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FintanDunne on July 15, 2010 - 7:22pm
Your report confirmed by the Wash Post:
Tom Hunter, retired director of the Sandia National Laboratories and a member of the federal government's scientific team, witnessed the test inside BP's war room in Houston and told The Washington Post that the pressure rose to about 6700 psi and appeared to be likely to level out "closer to 7000." He said scientists will labor to understand the meaning of such pressures. One possibility, he said, is that the well has simply depleted itself to a certain degree over the course of nearly three months.
"It's just premature to tell. We just don't know whether something is leaking or not," Hunter said.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/15/AR2010071500642.html?hpid=topnews
ADMIRAL ALLEN: Not necessarily, what we're going to do is we're going to test for 48 hours, and every six hours, we're going to evaluate all of the information we have available. At the end of 48 hours, we're going to take down the system, go back to containment, or production, as you say, and then we're going to get a new seismic reading off the floor that will tell us as a result of that testing at high pressure for 48 hours, was there a change in the well bore, or did we have oil leak into the formation and form a pocket just to be a precursor for breaching the ocean floor? Is there methane gas coming up, which would be a precursor as well.
Once we are satisfied that there are no indications that we've compromised the integrity of the wellbore, we create an irreversible position of oil leaving the well bore, we can go back then and put the—put the system under pressure again. Then once we're—once we're convinced, we've got no pressure in the well bore, and it can withstand the pressure after another seismic run, after that 48 hours, we can certainly consider shutting in the well, that's always a possibility, and of course, we would like to do that.