Experts say there are no sure things when operating oil drilling equipment a mile under the water and 13,000 feet below the ocean floor.
Professor Tad Patzek, who heads the Department of Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering at the University of Texas-Austin, gives the relief well a 90 percent chance of success. But he'd rather not consider the other 10 percent.
"As a petroleum professional, I don't even admit the possibility that that might be possible," he said when asked about a failure to stop the flow. "That would be an environmental disaster of a caliber that was heretofore unseen by humanity."
Patzek estimates at least 20,000 barrels of oil and an equal amount of gas would flow daily for years from the reservoir, which he estimates to hold roughly 50 million to 100 million barrels.
"That is something that is not acceptable by any standards or measure," he said. "If BP cannot deal with the relief well, there will be somebody else that will, and that would happen sooner rather than later."
David Rensink, the incoming president of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, similarly said that BP's Macondo prospect likely contains enough oil to keep flowing from the broken undersea well for a very long time.
"It would take years to deplete. You are talking about a reservoir that could have tens of millions of barrels of oil in it," he said in a statement provided by the group.
A spokeswoman for the American Petroleum Institute - the oil industry's biggest trade group - said the relief well effort is certain to succeed. "Will the first relief well work? We don't know. That is why they are doing multiple relief wells," said API's Cathy Landry. |
