Blowout causes

The explosion and fire (May 1,1990) caused eight deaths (including a vice-president and site manager), 120 injuries, extensive damage to buildings in the area, and evacuation of an entire small town. The cause of the explosion, at the Angus Chemicals Plant, was the blowout of a compressor line on the nitroparaffin unit. 

If a kick is not controlled properly, a blowout will occur. A blowout may develop for one or more of the following causes ... 

The other source of possible drift or precipitation from cooling towers is caused by windage or blowout from... 

In extreme situations, incompatibility between injection fluids and reservoir components can be so great that deep-well disposal will not be the most cost-effective approach to waste disposal. In other situations, such remedial measures as pretreatment or controlling fluid concentrations or temperatures can permit injection even when incompatibilities exist. In addition to operational problems, waste-reservoir incompatibility can cause wastes to migrate out of the injection zone (casing/confining-layer failure) and even cause surface-water contamination (well blowout). 

Blowouts (uncontrolled May cause leakage of high flows in short Injection... 

According to the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency (IEPA), a series of gas blowouts has occurred at two waste injection wells in the state (Brower el al., 1989). In each case, well operators were injecting concentrated hydrochloric acid into a dolomite bed. At its plant near Tuscola, the Cabot Corporation injects acid waste from the production of fumed silica into the Cambrian Eminence and Potosi Formations below 5 000 ft (1 500 m) depth. Allied Chemical Corporation injects acid into the Potosi formation below about 3 600 ft (1 100 m). The acid, which is contaminated with arsenic, is a byproduct of the manufacture of refrigerant gas. Since some of the blowouts have caused damage such as fish kills, there is environmental interest as well as operational concern in preventing such accidents. 

The actual construction details of blowout panels is beyond the scope of the text. A detached blowout panel moving at high velocity can cause considerable damage. Therefore a mechanism must be provided to retain the panel during the deflagration process. Furthermore, thermal insulation of panels is also required. Construction details are available in manufacturers literature. 

Although the ultimate cause of a blowout is human error to control the hydraulic wellbore pressure with drilling mud, in some cases the failure of the BOP to control the situation also contributed to the incident. The causes of the BOP failures are analyzed below ... 

The most common cause of a well to become uncontrolled and develop into a blowout is improper mud control operations and the inability of the blowout prevention system to contain it because of system failures, i.e., lack of testing and maintenance. 

Blowout - A uncontrolled flow of gas, oil or other well fluids from a wellbore at the wellhead or into the formation, caused by the formation pressure exceeding the drilling fluid pressure. It usually occurs during drilling on unknown reservoirs. 

Where a loading system s emergency shutdown system closes a valve on gravity or pipeline fed transfer systems, care should be taken to ensure the line is protected against pressure surges or hydraulic hammers which may cause gasket blowout or line failure (NFPA 30). 

Blowout of Tracors. When a tracer compn is not properly fixed inside the projectile cavity, the entire tracer might be ejected intact from its cavity shortly after leaving the muzzle of the gun. As such blown-out tracers usually catch fire, they might cause casualties among the firing gun crews Ref H.E. Hirschland S.Ricklin, Ordn 32,92(1947)... 

I have vivid memories from the late 1940s of Stanley Wetterau s demonstration of blowout velocity in glass equipment at Hydrocarbon Research, Inc. s laboratory, near Trenton, New Jersey. At an air velocity a bit below blowout, he showed me a dense bed of powder, albeit carryover from the bed was evident to the eye. By adjusting the air flow just a minuscule amount upward, Wetterau caused the bed to vanish, almost in an instant. When someone presented Wetterau with a new powder, his first action was to determine blowout. He argued that this velocity was a better indicator of a powder s usefulness for a fluid-bed process than anything else he could measure. 

Well blowout. Injection of acid into carbonate formations will cause the dissolution of carbonate minerals and produce CO2. When the pore pressure is high enough, fluids and wastes can be forced up the injection well and cause well blowout. 

Seep or Blowout. Compacted zones may cause entrapment of solutions, resulting in the formation of a perched water table within the dump. The buildup of hydrostatic pressure can cause surface seepage and even expulsion of solid material from the dump wall,... 

An initiating event is an event that triggers an accident sequence—e.g., a wave that exceeds the jacket s capacity that, in turn, triggers a blowout that causes failures of the foundation. As initiating events, they are mutually exclusive only one of them starts the accident sequence. A catastrophic platform failure can start by failure of the foundation, failure of the jacket, or failure of the deck. These initiating failures are also (by definition) mutually exclusive and constitute the basic events of the [probabilistic risk assessment] model in its simplest form. [152, p. 121]... 

Drilling and production through hydrate formations above oil and gas reservoirs can cause dissociation and well blowouts. Similarly, the possible instability of the sea floor sediments over hydrate deposits where oil and gas is extracted raises concerns over the collapse and loss of engineering structures. 

BOEMRE (Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement), 2011. Report Regarding the Causes of the April 20, 2010 Macondo Well Blowout. 

Permeability of the filter layer Gases need to flow through the bed in good contact with the filter bed material. An excess of fine material in the filter bed may cause clogging, pressure build-up and blowout of bed material... 

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