Television recently has shown some very hazardous attempts to extinguish oil well fires in Kuwait. There, stack-like objects were lowered over the flame of a flaming oil well, then water poured into the top of the stack, but not always with the intended extinguishing effect. Earlier attempts to arrest fires at petroleum and gas well include: the preventive installation of an upright, open-top housing mounted around the top of the well pipe, the housing having internally an introduction of extinguishers such as water (U.S. Pat. No. 3,463,227); a conical cap-like device to be set over a flaming wellhead, the device having a releasable chemical and inlet water for the extinguishing (U.S. Pat. No. 1,520,288); and floatable safety enclosure with a small top opening for surrounding and doming over an off-shore oil rig (U.S. Pat. No. 3,730,278); vehicle-borne well-capping and flow-diverting apparatus with a feeding in of flame-smothering material such as water (U.S. Pat. No. 1,758,453); and vehicle-mounted well-capping apparatus with a diverter pipe and an escape pipe while installation proceeds, these pipes being supplied with steam or other extinguishing vapor if needed (U.S. Pat. No. 910,295). It also has been proposed to wash a drill pipe with water sprays disposed in a jacket around the pipe (U.S. Pat. No. 4,895,205).
A basic anatomy of a flaming petroleum oil or gas jet is an outer flame with its burning vapor front ("flame front") surrounding and feeding off hydrocarbonaceous vapors, and those overlying an inner body of liquid oil if the hydrocarbon flow is liquid phase-continuous. The flame can be extinguished by depriving it of fuel and/or oxygen and/or its kindling temperature level. If the zone of the fire and its fuel supply then is cooled to a temperature below the autoignition temperature of the fuel, the flame is unlikely to be rekindled.
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