There are serious concerns with what they are doing now. Actually, I suspect it was the administration that was moving too fast and someone finally put the brakes on the quick politically expedient gamble of closing the rams. The OilDrum had a thread last night where these serious concerns were addressed. It made no sense what had transpired. Basically, the original BP plan was to get the new CAP installed, collect almost all the oil and wait for the Relief Wells to be completed. That is what most of the industry people on the Oil Drum expected. Then at the last minute someone made the decision to close the RAMS and see if the compromised Well Bore and Compromised BOP held to the increased pressure. That plan made no sense. The risk is that they can destroy the well bore and leave absolutely no option other then a nuke. The original plan was sound and probably would have worked. The problem is that we would not know until mid-August. I suspect that is too close to the next elections for Obama and his Marxist Thugs.
The thing I don’t understand is that the original plan was to get the cap back on for the new collection facility, and then work setting up a 2nd collector (this in addition to the existing Q4000 burner and the Helix collector).
Then the government said they were pushing BP to do a pressure test to see if they could seal the well. Then they said they were delaying that test.
Well, why not continue with the capping? The capping and collection setup shouldn’t interfere with the pressure test, or would it? Maybe cutting off the oil to the collection would mean they’d have to remove the cap and reset it because of ice formation.