[Paladin2]

"Third, we learned that the blowout preventer is not powerful enough to cut through joints in the drill pipe. We found a Transocean document that I would like to put on the screen. It says: most blind shear rams are “designed to shear effectively only on the body of the drillpipe. Procedures for the use of BSR’s must therefore ensure that there is no tool joint opposite the ram prior to shearing.”

This seemed astounding to us because the threaded joints between the sections of drillpipe make up about 10% of the length of the pipe. If the shear rams cannot cut through the joints, that would mean that this so-called failsafe device would succeed in cutting the drillpipe only 90% of the time."

That could be a problem.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

This is all looking like a big Engineering problem...

[Ready4Freddy]

That could be a problem.

A 50' BOP has multiple rams, and the joints take up only ~3' (1.5' each end) in a 30' section of drill pipe.