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“What’s topkill”

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There are some cute videos out that explain this, but essentially it is flooding the oil well from the top with heavy liquid - intending to put enough pressure on the column of oil sufficient to stop it from flowing. They call the liquid “mud” and they specially formulate it to have a certain appropriate weight. To the best of my research, they are using 16 pound per gallon PPG mud here. They got something like 100,000 barrels in place before yesterday for this. They are using pumps capable of at least 16,000 psi at over 50BBL/Min on this attempt. It may have worked - fingers crossed.

This topkill was not the “typical” topkill effort, because of many things - one being its extreme depth (the water pressure itself is 2,100psi), another being the huge amount of flow from the well that was not being blocked by the existing structures (BOP, etc.), another being the huge pressure of the well and its ‘gassiness’. It has been called “the well from hell” by some.

Since the oil was flowing so massively, apparently (my best read of the professionals) they had to create an “annular seal” ABOVE the well (I guess in the BOP itself) by pumping mud in specific flow pattern and rates ... similar to the way those neat no-door freezers in grocery stores work by providing laminar flow. That hydraulically generated seal allows them to pump a SECOND stream of “kill mud” into the well, despite the lack of any solid object to push against... this streams fights against the huge flow of the oil and gas. Hopefully, sufficient kill mud gradually works its way down the well and into appropriate channels to provide sufficient weight to counter the upward flow of oil. (No mean feat... the pressure is in the tens of thousands of PSI - I have heard rumors that it may be backed up in the reservoir itself of pressures of as much as 200,000 psi.... but I can’t help wondering if that is a typo) ... BP had to carefully study as well as they could ascertain the condition of the well under the surface (there are multiple, “concentric” tubes that they put in place while drilling and the precise path the oil was taking was critical to WHERE they injected the kill mud... guess wrong and not only would the topkill fail, but at their pumping pressures of upwards of 10,000 psi they could rapidly destroy some of that and make the problem much worse.)

Anyway - I probably said more than you asked here, and I may not be precisely accurate in what BP has been doing- but if I am wrong in the details, I at least am not wrong in the way I am conveying how Herculean this effort is.