You could sort of see this coming in their exchange of letters. The government wanted BP to guarantee the outcome, and BP kept saying it wouldn’t know what the outcome was until it did the test. So essentially this is a pause for the Feds to try to find a way to avoid the blame in case something goes wrong. Time for BP to just say, “screw it”, hook up the third production facility and wait a month for the kill well to work. As long as all the leak is being captured, the only risk from waiting is hurricanes.
The problem is that they stopped the relief wells also.
One of the things one should always understand when you do a test is what criteria indicates a pass and what indicates a failure. You do not do a test just to “see what will happen” which appears to be what BP was doing.
In this case (maybe a first) I would agree with the government if they asked for more information about how the test results would be read. Personally, it seems to me that BP may not know what a good result would be and if so, not doing the test is the best option— and as you say they can keep collecting the oil — none is going into the water at this time.
The concern from BP is to understand the levels of pressure needed to ensure success when they try to kill the well from the bottom using the relief well. But right now they have the oil spill stopped. Maybe we should collect oil and let the reservoir pressure drop for a while? Isn’t this what the well was for in the first place? Well OK, huricane season is upon us, that may mean we have to take some action to stabilize things in the event of a storm. BP could be looking at this as well.