For weeks now, retired Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen has been very clear: BP’s blown well would be considered fully fixed when the relief well was finally completed. “This well will not be killed until we do the bottom kill,” Allen said last week.
But it turns out that might not be true. As we reported yesterday, the final phase of …
You know, I’m going to miss these almost daily updates of well-capping procedures performed by robots 5,000 ft. under the surface of the Gulf of Mex…
No, I’m not. If I never hear another piece of vaguely violent drilling jargon—top kill, bottom kill, static kill—it will be too soon. It’s gotten to the point where I’m hearing …
According to The Onion, the greatest environmental disaster could be oil that actually makes it safely into our cars and planes, gets burnt for fuel and pollutes the atmosphere:
“We’re looking at a crisis of cataclysmic proportions,” said Charles Hartsell, an environmental scientist at Tufts University. “In a matter of days, this oil
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BP’s compensation claims process for Gulf residents and businesses affected by the oil spill has had some serious problems. Residents are saying that the company has been slow to pay, that the forms disappear into a bureaucratic void, and that the criteria of who qualifies and who doesn’t is anything but clear. For journalists covering …
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More good news on the oil spill front: around 9 A.M. today, BP began pouring cement into the well in the final phase of its static kill procedure. BP had earlier pumped 2,300 barrels of heavy drilling mud into the well—enough to equalize pressure in the reservoir and achieve a static situation, preventing any additional oil from …
That’s what BP reported early Wednesday morning, in what the company called a “significant milestone.” BP stopped pumping heavy mud into the blown well around eight hours after beginning on Tuesday afternoon, saying that the procedure had achieved its “desired outcome.” Here’s part of the press release from BP:
The well is now being
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The “static kill” is so called because that’s what BP aims to create—a static situation within its blown well, one where the drilling mud the company is currently pumping into the well offsets the pressure in the reservoir itself. If BP’s Houston-based drilling engineers want some advice on how to create a static situation, however, …
After the oil spill, BP promised to make the Gulf right—and a big part of that was going to be its claims process. Gulf residents affected by the spill—like fisherman who could no longer fish, or seafood restaurant owners whose business had cratered— could visit one of BP’s 25 claims centers sprinkled throughout the Gulf coast …
From the very beginning of the BP oil spill—when reporters were told that there probably was no oil spill at all—the people in charge have consistently underestimated the size of the spill. After that initial mistake, BP told us that oil was flowing at about 1,000 barrels a day from the blown well. (Each barrel contains about 42 …