I'm a geologist, not a microbiologist, but there's something compelling about the idea of using the natural processes of hard-working bacteria to help clean up the oil - bioremediation. They're doing it already, and always have done, which is why our oceans are not charged with oil from natural seeps. But their appetite is not limitless and they need nutrients to be able to continue their activity, so the concepts of adding to their numbers and boosting their appetite would seem attractive. But of course nothing is simple: there are arguments for and against bioremediation, it does not have a history of success, crude oil contains a vast array of chemicals, not all of which are appetising for all bacteria, and the food for bacteria must be fertilizer - nitrogen and phosphorus - the pollution from which already severely degrades two-thirds of the coastal waters of the US. And, as an article from the New Scientist, "Clean-up of oil spill may cause long-term damage," notes:
Even benign-sounding proposals like spraying nutrients to boost oil-munching bacteria can be damaging. When Eugene Turner of Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge added phosphorus to plots in a Louisiana salt marsh, it reduced the growth of roots of the dominant grass, Spartina alterniflora, undermining the integrity of the marsh (Estuaries and Coasts, vol 31, p 326).
But there is another point - I've referred to the potential of Alcanivorax borkumensis earlier, but this microbe is not alone. There are hundreds of genera of bacteria adapted to eating hydrocarbons, adapted because hydrocarbons occur so ubiquitously naturally.
For example, there are recent reports of the discovery of a new strain of a microbe that has been known for a long time, Pseudomonas aeruginosa. The new strain, NY3, was discovered at a site in China contaminated by oil; what it does is to produce rhamnolipids, non-toxic natural "biosurfactants." As a report in Scientific Blogging describes, "Even at a very low concentration, rhamnolipids could remarkably increase the mobility, solubility and bioavailability of PAHs, and strain NY3 of P. aeruginosa has a strong capability of then degrading and decontaminating the PAHs." PAHs, polyciclic aromatic hydrocarbons, are one of the most harmful components of crude oil. There's another report on this work at Science Daily. But although "this new bacterial strain could be of considerable value in the long-term cleanup of the massive Gulf Coast oil spill," "More research to further reduce costs and scale up production would be needed before its commercial use and the researchers are filing for a patent on the discovery," so who knows what to think.
And, speaking of who knows what to think, the Discovery News site has a piece on another possibility titled "A Florida start-up thinks it can save the Gulf; experts doubt it." So it's, as always, well worth listening to experts, among whom are certainly Ronald M. Atlas, Professor of Biology and Public Health at the University of Louisville and D. Jay Grimes, Professor in the Department of Coastal Sciences, Marine Microbial Ecology, at the Gulf Coast Research Laboratory, University of Southern Mississippi; read their informative commentary at Small Things Considered: the Microbe Blog, and watch their discussion at the American Society for Microbiology's 2010 General Meeting in San Diego.
There are many people and organisations who believe they have a bioremediation solution - the researchers at Bangor University, and a local company, Osprey Biotechnics, among them. And of course that's another problem: well over 100,000 calls have been received at BP's call centre and thousands of ideas submitted on paper. I would guess that there are many that fall into the category of "crank calls" and snake-oil salesmen, but that leaves a huge number that have to be filtered and tested - after all, who would want untested remediation methods randomly thrown at the problem? I'm tempted to say "well, except for the bermers," but I won't, I'm too exasperated. At least, after all the fuss, Costner's centrifugal separators are now being deployed....
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And so, I draw a line, not really in the sand, but under this series of posts on the catastrophe in the Gulf. I have tried to address topics that I know something about, or, if I don't, report the views of people who do. And I have (largely, although some reading between my lines might be revealing) tried to remain objective and to refrain from expressing my personal views. But, quite frankly, I give up. The effort and frustration involved in seeking sense among the eruptive volumes of rhetoric, political posturing, attention-seeking, hypocrisy, ignorance, and hysteria in the midst of a national, local, individual and environmental crisis is simply infuriating. There seems to be no distinction between the critically important and the trivial, the facts and the fictions, or the myths and the realities when it comes to who can make the most noise. The whole mess is a sad reflection on us as a species and on the way our society works.
As and when there is substantive news on the berms or related issues, I'll come back to these topics, but, meanwhile, I shall return to my usual ramblings.
A round of applause. Bravo!
