Top kill time for Gulf blowout well?

Washington Post:

The most critical moment in the oil spill crisis in the Gulf of Mexico is at hand, as BP engineers armed with 50,000 barrels of dense mud and a fleet of robotic submarines are poised to attempt a "top kill" maneuver to plug the leaking well a mile below the surface.

This will be the first attempt to stop outright the flow of oil that has created a vast slick in the gulf and is now coming ashore and into marshes in Louisiana. Previous efforts by BP since the April 20 blowout on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig have focused on containing and/or dispersing the oil coming from a collapsed pipe. Those efforts have had limited success.

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."

...

Does anyone seriously think there is someone in the government who has a clue how to do this? Those who are suggesting that the government take over the effort to stop the flow from the well need to think about that. The alternative solution of relief wells that is under way is also beyond the capacity of government employees.

While the Obama administration could probably have done a better job of protecting the beaches and wetlands, there is no way they could have done much of anything to solve the problem at the well head. That is something that the petroleum engineers in Houston will have to figure out.