What if it is impossible to stop the oil leak?
National Review Online’s Derb Radio asks that question.
http://radio.nationalreview.com/radioderb/
John Derbyshire is very thoughtful, and you have to listen carefully and tolerate dry English humour and irony.
His research seems to answer the question I’ve been trying to figure out – why do they need to dig the relief well to the bottom of the leaking well?
The answer seems to be that the poor design of the well and the resulting blowout may well have done serious damage to the casing. If you just try to plug the leak at the top, the oil will leak out sideways through the broken casing into the porous rock layers. In fairly short order, that oil will migrate upward in a series of small leaks spread over miles of the ocean floor instead of one central drill hole.
There has been a contradiction in what BP’s description of the relief wells are for. One description is that they’ll relieve the pressure in the main well, so the oil will stop coming out of the damaged well. The other description is that the relief wells will allow cement to be injected to plug the well. Those seem to be somewhat different descriptions. Maybe the relief wells are used to empty out the pressure for a period of time so that at some point it becomes possible to get a cement plug to not immediately be blown out…
