After its casing has been fitted and its own blowout preventer tested, the last act of the engineering drama will unfold as a series of short spurts of drilling take it down and into the leaking well, eventually cutting through its seven-inch diameter pipe.
Mike Mason, who worked on oil rigs in Alaska for 18 years, says that he observed cheating on blowout preventer tests at least 100 times, including on many wells owned by BP.
(Sept . 17 4. COACH COULD FACE SUSPENSION FOR BLOWOUT -- A test case in Connecticut.
England was truly dominant in only one match, the second-test blowout at Lord's.
When the blowout preventer was eventually tested again, it was tested at a lower pressure — 6,500 pounds per square inch — than the 10,000-pounds-per-square-inch tests used on the device before the delay.
After a four-month-long investigation, the commission in Alaska found that a single Nabors employee "violated rules regarding testing of blowout prevention equipment ("BOPE") on Rig 9ES by falsifying test results with a practice referred to as "chart spinning".
The problem, said safety board investigator Mary Beth Mulcahy, was that well owner BP and rig operator Transocean didn't test the blowout preventer's individual safety systems.
And when company officials wanted to test the blowout preventer, a crucial fail-safe mechanism on the pipe near the ocean floor, at a lower pressure than was federally required, regulators granted an exception, documents released last week show.
And: A draft of another industry-financed study this year contended that companies cut corners on federally mandated tests of blowout preventers.
We hear of kill lines, blowout preventers, negative pressure tests, and something called the bladder effect, which I would rather not know about.