Truly, I have found it so infuriating from the start that you have been my primary source of news on this. I'm practically embarrassed to take in most other news provided on the subject. And since you provided rather regular and comprehensive updates...
But I now look forward to further adventures arenaceous. :)
Posted by: F | June 19, 2010 at 07:40 AM
Your comment much appreciated! I'm pleased to have been of some use peering through the gloom of this sorry business - although obviously I sincerely wish that I never had reason to.
Posted by: Sandglass | June 19, 2010 at 10:16 AM
Michael,
Thanks again for your excellent research. It is hard not to have many subjective feelings about something so overwhelming and infuriating ion so many levels.
I have been so despondent about the situation in the Gulf that I have few words in me to adequately express the sad depth of my emotions. I read something today from a friend with a essay attached from someone supposely in the oil industry...the essay is unsigned...who is seriously worried that the strata under the blow out preventer is subsiding and that a even larger uncontrollable amount of oil may be released before the other relief wells are drilled. The essay is long and is not that easy to follow but I wondering if you had any thoughts about this potential unimaginable disaster the writer speculates on below:
Thanks much
Jules
___________________________________________________
OK let's get real about the GOM oil flow. There doesn't really seem to be much info on TOD that furthers more complete understanding of what's really happening in the GOM.
As you have probably seen and maybe feel yourselves, there are several things that do not appear to make sense regarding the actions of attack against the well. Don't feel bad, there is much that doesn't make sense even to professionals unless you take into account some important variables that we are not being told about. There seems to me to be a reluctance to face what cannot be termed anything less than grim circumstances in my opinion. There certainly is a reluctance to inform us regular people and all we have really gotten is a few dots here and there...
First of all...set aside all your thoughts of plugging the well and stopping it from blowing out oil using any method from the top down. Plugs, big valves to just shut it off, pinching the pipe closed, installing a new bop or lmrp, shooting any epoxy in it, top kills with mud etc etc etc....forget that, it won't be happening..it's done and over. In fact actually opening up the well at the subsea source and allowing it to gush more is not only exactly what has happened, it was probably necessary, or so they think anyway.
So you have to ask WHY? Why make it worse?...there really can only be one answer and that answer does not bode well for all of us. It's really an inescapable conclusion at this point, unless you want to believe that every Oil and Gas professional involved suddenly just forgot everything they know or woke up one morning and drank a few big cups of stupid and got assigned to directing the response to this catastrophe. Nothing makes sense unless you take this into account, but after you do...you will see the "sense" behind what has happened and what is happening. That conclusion is this:
The well bore structure is compromised "Down hole".
That is something which is a "Worst nightmare" conclusion to reach. While many have been saying this for some time as with any complex disaster of this proportion many have "said" a lot of things with no real sound reasons or evidence for jumping to such conclusions, well this time it appears that they may have jumped into the right place...
TOP KILL - FAILS:
This was probably our best and only chance to kill this well from the top down. This "kill mud" is a tried and true method of killing wells and usually has a very good chance of success. The depth of this well presented some logistical challenges, but it really should not of presented any functional obstructions. The pumping capacity was there and it would have worked, should have worked, but it didn't.
It didn't work, but it did create evidence of what is really happening. First of all the method used in this particular top kill made no sense, did not follow the standard operating procedure used to kill many other wells and in fact for the most part was completely contrary to the procedure which would have given it any real chance of working.
When a well is "Killed" using this method heavy drill fluid "Mud" is pumped at high volume and pressure into a leaking well. The leaks are "behind" the point of access where the mud is fired in, in this case the "choke and Kill lines" which are at the very bottom of the BOP (Blow Out Preventer) The heavy fluid gathers in the "behind" portion of the leaking well assembly, while some will leak out, it very quickly overtakes the flow of oil and only the heavier mud will leak out. Once that "solid" flow of mud is established at the leak "behind" the well, the mud pumps increase pressure and begin to overtake the pressure of the oil deposit. The mud is established in a solid column that is driven downward by the now stronger pumps. The heavy mud will create a solid column that is so heavy that the oil deposit can no longer push it up, shut off the pumps...the well is killed...it can no longer flow.
