat from hot liquids (called scalding), solids, or fire. Burns occur ma ...

. They can be the result of accidents, arson, or natural events, such as

lightning Lightning is a naturally occurring electrostatic discharge during which two electrically charged regions, both in the atmosphere or with one on the ground, temporarily neutralize themselves, causing the instantaneous release of an avera ...

. They can exist on a small scale, such as an oil field spill catching fire, or on a huge scale, as in geyser-like jets of flames from ignited high

pressure Pressure (symbol: ''p'' or ''P'') is the force applied perpendicular to the surface of an object per unit area over which that force is distributed. Gauge pressure (also spelled ''gage'' pressure)The preferred spelling varies by country and e ...

wells. A frequent cause of a well fire is a high-pressure blowout during drilling operations.

Extinguishing the fires

US Navy 030328-M-0000X-005 Kuwaiti firefighters fight to secure a burning oil well in the Rumaila oilfields

USAF_F-16A_F-15C_F-15E_Desert_Storm_edit2

Oil well fires are more difficult to extinguish than regular fires due to the enormous fuel supply for the fire. In fighting a fire at a

wellhead A wellhead is the component at the surface of an oil or gas well that provides the structural and pressure-containing interface for the drilling and production equipment. The primary purpose of a wellhead is to provide the suspension point and ...

, typically

high explosive An explosive (or explosive material) is a reactive substance that contains a great amount of potential energy that can produce an explosion if released suddenly, usually accompanied by the production of light, heat, sound, and pressure. An ...

s, such as dynamite, are used to create a shockwave that pushes the burning fuel and local atmospheric oxygen away from a well. (This is a similar principle to blowing out a candle.) The flame is removed and the fuel can continue to spill out without catching fire.Firefighting and Blowout Control. L. William Abel, Joe R. Bowden, Patrick J. Campbell. (1996) 350 pag , After blowing out the fire, the wellhead must be capped to stop the flow of oil. During this time, copious fuel and oxygen are present; any spark or other heat source might ignite a fire worse than the original blowout. Thus

brass Brass is an alloy of copper (Cu) and zinc (Zn), in proportions which can be varied to achieve different mechanical, electrical, and chemical properties. It is a substitutional alloy: atoms of the two constituents may replace each other wit ...

tools, bronze tools, or

paraffin wax Paraffin wax (or petroleum wax) is a soft colorless solid derived from petroleum, coal, or oil shale that consists of a mixture of hydrocarbon molecules containing between 20 and 40 carbon atoms. It is solid at room temperature and begins to ...

-coated toolswhich do not strike sparksare used in capping. In essence, the trade was started by Myron M. Kinley, who dominated the field in the early years. His lieutenant, Red Adair, went on to become the most famous of oil well firefighters. Some of the technology used by

Red Adair Paul Neal "Red" Adair (June 18, 1915 – August 7, 2004)Obituary: Red Adair

Kuwait oil fires The Kuwaiti oil fires were caused by the Iraqi military setting fire to a reported 605 to 732 oil wells along with an unspecified number of oil filled low-lying areas, such as oil lakes and fire trenches, as part of a scorched earth policy whi ...

without re-igniting the flow of oil, originated in a patent by John R. Duncan (United States Patent 3,108,499 filed September 28, 1960, granted October 29,1963), ''a method and apparatus for severing section of fluid pipeline therefrom.'' The patent was granted a year after Red Adair's success in combating the

Devil's Cigarette Lighter The Devil's Cigarette Lighter was a natural gas well fire at Gassi Touil in the Sahara Desert of Algeria. Ignited by static electricity when a pipe at the GT2 well ruptured on November 6, 1961, the Phillips Petroleum Company/OMNIREX/COPEFA-owned we ...

gas well fire. The invention is concerned with removing a section of a fluid pipeline and inserting a valve or other component therein without destroying line pressure and without losing any significant amount of fluid passing through the pipeline. There are several techniques used to put out oil well fires, which vary by resources available and the characteristics of the fire itself. With recent advances in technology as well as environmental concerns, many straightforward well fires today are capped while they burn. Techniques include: * Dousing with copious amounts of water. According to Larry H. Flak, a petroleum engineer for Boots and Coots International Well Control, 90% of all the 1991 fires in Kuwait were put out with nothing but sea water, sprayed from powerful hoses at the base of the fire. * Using a

gas turbine A gas turbine, also called a combustion turbine, is a type of continuous flow internal combustion engine. The main parts common to all gas turbine engines form the power-producing part (known as the gas generator or core) and are, in the directio ...

