Reply #6: BP Prepares for ‘Top Kill’ Procedure.

[elleng]

On Tuesday, engineers guided submarine robots through diagnostic tests in preparation for the top kill, a maneuver in which tubes will inject thousands of pounds of heavy drilling fluids into a five-story-tall stack of pipes to clog the well. A 30,000-horsepower engine on a ship floating above the well will shoot the liquids, known in the oil business as drilling mud.

The technique has been used successfully for other spills, notably for stopping the oil flooding out of Kuwaiti oil wells sabotaged by the Iraqi army at the end of the first Persian Gulf war.

Several veterans of that operation are orchestrating technicians in the Gulf of Mexico. To lead the effort, BP has brought in Mark Mazzella, its top well-control expert, who was mentored by Bobby Joe Cudd, a legendary Oklahoma well firefighter.

But at a mile below the gulf surface, the pressures of the surging oil and gas may be too much for the drilling fluids to counteract and reverse, BP officials warned.

“It has been done successfully in the past, but it hasn’t been done at this depth,” said Kent Wells, BP’s senior vice president for exploration and production. “We always have to be careful about setting expectations.”

BP said in a statement that the top kill could be combined with a procedure known as a junk shot, in which materials like golf balls and pieces of rubber are injected into the blowout preventer to bridge gaps in the rams and stop or sharply reduce the flow of oil.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/26/us/26spill.html?hpw