Usually this will happen fairly quickly, in fact for it to work at all...it must happen quickly. There is no "trickle some mud in" because that is not how a top kill works. The flowing oil will just flush out the trickle and a solid column will never be established. Yet what we were told was "It will take days to know whether it
worked"...."Top kill might take 48 hours to complete"...the only way it could take days is if BP intended to do some "test fires" to test integrity of the entire system. The actual "kill" can only take hours by nature because it must happen fairly rapidly. It also increases strain on the "behind" portion and in this instance we all know that what remained was fragile at best.
Early that afternoon we saw a massive flow burst out of the riser "plume" area. This was the first test fire of high pressure mud injection. Later on same day we saw a greatly increased flow out of the kink leaks, this was mostly mud at that time as the kill mud is tanish color due to the high amount of Barite which is added to it to weight it and Barite is a white powder.
We later learned the pumping was shut down at midnight, we weren't told about that until almost 16 hours later, but by then...I'm sure BP had learned the worst. The mud they were pumping in was not only leaking out the "behind" leaks...it was leaking out of someplace forward...and since they were not even near being able to pump mud into the deposit itself, because the well would be dead long before...and the oil was still coming up, there could only be one conclusion...the wells casings were ruptured and it was leaking "down hole"
They tried the "Junk shot"...the "bridging materials" which also failed and likely made things worse in regards to the ruptured well casings.
"Despite successfully pumping a total of over 30,000 barrels of heavy mud, in three attempts at rates of up to
80 barrels a minute, and deploying a wide range of different bridging materials, the operation did not overcome the flow from the well."
http://www.bp.com/genericarticle.do?categoryId=2012968&contentId=7062487
80 Barrels per minute is over 200,000 gallons per hour, over 115,000 barrels per day...did we seen an increase over and above what was already leaking out of 115k bpd?....we did not...it would have been a massive increase in order of multiples and this did not happen.
"The whole purpose is to get the kill mud down,” said Wells. “We'll have 50,000 barrels of mud on hand to kill this well. It's far more than necessary, but we always like to have backup."
Try finding THAT quote around...it's been scrubbed...here's a cached copy of a quote...
"The "top kill" effort, launched Wednesday afternoon by industry and government engineers, had pumped enough drilling fluid to block oil and gas spewing from the well, Allen said. The pressure from the well was very low, he said, but persisting."
"Allen said one ship that was pumping fluid into the well had run out of the fluid, or "mud," and that a second ship was on the way. He said he was encouraged by the progress."
Later we found out that Allen had no idea what was really going on and had been "Unavailable all day"
So what we had was BP running out of 50,000 barrels of mud in a very short period of time. An amount far and above what they deemed necessary to kill the well. Shutting down pumping 16 hours before telling anyone, including the president. We were never really given a clear reason why "Top Kill" failed, just that it couldn't overcome the well.
There is only one article anywhere that says anything else about it at this time of writing...and it's a relatively obscure article from the wall street journal "online" citing an unnamed source.
"WASHINGTON—BP PLC has concluded that its "top-kill" attempt last week to seal its broken well in the Gulf of
Mexico may have failed due to a malfunctioning disk inside the well about 1,000 feet below the ocean floor.
The disk, part of the subsea safety infrastructure, may have ruptured during the surge of oil and gas up the well on April 20 that led to the explosion aboard the Deepwater Horizon rig, BP officials said. The rig sank two days later, triggering a leak that has since become the worst in U.S. history.
The broken disk may have prevented the heavy drilling mud injected into the well last week from getting far enough down the well to overcome the pressure from the escaping oil and gas, people familiar with BP's findings said. They said much of the drilling mud may also have escaped from the well into the rock formation outside the wellbore.
As a result, BP wasn't able to get sufficient pressure to keep the oil and gas at bay. If they had been able to build up sufficient pressure, the company had hoped to pump in cement and seal off the well. The effort was deemed a failure on Saturday.
BP started the top-kill effort Wednesday afternoon, shooting heavy drilling fluids into the broken valve known as a blowout preventer. The mud was driven by a 30,000 horsepower pump installed on a ship at the surface. But it was clear from the start that a lot of the "kill mud" was leaking out instead of going down into the well."
There are some inconsistencies with this article.
There are no "Disks" or "Subsea safety structure" 1,000 feet below the sea floor, all that is there is well bore. There is nothing that can allow the mud or oil to "escape" into the rock formation outside the well bore except the well, because it is the only thing there.
