Underwater Oil Plume Intrusion from Deepwater Blowouts – A Large-Eddy Simulation Study

Abstract:

The interaction of buoyancy-driven hydrocarbon plumes with the stably stratified deep-ocean environment plays a crucial role in the formation of underwater oil intrusions. As gas bubbles and oil droplets are released from an underwater oil well blowout, they induce a strong buoyancy flux that lifts entrained sea water to form an upward plume. Towards higher elevations, the stratification-induced negative buoyancy increases and eventually exceeds the gas/oil-induced buoyancy, causing the plume to decelerate and a large fraction of entrained sea water to peel off from the rising plume to form a fountain-like downward outer plume. During this peeling process, weakly buoyant particles (e.g. small oil droplets) are trapped and fall together with the detrained fluid, and then migrate horizontally at the equilibrium buoyancy depth, forming underwater oil intrusion layers. In this study, the complex plume dynamics and oil intrusion are studied using a large-eddy simulation (LES) model. The LES model captures the essential characteristics of the plume structure and the peeling/intrusion processes, and yields good agreement with prior laboratory experiments. Applying to the Deepwater Horizon oil well blowout condition, the LES model shows considerable underwater trapping and intrusion of oil droplets under various conditions, with the trapping rate significantly affected by the diameter of the oil droplet. This study is supported by Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative RFP-II research grant.