to blast a fine mist of water at the base of the fire. Water is injected behind the exhaust of the turbine in large quantities. This proved popular with tackling stubborn fires in the Kuwait oil fires (1991) and was brought to the region by Hungarians equipped with

MiG-21 The Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-21 (russian: Микоян и Гуревич МиГ-21; NATO reporting name: Fishbed) is a supersonic jet fighter and interceptor aircraft, designed by the Mikoyan-Gurevich Design Bureau in the Soviet Union. Its nickn ...

engines mounted on a tank, either a

T-34 The T-34 is a Soviet medium tank introduced in 1940. When introduced its 76.2 mm (3 in) tank gun was less powerful than its contemporaries while its 60-degree sloped armour provided good protection against anti-tank weapons. The C ...

T-62 The T-62 is a Soviet main battle tank that was first introduced in 1961. As a further development of the T-55 series, the T-62 retained many similar design elements of its predecessor including low profile and thick turret armour. In contras ...

. Based on a Russian idea, the Hungarian vehicle, named "Big Wind", was influenced by a similar concept used in

Soviet The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen nation ...

times for extinguishing blown out gas- and oil-well fires and clearing snow off

airfield An aerodrome ( Commonwealth English) or airdrome (American English) is a location from which aircraft flight operations take place, regardless of whether they involve air cargo, passengers, or neither, and regardless of whether it is for pub ...

s by using a single

MiG-15 The Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-15 (russian: Микоя́н и Гуре́вич МиГ-15; USAF/DoD designation: Type 14; NATO reporting name: Fagot) is a jet fighter aircraft developed by Mikoyan-Gurevich for the Soviet Union. The MiG-15 was one of ...

jet engine bolted onto the bed of a truck. However, in this incarnation, it was not always powerful enough to defeat large fires, although it was also brought to and used in Kuwait; to tackle more resilient fires MB Drilling Company constructed "Big Wind" with two more powerful jet engines fixed to the more-stable chassis of a tank. The IMAX documentary '' Fires of Kuwait'' follows the numerous companies, and their methods, employed with the task of extinguishing the fires, with footage of the Hungarian "Big Wind" in action contained in the film. * Using dynamite to "blow out" the fire by forcing the burning fuel and oxygen away from the fuel source. This was one of the earliest effective methods and is still widely used. The first use was by Myron Kinley's father in California in 1913. Generally explosives are placed within

55 gallon drum A drum (also called a barrel) is a cylindrical shipping container used for shipping bulk cargo. Drums can be made of steel, dense paperboard (commonly called a fiber drum), or plastic, and are generally used for the transportation and storage of ...

s, the explosives are surrounded by fire retardant chemicals, and then the drums are wrapped with insulating material. A horizontal crane is used to bring the drum as close to the wellhead as possible. This method was depicted in the 1968 film '' Hellfighters'' starring John Wayne. * Dry Chemical (mainly Purple K) can be used on small well fires. * In the 1930s mechanical jaws were developed to clamp off the pipe below the fire, but they are seldom used today. The design became the basis for a safety device used on offshore wells. * Special vehicles called "Athey wagons" as well as the typical bulldozer protected by corrugated steel sheeting are normally used in the process. * Raising the plume: a metal casing 30 to 40 feet high is placed over the wellhead (thus raising the flame above the ground). Liquid nitrogen or water is then forced in at the bottom to reduce the oxygen supply and put out the fire. * The "LeRoy Corporation, Houston Oil well Firefighters" constructed a machine with an arm that was positioned over an oil well pipe on fire. The machine then lowers a cap over the pipe, extinguishing the flames. LeRoy Ashmore built 3 of these machines and named them Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, for the Biblical characters, who survived death from a fiery furnace. The walls of LeRoy's machines were hollow, allowing water pumped through them to circulate and keep the interior control room

water cooled Cooling tower and water discharge of a nuclear power plant Water cooling is a method of heat removal from components and industrial equipment. Evaporative cooling using water is often more efficient than air cooling. Water is inexpensive and non ...

