My worst case but imaginable scenario:
Both relief wells might fail in the same manner as the original one did. This would leave us with 3 gushers to contend with instead of one. Merry Christmas from BP.
Why? Because everything is the same: same oil field, same pressure, same depth, same rock formations, same company in charge of drilling the new wells, same drilling plan, same people at MMS overseeing the work.
No time or effort was invested for making revisions or learning from original mistakes. If one repeats a process over and over again, without bothering to change anything, why should one expect anything different to happen?
The Scenario
The term "relief wells" may be a misnomer. They should propably be called something like "bottom kill" wells. I think I heard them described that way before.
As I understand it, the technique is meant to do what BP tried to do when they were calling their project a "top kill" and followed that by a "junk shot." There, in the top kill portion, they tried to use heavy mud to push down the column of oil in the underground pipeline so as to reverse its flow and to create sufficient space above the oil column to be able to fill the pipe with cement and allow the cement to cure. If successful this would have blocked the well pipe permanently, near the top. Unfortunately they could not push the oil down. It came up and dragged the mud (and cement?) along with it.
Those new "relief wells" are intended to intersect the pipe itself, near the bottom of the rock layer, just above the top of the oil cavern. Then BP wants to drill into the side of the exiting pipe, (pretty tricky, I should say,) and fill the existing pipe with mud, then with cement. This is meant to block the existing pipe permanently, near the bottom of the pipe, three miles below the seabed. If the oil was moving under too much velocity, volume and pressure to allow this to succeed at the sea bed, why would it succeed three miles further down, at the same volume of oil flowing per second, at so much greater pressure and through a narrower pipe, thus moving with much greater velocity.
An Analysis of Why Things Happened as they Did
I saw the "60 Seconds" interview piece as well as the A360 interviews several days ago. What I saw was that people with no power had been attending meetings, passively listening to superiors. Those superiors seemed to know less about drilling than their powerless listeners did. But no one would challange what was being said.
Observing the recent behavior of BP's people and our government's people, supposedly in charge of overseeing BP, I conclude that neither BP's leadership people nor the government's people seem to know exactly what is going on, strategically, and why. The latter seem presently to be as intimidated by BP as were the powerless BP line workers who were interviewed on TV. The blind is now leading the blind. Before, it was the blind leading the sighted but powerless.
The Peter Principle
There is usually a corollary to "too big to fail" that reads like this: "too big to succeed against real competition." But the correlation is usually not one of direct causality; the two ideas are often related only by an indirect, causal train of events. The reason these situations almost always correlate is a consequence of the Peter Principle:
In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his (or her) own level of incompetence .
Therefore, part of the above mentioned indirection in causality is because "too big" correlates with "longer trains of hierarchy." In other words, there are increased levels of incompetence among one's co-managers as one gets near to the top.
And there is another dynamic at work in large bureaucracies. Upper management, realizing that their behemoth corporation is no longer agile and competent enough to compete with smaller companies, turns to using financial and political means to out-gun their opponents. Over time they even come to prefer this over direct engagement in competition with their smaller but superior competitors. Thus they reward would be mangers who think like they do, the politicocrats rather than technocrats.
Success at this process downgrades the need for technical competence even at the middle levels of management where technical expertise used to be important. Thus the Peter Principle churns even faster.
Let's Look Back at Recent History
In the case at hand, BP's chief decision maker at the Deepwater Horizon site had no experience at all with deepwater drilling. His experience was all at shallow depths and on land. Nevertheless, he was arrogant as hell; he bullied the TransOcean top honcho into following his orders, even against the latter's best judgement. That's the way incompetent managers can continue to rise higher into a hierarchy where technical competence has taken a back seat to financial and political competence.
So let's look at the competence of BP's new team, which has taken over the project since the explosion of the rig. The new staff must now be 10 times as large as before; it was put together hastily from the highest levels of BP management, (thus from the more trusted and, correlatively, more incompetent managerial staff.) They have shown themselves to be "experts" in bullying; they get their way, even with the coast guard; thereby, through that office they got their way even with the Obama administration itself. Everyone in government is afraid to speak up, even when their gut tells them something is not quite right with what they are seeing and hearing.
How many tricks have they tried since fifty days ago and counting? Five? six? seven?... I lost count. How many of those have worked? That's easy to count: NONE!
They seem not to have even bothered to read BP's own Blowout Recovery Plan, flawed though it may have been. Voices in an out of government were urging them to compute the total flow in order to get the information needed to plan ahead. They not only ignored those pleas, but they also refused to allow others, with the proper scientific instruments, to measure that flow. The excuse BP gives is that such an endeavor diverts time and resources from their primary goal: stopping or at least reducing the flow.
But their own spill-recovery document states that the first order of business will be to measure the flow, so that further actions can be properly planned. Had they followed even their own advice, they would have saved many weeks worth of 20 to 30 thousand barrels of oil per day that will have entered the waters of the Gulf between June 1, 2010 and mid July.
They had prepared for collecting all or most of what they thought was 5000 barrels of oil per day into tanker ships above the well. Now they are collecting over 10,000 barrels per day of a gusher estimated to be spewing out almost 40,000 barrels per day. The bottleneck is now on the surface, where the possibilities for collecting oil were almost limitless. Only now, more than a month too late, are they ordering two or three more large tanker ships from the North see and redesigning their above water system so that more than one ship can be filling simultaneously.
These people at BP strike me as the analogues to amateur chess players who are capable of looking only one move ahead: just their own, not even their opponent's direct reply. They are supposed to be BP's best: The creme de la creme! If they had read their own manual they would have computed the true spill rate six weeks ago and all those necessary changes would have been ready and in place, today. They are as arrogant as they are incompetent.
Conclusions
So! I have serious doubts that BP will be any better at completing the two "bottom kill" relief wells than they were at stemming the flow of oil, so far. When has BP ever used the bottom kill relief well technique before? And at what depth of water? Has either the Coast Guard or the Obama Administration checked this out?
I would feel much more assured if Obama hired another company to take over the entire project, starting next week. The effort should be capitalized with BP's physical assets, resources and money, confiscated by the government if that be the only way. It should be up to such new management whether to use whomever of BP's personnel that they feel are capable of providing some useful activity toward our goal.
I ask: why wont the mud and cement from the relief wells just get swept up to the surface along with the gushing of the oil, as we saw in the top kill, junk shot technique. Why wont the old, weakened, drilled-through pipe that is presently in the well simply collapse under its new abuse? Are we sure that BP didn't cut costs by using an unsafe grade of casing pipe in that part of the well, the part beneath the sea-bed?
Why should we trust that even if the relief wells do their job of blocking the original well, BP actually knows how to shut the relief wells, themselves, down in a safe and proper fashion for this depth? Don't they need to update their recovery plan first? Do we just let them "fly by the seat of their pants", like we did before?
There has been evidence that events happened several months before this accident which may have already ruptured the original casing pipe, thereby drafting the sedimentary rock formation itself into becoming an integral part of the oil's pathway from its cavern to the sea bed. At least one scientist pointed out evidence last week that oil is erupting from the sea bed itself, nearby but separate from the damaged BOP. Nobody knows for sure; and who actually trusts BP to tell us, truthfully, all that they know?
We need to have another company put in charge. It should be one that is not burdened by the possibilities of future lawsuits: one that we can trust to plan and manage the rest of this ongoing saga.