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Allen: ’Static kill’ is controlling oil well, but more work still ahead

04 August 2010 19:54 (UTC +04:00)

Baku â€“ APA. The blown-out Macondo well has reached a "static condition," oil giant BP said early Wednesday, meaning that pressure inside the well has been brought under control through a mud-pumping process that began Tuesday afternoon, APA reports quoting â€œThe Washington Postâ€.
BP called the achievement "a significant milestone" and said it stopped pumping mud into the well after about eight hours because the effort had been successful.
"The well is now being monitored, per the agreed procedure, to ensure it remains static," the company said in a statement. "Further pumping of mud may or may not be required depending on results observed during monitoring."
As they huddled in BP’s operations center, federal officials tried to manage expectations, saying that even if the operation known as "static kill" goes as hoped, the well at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico will not be finally plugged until it is intercepted and cemented by a relief well that crews have been drilling for three months.
"You want to make sure it’s really dead, dead, dead. Don’t want anything to rise out of the grave," Energy Secretary Steven Chu told The Washington Post late Tuesday afternoon.
The federal official in charge of the oil spill response, retired Coast Guard Adm. Thad W. Allen, told a New Orleans television station Wednesday that pumping mud into the blown-out well took care of the immediate threat but that the "bottom kill" technique involving the 18,000-foot relief well would still go ahead.
"We’ve pretty much made this well not a threat, but we need to finish this from the bottom," Allen told WWL-TV.
Meanwhile, the government is set to announce Wednesday that about 75 percent of the oil spilled from the well has already evaporated, dispersed, been captured or otherwise eliminated, the New York Times reported. The newspaper said a government study, to be released Wednesday, will say that the remaining oil is breaking down rapidly and seems unlikely to pose significant additional harm.
According to the most recent estimates, 4.9 million barrels, or 205.8 million gallons, of oil has spilled into the gulf since the April 20 explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig. Those estimates make this spill the largest unintentional oil spill in history.
BP initiated the process of pumping mud into the well at about 4 p.m. Tuesday. The static kill is not a quick operation by design, pumping mud at a leisurely rate of 2 barrels per minute. Engineers calculated that about 2,000 barrels would be needed to fill the well.
Ideally, the heavy mud will have caused the pressure in the well to drop to zero -- but that alone won’t mean the well is dead, according to federal scientists. The well could be playing dead. For example, when the mud travels into the hot environment of the rock formation 2 1/2 miles below the seafloor, the heat could cause the mud to change form and allow the Macondo reservoir to "push back," as Chu put it.
"You can imagine the hydrocarbons begin to finger through the mud," he said Tuesday.