I don't think the outcome of this procedure is going to be be as clear-cut as the media have been reporting. "Roll the dice" seemed to be the story as of last night.
In reality, we'll only know if top kill worked in August when the relief wells are completed. Until then, we'll only be able to say the fix hasn't failed yet.
The worry is that if the fix is reported to have worked and problems materialize a month later, they won't get the same attention as another blowout tomorrow.
yeah, but the "drop a big box on it" technique has been proven to not work many times in the past. i did some shoddy research that leads me to believe that its never worked. seems like they should just cut to the solutions that have a better success rate.
Look, I'm as uncomfortable with the physical world as anybody here, but I just can't see why you would have something called a "blowout preventer" that doesn't also have a freaking valve somewhere along the line. Turn valve, oil stopped. Is it really that hard? There's like 50 different places water from a city water tank and your sink can be stopped. And again, if you don't like that "Plan B", ask the BP engineer in line at WalMart with 50,000 boxes of X-out titleists what his solution is.
It's harder to find the news articles discussing the early efforts to close the valves because it's not exactly news anymore, but here's what wikipedia says.
"The rig's blowout preventer, a fail-safe device fitted at source of the well, did not automatically cut off the oil flow as intended when the explosion occurred. BP attempted to use remotely operated underwater vehicles to close the blowout preventer valves on the well head 5,000 feet (1,500 m) below sea level, a valve-closing procedure taking 24–36 hours. BP engineers predicted it would take six attempts to close the valves. As of May 2, 2010, they had sent six remotely operated underwater vehicles to close the blowout preventer valves, but all attempts were ultimately unsuccessful."
Yes, it really is that hard. Water valves that someone can walk up to and spin by hand is very much different from a valve that is a mile away (vertically) under water. Wikipedia says the pressure increases by 1 atmosphere every 33 feet (10m)... 5000 feet would be more than 150 times atmospheric pressure.
Marine Remote Operated Vehicles (MROVs) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MROV are being used, but it is very difficult to operate them even in good conditions (flat seas and minimal currents). Add to that, the dexterity of the tools on the ROV is nowhere close to the dexterity of a human hand.
I guess the only questions is why did it take weeks to do get this into place and several days to evaluate once in place?
How exactly could they have made this worse by rushing it a little bit? Shouldn't there have been round-the-clock engineering shifts being paid for? Why is anyone going home at night to sleep comfortably?
In our terms this is like "oh well, server is down across the country, it's hard to reach so we'll just analyze our options for a few days and try a few things until something works - nothing to lose sleep over".
You are underestimating how important logistics and planning are to a large scale operation like this. This needs large pieces of equipment and a group of specially trained people assembled and brought to a place which is not easily accessible, with a carefully thought out plan to maximize their chances. All that takes time.
BP has all the incentives to stop this as quickly as possible; it is costing them lots of money and continues to be a PR catastrophe every day it continues.
Do you realize the EXACT same problem happened 30 years ago by the EXACT same drilling company?
There is nothing "new" here. They should know what to do and only have better techniques to solve problems, but they are doing no better than 30 years ago.
Nothing worked 30 years ago, they had to wait 9 months while they drilled relief wells. The tophat failed, the kill failed, everything.
I was totally amazed at the super advanced, sophisticated machinery until I saw, on slide 6, that they'll be using a "junk shot", made up of tyres, rope, and golf balls as a last resort! One more use for all those balls that end up in course ponds, I guess.
Maybe it's from working on the Internet too much, reading about innovation, collaboration, open source, etc, but somehow I get the feeling the oil industry needs to evolve much like the old media was forced to. I bet if BP used crowdsourcing instead of asking the "old school engineers" for ideas, some smart 14-year-old somewhere would have thought of a better plan than to stuff the hole with golf balls.
Open source software works because the people who contribute are .... programmers!
Other kinds of crowd sourcing works by doing something simple/stupid many times.
Most people don't even understand the problem. So how do you expect them to come up with a solution? How many people do you know who have the slightest clue what they do to drill a well? And reading wikipedia doesn't count.
