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Relief wells explained
The goal of a relief well, Milgram explained, is first to drill down to the same oil-bearing rock from which the leaking well is getting its oil. “The oil is under pressure,” said Milgram. “So you can’t get too near the original hole with the drill rig.”

Once the rig is in location, the long, difficult process of drilling can begin.

“In this case it’s kind of hard,” said Milgram. “You are drilling through mostly rock. It’s not going to be fast.”

When the same oil-bearing rock is eventually reached by the relief well drill rig, the sealing of the broken well can finally begin.

First, seawater is pumped into the rock through the relief well. If all goes according to plan, that water should make its way into the lower end of the leaking well, displacing oil. If that succeeds, the next step is to pump in a mineral mud, which follows the sea water up the broken well. Once that mud fills the well, concrete can be pumped into the relief well.

“If you get a tall tower of mud, and if you’re lucky, you’ll stop it,” said Milgram. “The next day you pump concrete and then the well is dead.”

The mud and concrete work by their by density and shear weight, which is enough to counter the highly pressurized oil moving up the well.

I posted the following to a different thread yesterday, and the first part at least is pertinent to your question. Instead of editing it, I am going to toss this whole block into this thread due to lack of time now....

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Over the last couple weeks I have spent a fair amount of time on the professional oil worker site - places that they discuss this in terms of data and terminology and calculations that you will not see in the Old Media, and over 99% of people would not have a prayer of understanding if they did see it.

With that background... here are a few things I would like to convey from my investigations pertinent to what you have said on this thread:

Russia has nuked several holes in situations like this. There has been something like one great success, several times it helped but didn’t work completely, and one time that the situation was greatly exacerbated, and rendered the well fully out of control until it eroded itself spent. Not a great option but it might work. My read is that it the option is not worth trying, especially in our political environment. Conventional explosives are not much better in this case since this find is so powerful.

BP has some of the greatest minds working on this. Certainly there are others who would be useful, too. However, many are not really able to help - but NOT only because BP is too proud to utilize them, but because of the dumb litigious environment ... it opens BP up to more lawsuits and crazy claims for so many reasons it makes your head spin. BP surely would love to have all the great ideas, and they have even set up a way that they can be reached by other experts who have suggestions. (I know of one engineer contacted for further thoughts, so it isn’t just a ruse.) But you know as well as you are breathing that there are a whole bunch of people just looking for a way - a scummy way - to benefit from BPs misfortune, so they have to be careful of who they do business with and how they do it. Not all who claim they “want to help” are honest, if you catch my drift, and instead all they are really trying to do is to find more ways to sink BP for their own self aggrandizement. There are also a whole lot of people who have an overinflated view of their mental prowess in situations like this, and have the ability to waste days and days of experts’ time on wild goose chases and other ways of tossing time down into a rabbit hole. People who are not capable of thinking in terms of ten-thousand pounds of pressure per square inch, working remotely two miles under the surface of the earth, and with mathematical facility need not apply. I do not believe ONE single congressman or politician has the ability to even comprehend the real situation. That includes being skeptical about the Science Adviser to Obama. As a physicist he should be able to but this really requires engineering prowess.

That said, BP is doing the best they can with some of the greatest experts in the world, in a situation that is in some ways, but not all, unprecedented. They have worked tirelessly on this. I bet that none of their people have been playing golf or giving speeches to college classes for pay, unlike many of the politicians, government dildos, and opportunists who are constantly in the news.

They have already manage to reduce the release substantially. In addition the dispersents have done a great job. This is very unlikely to be even ten percent as large a spill as Ixtoc I (1979, also Golf of Mexico), which really didn’t affect the GOM very badly in retrospect. Most people don’t know about it at all, in fact.

They have brainstormed many things, and tried a couple even though they didn’t have confidence they would work - ask your friends if they were amazed that putting a funnel to capture the oil coming out didn’t work because of the formation of methyl hydrides! BP tried it but anticipated that might be the outcome, and warned people in advance because they DO have the experts working this situation!

Right now they are working on several things - including trying to place a concrete “stopper” in the pipe ten thousand feet beneath the ocean floor. Ask Obama how he would try something like that! Two days from now they will try to inject fluid to “topkill” the well - that will require injecting high density slurry at pressures on the order of 15,000 PSI. The pumps they will use are on order of the power the engines that drive destroyers through the waves at 40 knots- a tad greater than the water pump in your car, or in fact the pumps used by the water plant in your town. Still they know this might not work - the liner of the well may not be in the condition they hope for.

BP is also drilling a hole many thousands of feet below the ocean floor (itself 5000 ft deep) designed to intercept the existing well, with intention to then drill a hole into the well liner (about one-inch thick metal) around 8,000 feet below the ocean floor, and then inject a material to plug the well. IF they are able to do this, it is pretty likely to work, eg, plug the well. It takes a while to get that drilling done - months...

If all this fails, eventually the sandy blasting oil will erode the oil formation and collapse it, and the oil flow will stop. Though such a result would not be unprecedented, it would be tragically wasteful for this formation to be lost. Though this particular well will never be a “production” well, it would be tragic if this rich formation were not exploited.

Oh - one more thing - somehow people seem to have the belief that wells haven’t gotten out of control before. That is completely false. I believe the figure I have seen is that something like 800 wells have had some type of at least minor blowout in the last 30 or so years. Very few have been American. This is one of the deepest, and it IS one of the worst, but the result of this discovery is likely to be a much greater amount of oil from it eventually.

BP is doing as well as they can as rapidly as they can to correct this. If we didn’t have such ligigious culture they might even be able to do it better and faster.

If you want someone to blame: I suggest that you lay into the Congress and President who failed to carry out the 1994 plans which were developed and approved to have burning booms available for use in JUST this situation, and it appears even have transferred them to Brazil or other countries to protect their coasts.