Posted on 06/28/2010 12:24:54 PM PDT by deport
HOUSTON — BP says the rig drilling the relief well that's the best hope of stopping the Gulf oil spill has made it within about 20 feet horizontally of the blown-out well that's gushing crude.
BP Senior Vice President Kent Wells said Monday that the rig is going to drill an additional 900 feet down before crews cut in sideways and start pumping in heavy mud to try to stop the flow from the damaged well. It's currently about 16,770 feet down.
Wells says BP is moving extremely cautiously to make sure everything is lined up correctly and the relief well is still on target to be finished by early August. A second well is being drilled as a backup.
end excerpt
A good schematic array of what BP is trying to accomplish at the following BP Link.
(Excerpt) Read more at chron.com ...
bump for later
Well, it’ll be a relief when it gets there.
I sincerely hope this works.
Only twenty feet left....
New Kent Wells update with detailed drawings of relief well --June 28, 2010
That is impressive!
It is hard to be optimistic, after so many other failures.
Yes relief wells have been utitlized in the past. The 1979 IXTOC Premex blowout in the Bay of Campeche was plugged using relief wells. It took two attempts and about 10 months but they got it.
Dumb question alert. Why pump mud in? Why not pump oil out?
Thanks for the link!!
Dumb question alert. Why pump mud in? Why not pump oil out?
You want to stop the flow coming up the bore that is spewing into the gulf. The way to do that is pump mud into the upflow until you get enough volume and weight to stop the flow. Then plug it. They will plug and abandon that fiasco. At some point they may drill another well into that reservior but who knows.
Its there wanting to come out and keep our energy prices down. I would argue that if we don’t use it, it may eventually work its way up into the Gulf and cause tar balls on the beach as they found in the 1500s.
Of interest.
No problem with using the crude. But you want to manage the extraction under a controlled situration. That we don’t have and won’t have with this blowout. Kill it, plug it and go back from another bore to get the crude.
Hundreds, perhaps thousands of times. EVERYTHING done to this point has been to shut up the uninformed American public who are given to panic.
Capturing or burning will work to a point everything else is PR.
Yes, it has. That is why they have said all along that it was the best hope for stopping the leak. The only thing is it takes a while to do, so the other measures were taken first. That doesn’t excuse Bozo the Clown for not taking help when needed and not putting skimmers available on the job. Disgraceful POS that he is.
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