It’s Confined, Not Dead

McClatchy, and most news outlets, gets carried away and reports: BP well in Gulf killed with heavy mud in 8-hour operation

WASHINGTON — BP’s Deepwater Horizon well, which for 87 days spewed millions of barrels of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico in the worst accidental oil spill the world has ever seen, has been successfully killed by thousands of tons of heavy drilling mud.

BP announced early Wednesday that a so-called “static kill” had succeeded in forcing the Macondo well’s oil back into rock formations 18,000 feet below the sea’s surface.

“The MC252 well appears to have reached a static condition,” BP said in a news release, calling the well by the Mississippi Canyon lease number it was assigned when BP bought the rights to drill from the federal government in 2008.

The well reached it’s “static condition” — meaning the drilling mud was holding the oil in the reservoir by nothing more than its weight — about eight hours after technicians began pumping the mud into the well, BP said. It was midnight on the East Coast, but still Tuesday in the Central time zone, the 105th day of the crisis.

They have the well in balance for the moment, but it was supposedly in balance on April 20^th, just before a gas bubble pushed all of the mud out of the well and exploded. After they pump in enough cement to fill the entire well bore I’ll accept that it is dead, but not before.

The cementing process itself is not risk free. It may well have been the heat from the curing cement that released the gas from a hydrate deposit and caused the bubble. The Wagnerian soprano isn’t on stage yet.