To: ChinuSFO who wrote (76006 ) 5/25/2010 5:45:49 PM From: tejek Respond to of 149317 They haven't even done the diagnostics yet."Now the equipment for the top kill is in place at the sea bottom and engineers are beginning a set of diagnostic tests on the five-story-tall blowout preventer that sits atop the wellhead. By probing conditions inside the blowout preventer, BP will learn how much pressure must be overcome when the drilling mud is injected into the well. "We've got a crack team of experts that are going to pore over the diagnostic data," BP's senior vice president of exploration and production, Kent Wells, told reporters in a conference call Tuesday morning. "There is a remote possibility that we would get some information that it wouldn't work." After the tests are complete, the final decisions will be made on precisely how to proceed. There are five portals into the blowout preventer. Mud will be pumped at 40 barrels a minute, or some similar quantity, through multiple lines, driven by a 30,000-horsepower engine on a ship at the surface some 5,000 feet above the well. Some of that mud will not go down into the well but will leak out the end of the damaged pipe, but the engineers have factored that into the calculations, Wells said. "We know we'll lose some out the top, but can we pump fast enough to ultimately kill the well?" Wells said. He said the goal is to "outrun the well." This could work, but it's a challenging environment, said Tadeusz Patzek, chairman of petroleum engineering and geophysics department at the University of Texas at Austin: "They need to get access to the well. They were just working on finding ways through the choke and kill lines and figuring out how to do that safely. Remember that they are one mile in pitch-black water." The exact timing and pace of the maneuver has not been set, but Wells said the mud injection would begin no sooner than Wednesday and he cautioned that it could take as much as two days to complete." washingtonpost.com