Replies

I think the seep is the same as the “bubble” Suttles reported this morning. They were trying to capture some of it to check for hydrocarbons. I get the feeling from the Allen letter that he’s trying to clear the decks so that there’s no delay on test results getting to him and no stalling if those results are positive. Later in the letter he told them to be prepared to reopen the choke line without delay.

I’m not sure I see the “conflicts” on this issue that the media’s speculating about. Suttles was very careful not to get into the position of being the advocate for a different position from the government’s. He even ducked being characterized as hopeful. I think there’s a lot of communal nail-biting going on.

Sandwich kill, possibly so. However, with a loss zone / underground blowout / broach it is hard to develop the friction pressure needed to kill the blowout. This is why so many of us did not favor the top kill to start with...it has the serious potential of damaging he wellbore early and makes the dynamic kill harder or maybe impossible.

If the sum of the fracture pressure + fracture propagation pressure at the kill flow rate + mud hydrostatic are greater than the reservoir pressure it is possible to dynamically kill the well. There is another however, this has to be done without broaching to surface. If that happens it is game over.

The problem with the top kill or bullhead kill is that it supercharges the zone where the mud goes. Without a way to shut the well in (they didn’t have this when they did the top kill) the well will predictably flow back and once more unload the kill mud and continue to flow. It is just about impossible to bullhead kill mud and not have a flowback without some way to shut in and allow the supercharge to become distributed into the far field of the reservoir.

On May 7 (I believe that was the date or close to it) BP asked for a peer review and they were told by every industry expert they invited that the top kill and junk shot were not only a waste of time... they were bad ideas that could lead to serious compromise of the wellbore integrity and maybe even a broach. They were also told a bunch of other things that they didn’t do like the need to install a capping stack early in preparation for hurricane season flow back facilitation.

Recall that there were questions about the top kill and where the mud went since they were not able to build much pressure. Recall also that within the time frame of the top kill was when rumors began to circulate about fissures in the sea bed. Pretty good chance that the broached the well back then. Flowing and relieving the pressure (providing an easier flow path than the broach) could have allowed the broach to heal some but it would not regain the original integrity.

One of the ideas of blowout management is to not do anything stupid that would leave the damaged well in worse shape than it is already. It is no time for hail mary operations. The mechanical asset in the wellbore is mostly finite and loss of competence is usually irreversible.

Some knothead from AC213 called an hour and a half ago and I still have not gone back to sleep. Leave it to some prune picker to screw up my sleep.