Golmer's Blog

Okay. So I decided to do a decidedly crude experiment of my #oilWell killing idea. I used a piece of 1/2” tubing for my “Riser Tube,” an appropriate sized brass bristled rifle cleaning brush from my cleaning kit (bristles slightly longer than the diameter of the riser tube, and a large syringe from my farm animal’s medical supplies to supply oil pressure. (The oil was actually used motor oil from my truck’s last oil change.) 

For “Kill shot” material, I didn’t have any drill mud or concrete or even corn starch, but I did have some “masa flower” which is really gooey when even slightly dampened. 

I inverted everything to make it more manageable and less messy.

As predicted, the brush was easy to insert into the end of the tube, but impossible to pull backwards. Also as predicted, oil injected into the affair went by the bristles of the brush practically unhindered. (I actually tried to do everything and film it with my iPhone with the other hand, but the results were less than exciting or viewable.) 

I first tried my “junk shot by just adding the masa flour to the stream of oil, similar to adding “drill mud” to the flow of oil on the real well. It turns out that Masa flour doesn’t “clot” when exposed to oil at all..as a matter of fact it encapsulated the flour particles and let them flow around the helically spaced bristles along with the oil.

So I reset everything and cheated (a little) by injecting a few drops of water into the stream along with the flour (i.e. my “drill mud”) to make it “clot.” The flour (drill mud) immediately started adhering to the bristles of the brush inserted into the “riser tube” and the flow of oil stopped a few seconds later. I couldn’t even get it to flow by supplying considerable pressure behind it with the syringe. 

Of course this was a VERY crude experiment, but the idea itself is sound. It is assumed that a real “junk shot” in a real-world scenario would be made up of stuff BP said it would - golf balls, shredded rubber chunks, etc., which would readily lend itself to clogging the bristles of the “brush.”

What is needed at this point is someone actually in the Oil Industry to get one of their high-paid mechanical engineers to do the math on the whole thing. We know the size of the riser tube (22”) so we need to know the diameter of the drill pipe itself. We also need to know the pressure of the material coming out of the well, and the increase in flow rate that would be caused by inserting the drill pipe itself into the riser tube - i.e. how much faster the flow and increase in pressure from the insertion of the pipe. 

Then some serious engineering needs to occur on how many bristles, what the pattern should be (Note: the rifle cleaning brush bristles were helically arranged - experimentation shows this is probably not ideal - it worked like an inclined plane on observation. An arrangement more like a chimney sweep’s brush might be better.) what the diameter of the bristles should be, how much longer they should be than the total diameter of the riser pipe, and THEN how much the pressure increase would be as a result of that. You’d also have to know how much weight would be on the section(s) above the “brush” section to overcome said pressure sufficiently to seat the brush section. 

Everything else is gravy.