Transocean engineers wanted to keep the pressure in the borehole under control with heavy mud while Halliburton set the cement plugs.
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Given the two red flags that had been thrown up previously, one would have expected that as a precaution a cement plug would have been placed somewhere in the wellbore as a secondary pressure seal before this primary pressure control system (heavy mud) was evacuated from the wellbore.
The friction caused by the gas bubble pushing up the pipe and displacing the drilling mud used to control the pressure could have created a static charge that ignited the gas into a fireball.
More heavy mud was sent to the bottom to control the kicks.
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The speculation is that something went wrong with the circulation of this drilling mud such that it could no longer control the reservoir pressures.
Davy Jones was so eager to cough up its bounty from a massive high-quality reservoir 200 feet thick that McMoran several months ago had to control the flow by filling the hole heavy drilling mud.
At 8:20 p.m. on the day of the explosion the pressure data suggest there was a constant flow of sea water being pumped into the drill pipe that was displacing the heavier mud system which was the primary pressure control for the well.
The control pod will open the valves that allow the drilling mud to be forced into the well.
This is what this data is supposed to monitor, but the well flow evidence would appear to have been ignored, because at this point the BP rig supervisors should have gone to a well kill operation and started to pump heavy mud back into the well bore to restore the primary control mechanism.
The denser mud had been, up until this time, the primary pressure control and was keeping the hydrocarbons in place despite the lack of an adequate cement job at the casing shoe.
And the mud that had to be shoved down the hole to keep it under control in recent months has now been cleaned out of the hole.
Some lawyers give Bingham credit for trying to assert control over the dispute with Mr. McCourt, especially after having been dragged through the mud during the trial over the agreement's validity.
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