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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Right now, the company says, it has removed that mud from the hole, but it believes that barite from the oil-based mud has blocked the flow.
But the deadline for the seabed cleanup cannot be met following an additional discovery of oil-soaked mud last week.
And in some regions, cottonseed hulls are processed into oil-drilling mud, a sticky, industrial-strength type of Play-Doh that is used to plug leaks in oil wells.
Late last year Chevron and deepwater driller Transocean incurred a relatively minor spill of a couple thousand barrels of oil-laced drilling mud at the Frade prospect they were drilling off the coast of Brazil.
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But the minute they stopped pumping the mud, the oil came back up.
There was in fact a discharge from a drilling rig in March, but the oil people say it consisted of mud containing no substances that would affect the environment.
This involves plugging the well with densely packed mud to prevent any more oil from escaping.
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Video footage from the sea floor showed the sinuous heave of oil into the sea weakening as the mud was pumped in.
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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 price of oil, copper, steel, international shipping--even mud--shot up.
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.
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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We did the top kill -- we were able to force mud down the wellbore to the point where we actually suppressed all the oil.
Importantly, this mud also acts as a kind of plug in the hole, preventing any oil and gas from blasting up out of the hole.
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