Bust a Cap In It, Part 2

BP well cap tests aren't going as well as we'd hoped.

Pressure readings have been less than ideal from the new cap shutting oil into BP's busted well, but the crude will remain locked in while engineers look for evidence of whether there is an undiscovered leak, the federal pointman for the disaster said Friday.

Retired Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen said on a conference call that pressure readings from the cap have not reached the level that would show there are no new leaks in the well.

Allen said BP's test of the cap, which started 24 hours previously by shutting three valves and stopping the flow of oil into the water, would continue for at least 6 hours. It was scheduled to last up to 48 hours.

He said the developments were "generally good news" but needed close monitoring.

Allen said there are two possible reasons being debated by scientists on the project for why the pressure hasn't risen as high as desired: The reservoir that is the source of the oil could be depleting after a three-month spill, or there could be an undiscovered leak somewhere down in the well.

"We don't know because we don't know the exact condition of the well bore," Allen said.
He said the test will go ahead for another 6-hour period before being reassessed to see if BP needs to reopen the cap and go back to piping some of the oil to ships on the surface.
If it were reopened, Allen said, "There's no doubt there would be some discharge into the environment."

In other words, unless you believe that the oil under the ocean is depleted to the point where the pressure's gone (and yet had enough pressure to spew tens of thousands of gallons of oil, 24 hours a day for 87 days) there's another leak out there somewhere in the pipeline.  Odds are very good now that by capping this wellhead, that pressure is now be transferred to the leak point or points, and it's in the process of ripping them open wider too, meaning all the oil being capped here is coming out, we just can't see it because it's under a mile of ocean somewhere.

Frankly, this means that there's a very good chance that this cap is a failure, and that the only solutions now are that relief well working or waiting until enough oil really has spilled out to lower the pressure to the point where we can plug it.  Option one may take weeks to months and several tries, option two may take much, much longer.

Either way, this isn't over.  Not by a long shot.