Nice courteous reply there board moderator.
So now we know BP had a bad plan and had their EIS waived by MMS, leading to a massive oil spill. That's a good reason for Salazar to waive 27 more EIS reports. If that's Obama's "middle of the road", then you can have it. Bush couldn't have done worse.
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Anthony Gervaso, the engineer aboard a supply ship that was parked near the rig when it exploded, told a Coast Guard inquiry in Kenner, La., that he'd learned from his captain that rig workers pulled from the water had said they'd just start removing the drilling lubricant from the well when gas shot up the pipe and exploded.
Tim Probert, an executive of Halliburton, the subcontractor responsible for placing a cement plug in the well, told senators in Washington that the dense drilling fluid had been pulled from the drilling tube and replaced with much lighter seawater before a cement plug had been set to block gas and oil from coming up the pipeline.
Normally, the procedure would have been to place the plug and then switch out the drilling fluid for sea water. But he said the decision to reverse the process came at the instigation of BP, the well's owner.
The switch, he said, was “in accordance with the requirements of the well owner's well construction plan.”
The drilling fluid is commonly called mud, but it is a complex and expensive recipe of clay and minerals that is recovered from a well and recycled. For a boring like the Deepwater Horizon project, mud could make up more than 10 percent of the cost of the overall project, potentially in excess of $10 million to $20 million, and mud experts with engineering degrees, one of whom was killed in the explosion, were on hand to oversee its use.
Before a cement plug is installed, muds are the most important and effective way to restrict gasses and fluids held under pressure deep underground.
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