How sealed does a well have to be before it’s considered sealed? That seems to be the question BP and its accompanying team of government scientists are grappling with as the active phase of the Gulf oil spill appears to enter its final days. Yesterday retired Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen announced that BP was holding off on finishing the relief wells—long considered the final step in killing the original well—pending the results of pressure tests on the outer casing of the original well, otherwise known as the annulus. If it turned out that the mud and concrete BP had poured into the top of the well during the recent static kill operation had spread and sealed off the annulus, it might have meant that the relief well would have been redundant—the well would have been solidly killed, with no chance of the oil remaining in the Macondo reservoir leaking into the ocean.
The results of that test came in Friday morning, but the data is still being reviewed by BP and the team of government scientists led by Energy Secretary Steven Chu. But this much is clear: there does appear to be cement in the annulus, and Allen said that there is no “communication” between the reservoir and the surface. So does that mean the well is already killed? Apparently not. Though the results of the pressure tests are still unclear, Allen was. “The relief well will be finished,” he told reporters in a briefing Friday afternoon. “We will kill the well.”
All right then. Once the data from the pressure test on the annulus has been fully reviewed and relief drilling commences, it should take 96 hours to compete the procedure. But clearly something not quite right is happening with the original well. The concern seems to be that pumping additional mud and cement into the bottom of the well through the relief wells could increase the pressure beneath the surface, and that could stress some of the equipment on the floor of the ocean, including the flange tool that connects the original well’s blowout preventer and the capping stack BP placed on top of the well in mid July. The last thing BP wants to do this close to the end is create new problems, and putting too much pressure inside the well could cause unexpected trouble. The delays are a reminder that we’re all in uncharted territory here, and BP’s engineers—like the rest of us—are learning as they go. “Everybody is in agreement we need to proceed with the relief well,” Allen said. “The question is how to do it.”
The rest of the country may have already tired of the oil spill, but along the Gulf coast residents just want it over with:
“I have a hard time believing it will ever be over,” said Doug Hunt, 47, a construction worker in Houma. “All we’ve heard is oil, oil, oil. I guess they’ll do the job sooner or later, but it will take a long time for the people here to recover from this.”
Indeed, when we look back on the great BP oil spill, this may be seen as the end of the beginning, not the beginning of the end.