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Formed in the earth does not follow up false or actually break through capping rocks itself and leak to the surface. a lot of oil that s formed naturally by the earth ends up escaping or leaking to the surface in the form of natural seeps. yes, there are a lot of these all around the world. we ve found these seeps or these something near the well we don t know what the word near means yet. isn t that really the reason why they drilled that oil in the first place? they knew something was seeping around it so they knew there was problem something below there? actually, yes, whenever we see seeps, we know there are hydrocarbons stored. the first thing that comes out of a seep is going to be the natural gas because the buoyancy of natural gas is higher than that of oil. and it can overcome the capillary pressure in these little pores in the ceiling rocks and can push its way through. ....
If we have something below that, it could be one of two things. there could be a small leak or there could also be a condition where you ve had some depletion of the reservoir. when you draw the fluid in your example that you gave in letting air out of a tire, if you let some air out of a tire and you stop, the pressure is going to be lower. that s what you re seeing. unlike the tire, in a reservoir, oil and gas can fill in from the outer reaches of that reservoir and start to build that pressure up slowly. and that s what we re seeing. it s building up slowly as that pressure comes back into the tire-like situation that you used as an example. why do we think there is seepage? tell me about this and what the implications are. well, they ve seen a little bit of a spike in a methane content around the well but they haven t seen bubbles because they ve been looking very closely at that. as far as bp is concerned, there is no leak there. but some distance and i still haven t heard ....
And they cannot see a leak around the wellhead and one of the most serious situations would be is if you had a leak very close to the wellhead and you could have a potential erosion of the substrate and could cause it to collapse if the flow increased. right know, they don t see anything to be concerned about. don, you expressed a view that carrying on with the testing for a long time is not a good idea? one of the things they could do, they have production lines already available and they could add production lines. and if they start to draw down the pressure by producing even a small amount of that oil, it will drop the pressure within the wellhead. a lot of this is pressure thresholds. so when the pressure gets over a certain limit, it can become dangerous and start to be dangerous if there is a leak. ....
Now is a kind of way to set up this election. the democrats don t want the narrative just to be about barack obama. they want it to be about the other guys as well. and they re going to use it with financial reform which the president is going to sign later this week and they re going to say, look at all these republicans who voted against wall street reform. i m the one who brought it to you. now, wall street reform is popular. but the question is whether people hate the government so much they don t even think the government can fix wall street. so that s another problem they ve got. it s complicated. good to see you as always. reporter: welcome back. we missed you. good to be back. gloria borger, cnn senior political analyst. the oil leak in the gulf of mexico, here s one thing good that happened while i was away, it s been capped. is it going to hold? could something catastrophic still happen with that oil well? we ve got your questions and your answers after the break. ....
Is, away from that, they actually can see some methane escaping at the surface. and it s essentially bubbling through the strata. and in that case, it s possible that some of the sands below the surface have been charged with oil and gas. and, of course, the oil and gas have different size requirements for leaking through a particular capping rock and usually what happens is the pressure builds up, the gas will leak out first and then later on, the oil will start to leak out. you mention that they re seeing methane close to this thing. what are the implications of that? over the last three months, we ve all become scientists to some degree. what does this mean? why do we have to be concerned about methane? when the cap was opened, you had oil and gas coming out of the well all concerned it, that wasn t too much of a problem because that s what you would expect to see. but if the well is completely sealed in, you do not want to see an increase in methane. ....