Posted on 05/27/2010 12:05:47 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
British Petroleum and the federal government are both claiming victory today after an experimental process to stop the flow of oil from a blowout in the Gulf appears to have succeeded. The “top kill” process dumped mud into the broken pipe, effectively snuffing out the spewing of thousands of barrels of oil (via Instapundit):
Engineers have succeeded in stopping the flow of oil and gas into the Gulf of Mexico from a gushing BP well, the federal government’s top oil spill commander, Adm. Thad Allen, said Thursday morning.
The so-called “top kill” effort, launched Wednesday afternoon by industry and government engineers in Houston, has pumped enough drilling fluid to block all oil and gas from the well, Allen said. The pressure from the well is very low, but persistent, he said.
Once engineers have reduced the well pressure to zero, they will begin to pump cement into the hole to entomb the well. To help that effort, he said, engineers are also pumping some debris into the blowout preventer at the top of the well.
That’s pretty good timing for today’s presser, but undeniably just great news altogether. It verifies a more or less speculative solution that apparently was the last guess at stopping the oil. “Top kill” had worked at much shallower depths in the past, but so had the bell cap process, too, which turned out to be unsuitable for 5,000 feet.
However, the trouble may not yet be past. The ship pumping the mud has run out of material; a second ship is on the way. The shell of mud may still blow open from the upward pressure, but that could be resolved by more applications of “top kill.”
Now all that is left is the cleanup — and that will take much, much longer than plugging the leak did. Expect this to drag on for months and perhaps years.
Then in typical "living in your momma's basement while going to college fashion".....you missed the entire point of my posts. Oh.....by the way, the well isn't sealed.....see post 52......dumbass.
Even if the oil has stopped, that does not mean the problem is fixed. There are many miles of shoreline in Louisianna that has been contaminated with oil, of course huge amounts in the gulf, wildlife that is dying, not to mention the huge impact on industry and tourism.
This is far from over, if Obama wants to take responsibility, fine, but he doesn’t get a pat on the back because our Gulf is a disaster.
I agree, excellent question.
Cement does not require outside oxygen to cure...it requires being static.
Are you sure?
That would be my understanding as well. They would have to keep pressure on the concrete until it sets/hardens I assume.
All hail Obama...he stopped global catastrophe just like he paid for my gas and mortgage!
Y’all believe what you want. This is the kind of thing Yogi Berra was talkin’ about when he said “Predictions are tough, especially when they involve the future.”
The kill operation has failed miserably. This thread should be pulled from “Breaking News”
RE: Are you sure?
Ask the writer of this piece of news — Ed Morrisey. I just copied his article ( including his title and one line in his article ).
BP has 4 ships in place, 3 with massive pumps and loads of mud and one with nothing but mud, lotsa mud on hand according to BP, no reason that I would doubt them, they are doing a good job IMHO.
I don’t know. To me it looks like the material is spewing out from several areas now and I don’t recall it being like that before. If you ask me, I think this well won’t be able to be capped with mud until the relief wells are there to slow the pressure.
Regarding permits. People in Louisiana want to dredge up sand berms to block the entrances to marshlands. This is still being reviewed, and requires approval by the Army Corp of Engineers. Aren’t these the folks who brought us the dikes and barriers that failed in Katrina? On the other hand there may be legitimate issues regarding cutting of access behind barrier islands for a long time. It may lead to stagnent water and death of creatures, as well as preventing them from going in and out of the bays according to their life cycles. I’ll be interested to see how this plays out.
Well, someone may have already posted this info, but word now is that midnight a night ago, they stopped pumping mud, but apparently failed to tell anyone including the president. So, questions, did they use this insider information to profit from the significant run up in the market, including almost 6% up for BP, and maybe dump some before the bad news hit? DId they do this to help the President make himself look bad?
“where air won’t be available to cure the cement.” I didn’t think air was needed to cure cement. I thought it heated up chemically, and got hard. The word “exothermic reaction” comes to mind, but I could be wrong. Any construction experts know more?
One can add chemicals to increase that temperature ‘band’, but only by a few degrees.
It is inconceivable to me, or most anyone else for that matter, that a long term potential danger should be allowed to interfere with a necessary response to a short term devastating event.
Thinking that the long term potential problem should take precedence is just not natural. Those people are NUTS.
You are a total nitwit, and you have no idea now, and never had any idea what you were even responding to when you pretended to be responding to something I said. You are the sort that can make FR a waste of time, attaching your nonsense to posts to which your nonsense does not even relate.
And, again, you missed entirely the fact that this entire thread was based on stories that had been around since early morning yesterday, and the stories had been deemed unreliable, and several duplicates of the story had been eliminated by the moderator, and this one only slipped through because it came from Hot Air with an different - and 100% incorrect - title. You missed it all, clown, and went off on tangents like most everyone else.
And your entire above post is nonsensical and unrelated the the facts as everything else you've posted here. You're trying to be a real virtual world bad ass, and failing miserably.
And, post #52 that you are so proud of was wrong. They never stopped the leak, so that stuff coming out of the hold was a mixture of mud and oil, not just mud as you thought. And, again clown, all comments in the thread, including yours, were based on very incorrect information from an old story. Too bad you missed that fact and went off on irrelevant tangents.
“Well, someone may have already posted this info, but word now is that midnight a night ago, they stopped pumping mud, but apparently failed to tell anyone including the president.”
Yeah, this story becomes curiouser and curiouser as I’ve heard people say, which means this long thread and headline was based on even older, and even less reliable information. Here’s a pretty good summary quote:
“BP officials, who along with government officials created the impression early in the day (yesterday, Thursday) that the strategy was working, disclosed later that they had stopped pumping the night before when engineers saw that too much of the drilling fluid was escaping along with the oil.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/28/us/28spill.html?hp
Don’t know about any intend to influence the stock market. These guys are probably enough up to their necks in alligators that they don’t have time to worry about anything but the immediate problem at hand.
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