All the actions and few tid bits of information all lead to one inescapable conclusion. The well pipes below the sea floor are broken and leaking. Now you have some real data of how BP's actions are evidence of that, as well as some murky statement from "BP officials" confirming the same.
I took some time to go into a bit of detail concerning the failure of Top Kill because this was a significant event. To those of us outside the real inside loop, yet still fairly knowledgeable, it was a major confirmation of what many feared. That the system below the sea floor has serious failures of varying magnitude in the complicated chain, and it is breaking down and it will continue to.
What does this mean?
It means they will never cap the gusher after the wellhead. They cannot...the more they try and restrict the oil gushing out the bop?...the more it will transfer to the leaks below. Just like a leaky garden hose with a nozzle on it. When you open up the nozzle?...it doesn't leak so bad, you close the nozzle?...it leaks real bad,
same dynamics. It is why they sawed the riser off...or tried to anyway...but they clipped it off, to relieve pressure on the leaks "down hole". I'm sure there was a bit of panic time after they crimp/pinched off the large riser pipe and the Diamond wire saw got stuck and failed...because that crimp diverted pressure and flow to the rupture down below.
Contrary to what most of us would think as logical to stop the oil mess, actually opening up the gushing well and making it gush more became direction BP took after confirming that there was a leak. In fact if you note their actions, that should become clear. They have shifted from stopping or restricting the gusher to opening it up and catching it. This only makes sense if they want to relieve pressure at the leak hidden down below the seabed.....and that sort of leak is one of the most dangerous and potentially damaging kind of leak there could be. It is also inaccessible which compounds our problems. There is no way to stop that leak from above, all they can do is relieve the pressure on it and the only way to do that right now is to open up the nozzle above and gush more oil into the gulf and hopefully catch it, which they have done, they just neglected to tell us why, gee thanks.
A down hole leak is dangerous and damaging for several reasons.
There will be erosion throughout the entire beat up, beat on and beat down remainder of the "system" including that inaccessible leak. The same erosion I spoke about in the first post is still present and has never stopped, cannot be stopped, is impossible to stop and will always be present in and acting on anything that is left which has crude oil "Product" rushing through it. There are abrasives still present, swirling flow will create hot spots of wear and this erosion is relentless and will always be present until eventually it wears away enough material to break it's way out. It will slowly eat the bop away especially at the now pinched off riser head and it will flow more and more. Perhaps BP can outrun or keep up with that out flow with various suckage methods for a period of time, but eventually the well will win that race, just how long that race will be?...no one really knows....However now?...there are other problems that a down hole leak will and must produce that will compound this already bad situation.
This down hole leak will undermine the foundation of the seabed in and around the well area. It also weakens the only thing holding up the massive Blow Out Preventer's immense bulk of 450 tons. In fact?...we are beginning to the results of the well's total integrity beginning to fail due to the undermining being caused by the leaking well bore.
The first layer of the sea floor in the gulf is mostly lose material of sand and silt. It doesn't hold up anything and isn't meant to, what holds the entire subsea system of the Bop in place is the well itself. The very large steel connectors of the initial well head "spud" stabbed in to the sea floor. The Bop literally sits on top of the pipe and never touches the sea bed, it wouldn't do anything in way of support if it did. After several tens of feet the seabed does begin to support the well connection laterally (side to side) you couldn't put a 450 ton piece of machinery on top of a 100' tall pipe "in the air" and subject it to the side loads caused by the ocean currents and expect it not to bend over...unless that pipe was very much larger than the machine itself, which you all can see it is not. The well's piping in comparison is actually very much smaller than the Blow Out Preventer and strong as it may be, it relies on some support from the seabed to function and not literally fall over...and it is now showing signs of doing just that....falling over.
If you have been watching the live feed cams you may have noticed that some of the ROVs are using an inclinometer...and inclinometer is an instrument that measures "Incline" or tilt. The BOP is not supposed to be tilting...and after the riser clip off operation it has begun to...
