BP’s new “Plan B” – Plan A is that tomorrow they will try to use the BOP to inject drilling mud and cement to force in pressure to shut down the flow – it’s entirely possible that all that happens is a large bunch of drilling mud will spurt out the hole at the top.
Plan B makes sense, but it has more political risk. First, to describe the problem. The BOP sits at 5000′ below the surface. Before the blowout, there was a 5000′ “riser” pipe connecting the well to the surface (during drilling). The riser pipe weighs something like a million pounds. When the explosion happened and the drilling rig sank two days later, that riser pipe was bent as the drilling rig sank. The biggest leak is near the BOP where the pipe was bent, but there are other holes further along the pipe – but the oil will leak from the easiest one it can find – plug the main leak today, it just moves to the next hole.
Plan B is to cut the riser pipe away from the BOP. When you do that, there will be a temporary huge spurt in oil as the well will be wide open. But with a clean straight connection on top of the BOP, it will be fairly easy to put a valve on top and shut off the flow. The movie Hellfire (starring John Wayne) shows a lot of the techniques that are used on land. The risk is you increase the flow and then for some reason can’t fasten the new well head, you’re totally screwed. Even so, the chance of the dome working is enhanced since you have a small central leak, not a scattered leak from a bent pipe.
