On May 26th BP, the company responsible for the well that Deepwater Horizon had drilled, started to pump heavy drilling mud into the well's blowout preventer, a set of valves on the sea floor.
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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.
Above it the Q4000 rig and three attendant vessels have 50, 000 barrels of peculiarly heavy drilling mud and pumps capable of providing 30, 000 horsepower with which to muscle that mud into the well.
At that point the fluid-dynamics equivalent of a titanic arm-wrestling match will get under way, with the surface vessels' pumps trying to push the mud down the well while the rising oil tries to push it out.
The solutions for -- the solution with the top kill, first in stabilizing the well with heavy drilling mud, ultimately would lead to the cement capping of that well.
This technique, starving fires of oxygen and then instantly capping the well with mud and cement, remained his favourite.
From that point, it will take another few days to permanently seal the well with mud and cement from below in what's called a "bottom kill" procedure.
Halliburton said that the report "accurately places responsibility on BP as the well owner for its operational decisions, " which included using a heavy fluid designed to keep gas from entering the well, called drilling mud, that was "too light" and probably mixed with the cement at the bottom of the well, and drilling too narrow a well.
The tough bit is getting the requisite amount of drilling mud far enough down the well.
During the pumping and displacement of the heavyweight spacer used to displace the mud, a breach in pressure integrity resulted in the undetected loss of drilling mud into the probably uncemented well-bore.
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This involves plugging the well with densely packed mud to prevent any more oil from escaping.
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The control pod will open the valves that allow the drilling mud to be forced into the well.
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That could have been why Transocean was pushing to complete the cement plugs while the well was still weighted with mud.
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If a stable column of mud has been set up in the well, keeping the oil at bay through its sheer weight, the next step would be to set cement in the well and seal it off permanently.
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There had already been a several week delay during which MMR was trying to mechanically grind away solidified barite, an ingredient in the oil based mud that was used to contain the well when it repeatedly tried to flow before it was supposed to.
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In early August, owner BP used cement and mud to plug the damaged Gulf of Mexico well.
The mud solidified into a cement like mass that caused the well to stop flowing and then really STOP FLOWING.
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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.
You could either do it separately if the integrity of the wellbore has been maintained through the explosion, and if not, it helps when the relief well intersects to the well in having a separate point of pressurization for mud and cement.
When the heavy drilling mud that provides the pressure needed to keep things from coming up the well was removed, first as a test, then as part of a procedure for closing down the well and moving the rig, telltale signs that something was wrong were missed.
And following the intersection of the well bore with those relief wells, they will put heavy mud down there to suppress the pressure of the oil coming up from the reservoir, put a cement plug in and effectively do what I would call a bottom kill, as opposed to the top kill, which was not successful a couple of weeks ago.
Only one of those economic engines, auto sales, seems to be functioning well so far, with the housing industry still mired in the mud.
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As for Lafitte, while there have been gas shows in the mud logs, Moffett is afraid to read too much into them until the well has been logged.
With that leak sealed, the plan is to inject heavyweight "kill mud" into the lower part of the blowout preventer, followed by cement that will effectively entomb the well.
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