This is not the only problem that occurs due to erosion of the outer area of the well casings. The way a well casing assembly functions it that it is an assembly of different sized "tubes" that decrease in size as they go down. These tubes have a connection to each other that is not unlike a click or snap together locking action. After a certain length is assembled they are cemented around the ouside to the earth that the more rough drill hole is bored through in the well making process. A very well put together and simply explained process of "How to drill a deep water oil well" is available here:
The well bore casings rely on the support that is created by the cementing phase of well construction. Just like if you have many hands holding a pipe up you could put some weight on the top and the many hands could hold the pipe and the weight on top easily...but if there were no hands gripping and holding the pipe?...all the weight must be held up by the pipe alone. The series of connections between the sections of casings are not designed to hold up the immense weight of the BOP without all the "hands" that the cementing provides and they will eventually buckle and fail when stressed beyond their design limits.
These are clear and present dangers to the battered subsea safety structure (bop and lmrp) which is the only loose cork on this well we have left. The immediate (first 1,000 feet) of well structure that remains is now also undoubtedly compromised. However.....as bad as that is?...it is far from the only possible problems with this very problematic well. There were ongoing troubles with the entire process during the drilling of this well. There were also many comprises made by BP IMO which may have resulted in an overall weakened structure of the entire well system all the way to the bottom plug which is over 12,000 feet deep. Problems with the cementing procedure which was done by Haliburton and was deemed as “was against our best practices.” by a Haliburton employee on April 1st weeks before the well blew out. There is much more and I won't go into detail right now concerning the lower end of the well and the troubles encountered during the whole creation of this well and earlier "Well control" situations that were revieled in various internal BP e-mails. I will add several links to those documents and quotes from them below and for now, address the issues concerning the upper portion of the well and the region of the sea floor.
What is likely to happen now?
Well...none of what is likely to happen is good, in fact...it's about as bad as it gets. I am convinced the erosion and compromising of the entire system is accelerating and attacking more key structural areas of the well, the blow out preventer and surrounding strata holding it all up and together. This is evidenced by the tilt of the blow out preventer and the erosion which has exposed the well head connection. What eventually will happen is that the blow out preventer will literally tip over if they do not run supports to it as the currents push on it. I suspect they will run those supports as cables tied to anchors very soon, if they don't, they are inviting disaster that much sooner.
Eventually even that will be futile as the well casings cannot support the weight of the massive system above with out the cement bond to the earth and that bond is being eroded away. When enough is eroded away the casings will buckle and the BOP will collapse the well. If and when you begin to see oil and gas coming up around the well area from under the BOP? or the area around the well head connection and casing sinking more and more rapidly? ...it won't be too long after that the entire system fails. BP must be aware of this, they are mapping the sea floor sonically and that is not a mere exercise. Our Gov't must be well aware too, they just are not telling us.
All of these things lead to only one place, a fully wide open well bore directly to the oil deposit...after that, it goes into the realm of "the worst things you can think of" The well may come completely apart as the inner liners fail. There is still a very long drill string in the well, that could literally come flying out...as I said...all the worst things you can think of are a possibility, but the very least damaging outcome as bad as it is, is that we are stuck with a wide open gusher blowing out 150,000 barrels a day of raw oil or more. There isn't any "cap dome" or any other suck fixer device on earth that exists or could be built that will stop it from gushing out and doing more and more damage to the gulf. While at the same time also doing more damage to the well, making the chance of halting it with a kill from the bottom up less and less likely to work, which as it stands now?....is the only real chance we have left to stop it all.
It's a race now...a race to drill the relief wells and take our last chance at killing this monster before the whole weakened, wore out, blown out, leaking and failing system gives up it's last gasp in a horrific crescendo.
We are not even 2 months into it, barely half way by even optimistic estimates. The damage done by the leaked oil now is virtually immeasurable already and it will not get better, it can only get worse. No matter how much they can collect, there will still be thousands and thousands of gallons leaking out every minute, every hour of every day. We have 2 months left before the relief wells are even near in position and set up to take a kill shot and that is being optimistic as I said.
Over the next 2 months the mechanical situation also cannot improve, it can only get worse, getting better is an impossibility. While they may make some gains on collecting the leaked oil, the structural situation cannot heal itself. It will continue to erode and flow out more oil and eventually the inevitable collapse which cannot be stopped will happen. It is only a simple matter of who can "get there first"...us or the well.
We can only hope the race against that eventuality is one we can win, but my assessment I am sad to say is that we will not.
The system will collapse or fail substantially before we reach the finish line ahead of the well and the worst is yet to come.