during fire fighting. * Drilling relief wells into the producing zone to redirect some of the oil and make the fire smaller. (However, most relief wells are used to pump heavy mud and cement deep into the wild well.) The first relief wells were drilled in Texas in the mid 1930s. * Under the Soviet

Nuclear Explosions for the National Economy Nuclear Explosions for the National Economy (russian: Ядерные взрывы для народного хозяйства, Yadernyye vzryvy dlya narodnogo khozyaystva; sometimes referred to as ''Program #7'') was a Soviet program to investiga ...

program, underground nuclear explosions were successfully employed to stop well fires. The high heat of the detonation simultaneously displaces and melts the rock in its vicinity, and with that seals the previously drilled hole.

Effects

Oil well fires can cause the loss of millions of barrels of crude oil per day. Combined with the

ecological Ecology () is the study of the relationships between living organisms, including humans, and their physical environment. Ecology considers organisms at the individual, population, community, ecosystem, and biosphere level. Ecology overlaps wi ...

problems caused by the large amounts of smoke and unburnt petroleum falling back to earth, oil well fires such as those seen in Kuwait in 1991 can cause enormous economic losses. Smoke from burnt crude oil contains many chemicals, including sulfur dioxide,

carbon monoxide Carbon monoxide (chemical formula CO) is a colorless, poisonous, odorless, tasteless, flammable gas that is slightly less dense than air. Carbon monoxide consists of one carbon atom and one oxygen atom connected by a triple bond. It is the simple ...

soot Soot ( ) is a mass of impure carbon particles resulting from the incomplete combustion of hydrocarbons. It is more properly restricted to the product of the gas-phase combustion process but is commonly extended to include the residual pyrolysed ...

benzopyrene A benzopyrene is an organic compound with the formula C20H12. Structurally speaking, the colorless isomers of benzopyrene are pentacyclic hydrocarbons and are fusion products of pyrene and a phenylene group. Two isomeric species of benzopyrene ar ...

, Poly aromatic hydrocarbons, and dioxins. Exposure to oil well fires is commonly cited as a cause of the

Gulf War Syndrome Gulf War syndrome or Gulf War illness is a chronic and multi-symptomatic disorder affecting military veterans of both sides of the 1990–1991 Persian Gulf War. A wide range of acute and chronic symptoms have been linked to it, including fatigue ...

, however, studies have indicated that the firemen who capped the wells did not report any of the symptoms suffered by the soldiers.Presidential Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterans' Illnesses: Final Report
, December 1996 Image:Oil well burning in Bibi Eibat.JPG, 1904 fire at a Bibi-Eibat oil well. Image:Burmese Oil Well on Fire.jpg, A Burmese oil well on fire, ca. 1905 Image:Santa Fe Springs fire.jpg, Two wells on fire,

Santa Fe Springs, California Santa Fe Springs (''Santa Fe'', Spanish for "Holy Faith") is a city in Los Angeles County, California, United States. It is one of the Gateway Cities of southeast Los Angeles County. The population was 16,223 at the 2010 census, down from 17,4 ...

, 1928 Image:Oil Fire, 1928.jpg, Steel cap used to cap burning oil well in

, 1928

Notable occurrences

Piper Alpha Piper Alpha was an oil platform located in the North Sea approximately north-east of Aberdeen, Scotland. It was operated by Occidental Petroleum (Caledonia) Limited (OPCAL) and began production in 1976, initially as an oil-only platform but la ...

, an

oil rig {{about, , the mnemonic OIL RIG, Redox An oil rig is any kind of apparatus constructed for oil drilling. Kinds of oil rig include: * Drilling rig, an apparatus for on-land oil drilling * Drillship, a floating apparatus for offshore oil drilling ...

that caught fire * Kuwait Oil Fires (1991) *

Deepwater Horizon explosion The ''Deepwater Horizon'' drilling rig explosion was an April 20, 2010 explosion and subsequent fire on the ''Deepwater Horizon'' semi-submersible mobile offshore drilling unit, which was owned and operated by Transocean and drilling for ...

References

External links

*{{Commonscatinline, Oil well fires Oilfield terminology Petroleum production Firefighting Types of fire

Extinguishing the fires

Effects

Notable occurrences

See also

References

External links