Will a junk shot or top kill work?

I have long considered myself to be environmentalist, doing my part, however small it seems in the giant scheme of things and trying to set an example that hopefully someone somewhere will feel is worth emulating.

On the other side of the coin, I have never been mistaken for someone who works in the oil industry.


Because I believe power comes from knowledge, I have spent the past few days wandering around various websites where oil-riggers (and others who know the industry) have gathered to discuss the whether or not any of BP's proposed solutions to stop the oil from spewing will work and why or why not.

My goal was to wrap wrap my mind around what exactly a junk shot and top kill process is and how it is supposed to work. I wanted more information than was being put forth in the soundbites from BP endlessly repeated by the talking heads on TV.

I wanted facts. Explained to me so I would get it.

I've poured through posts filled with more terms that are meaningless to me as a industry outsider but finally one man explained it with enough clarity that even a boob like me could understand.

I didn't like his answer because made me more scared about the scope of this disaster, how long it will take to actually get the oil to stop gushing (BP and the talking heads should be using that term as opposed to leak or spill if they were being honest about the magnitude of what's happened) and what the long term effects mean to all of us.

As bad as his answer is to hear, it is worth sharing:

Goose -- "I KNOW nothing but I suspect it might not be working. I thought of a way folks could look at the effort in a manner they can more easily visualize. Here goes: there is a fire hydrant open full force. Putting out 7 ppg water at 80 psi at a RATE OF 500 GALLONS PER MINUTE.. Now I want to stop that water from coming up the main by pointing another fire hose at it. Unfortunately I can't connect the hose directly to the hydrant because the threads are messed up (i.e. bad BOP). So all I can do is hold the end of the hose close to the opening of the hydrant. My hose is putting out 500 gallons of 16.5 ppg mud at a pressure of 80 psi. So can I stop the water flowing from the hydrant? Nope...the pressures are the same. At best the two streams hit each other and the total flows out of the gap.

This is the problem I've had with the top kill from the start. I've been on rigs where we've pumped a successful kill pill. But the well was shut in. All we had to do was pump in at a pressure greater that the shut in pressure of the well. The pressured mud would push whatever was in the well downwards. But the BP well isn't shut in...it's flowing. How much force do you need to apply to a river to make it flow upstream? I know folks were holding out for the top kill to work so I didn't want to be too negative. But if they couldn't get a very tight seal on the BOP I couldn't envision how they could get the flow to stop let alone flow backwards down the csg. But as I've said before I'm not an engineer...just pretend to be sometimes on TOD."

Thanks Goose for your honesty however brutal.