Sorry to bring you that news, I know it is grim, but that is the way I see it....I sincerely hope I am wrong.
We need to prepare for the possibility of this blow out sending more oil into the gulf per week then what we already have now, because that is what a collapse of the system will cause. All the collection efforts that have captured oil will be erased in short order. The magnitude of this disaster will increase exponentially by the time we can do anything to halt it and our odds of actually even being able to halt it will go down.
The magnitude and impact of this disaster will eclipse anything we have known in our life times if the worst or even near worst happens...
We are seeing the puny forces of man vs the awesome forces of nature. We are going to need some luck and a lot of effort to win... and if nature decides we ought to lose, we will....
Posted by: Jules | June 19, 2010 at 11:26 PM
Jules - thanks for posting this. I had seen it and read it when it first caused, quite rightly, the media stir that it did. You're right - it's lengthy and detailed, with much that is not easy to follow, and it's anonymous (you have to ask why). BUT there's also much that rings true in it, which is scary, to say the least. It appeared originally on The Oil Drum (http://www.theoildrum.com/) which is a reasonable site for professional industry comment.
I'm a geologist, not an engineer or a driller, but I've been around the industry enough to have a good sense of what "anonymous" is talking about: the suggestion that the "top kill" operation was stopped sooner than might be expected is accurate, in my view. All the indications are that the original blowout occurred because the conditions downhole were not secured - that is, after all, essentially a definition of a blowout. Not secured by the casing (the pipe that lines the well)or by the cement that should seal off the gap between the casing and the rock that contains the high-pressure oil and gas. If this is the case, then the flow of hydrocarbons into the well bore via routes that follow weaknesses in the casing and cement can be catastrophic. The pressure exerted by that flow is enormous and there is a real risk that oil and gas can force their way into the shallower, lower-pressure, sediments below the sea floor.
I can't contribute anything to whether or not this is actually happening (there are clearly people who monitor the videos from the ROVs very closely - I'm not one of them), but to describe it as a risk is accurate. I seriously doubt that anyone, including BP, knows exactly what is going on where in that well.
And, while I'm at it, these kinds of concerns (an understatement?)are connected to discussion of worst-case scenarios in which relief well efforts fail and the entire reservoir ultimately drains into the Gulf. Which raises the question of how much oil is down there? In this context, I read in the paper yesterday a quotation from a BP spokesman:
"We haven't made an assessment of the reserves as far as I know," said Toby Odone, a BP spokesman. "You start evaluating the reservoir once you complete the well. Obviously we didn't get to that point."
This cannot possibly be true. BP cannot have been drilling this well without an evaluation of the "prospect" from their geologists and geophysicists as to the potential volumes of hydrocarbons that the reservoir could contain. This kind of estimate (always done as a range of probabilities)is fundamental to the economics of the prospect and the decision to drill an exploration well. No-one would drill a well this deep in water this deep at enormous costs unless the volumes in a success case would be very large indeed. And this clearly (tragically) was "a success." AND, the accident happened when the well was being prepared to be suspended - in other words, sealed off to await the production facilities to be in place to produce it. Therefore, there will have been logs run - measuring devices lowered down the well that provide data on the character and quality of the reservoir (porosity and so on) and its thickness. While still couched in terms of a range of probabilities, the results would be a very good idea of the volumes. The statement that "we haven't made an assessment of the reserves as far as I know" could be described as accurate only as long as the last five words are included.
Enough for now, otherwise I'll be here all day!
Posted by: Michael | June 20, 2010 at 12:47 PM
Thanks Michael for weighing through that very long essay and your insightful comments. My friend told me today as you said that it had come from the Oil Drum website which I sometimes follow. I hope as we all do that the worst case scenrio will not come to pass. The amount of irresponsibility, incompetency and lack of planning for such a potential disaster is staggering. I am not against offshore drilling, but something this risky deserved the utmost attention to safety and engineering detail no matter what it cost. In the long run the costs now will far exceed anything that would have been required through regulation and oversight.
Jules
Posted by: Jules | June 20, 2010 at 05:44 PM
So what happen if they cannot clean the oil spill? Upon seeing and reading it,my heart break for we don't deserve for this kind of damage.Who is to be blamed for all of this? I hope they can do something for this issue.
Posted by: Oberry Sarmiento | July 02, 2014 at 02:41 PM