The “end game” of the top kill. I’m just kind of remember playing with beakers in high school and college…. so the drilling mud is heavier than the oil and gas coming up… you have a mile long “straw” that is 24 inches at the top and 9 5/8 at the bottom…. as you pour/pump the mud into the hole, it will sink down the hole – the more mud you get in the pipe, the heavier the mud gets and pushes more and more against the oil and gas trying to get out.
But here’s the tricky part and why I think they’re being so cautious, and is probably the issue with doing this at 5000 feet. When the mud arrives at the bottom of the well, there is no “plug” there to keep the mud from just running into the area where the oil and gas is – with 5000′ feet of water pressure pushing also, if you stopped pumping in more mud (or run out of mud), the mud will run out the bottom of the well until it clears out the pipe, and the leak starts all over again. It may be tricky or impossible to create an equilibrium between the upward and downward pressures.
At some point after the mud is flowing, they add in cement – but the inside of the pipe itself has nothing for the cement to adhere to. The graphic from BP shows a large area of “stuff” injected below the bottom of the pipe. It looks like the idea is to create a huge concrete plug below the bottom of the pipe and hope it gets solid enough to stop the upward pressure, but not so much downward pressure that the plug of concrete can never “set”. Quite a challenging task.
Le’ts send in the Marines – they can handle this for sure!
