From NBC News

Will it work?  No one knows yet whether the “top kill” procedure has succeeded (as I write this) but they are currently suspending whatever it is they are doing in order to “assess their progress.”  ScienceMag calls it “How to Kill a Well with Gravity“.

Oil giant BP has a very long straw stuck 3048 meters into the Gulf of Mexico sea floor with oil and gas spouting out the top at several thousand pascals. How do BP engineers stop the flow when none of the control valves at the top is working and there’s no way to put a stopper in the straw’s end? The only option is using gravity, notes petroleum engineer Paul Bommer of the University of Texas, Austin. To get gravity on their side, engineers yesterday started trying to quiet down the well by pumping drilling “mud” into the side of the leaky straw as hard as they could. “If they get it quiet,” says Bommer, “gravity will take over.”

If all goes well, the stopper that holds in the oil and gas will be 3048 meters of drilling mud—a colloid of water, clay, and other solids—filling the well. Twice as dense as water and far more dense than the hydrocarbons coming up the well, the weight of a well full of drilling mud would more than balance the force of fluids trying to rise from the well bottom. This is the way drillers normally control well pressures. . . . . But if that resistance erodes under the higher pressure and faster flow escaping the wellhead, it could be time for a “junk shot.” That’s the injection of large particles of, um, … stuff intended to clog leaks and let the backpressure rise again. No word on what sort of stuff might be used, but shredded tires and golf balls have come up.”

Wonderful.  President Obama gave a tough public speech today, frowning a lot, looking serious,  telling us all he’s on top of this disaster and this is his number one priority.    I believe that like I believe the earth is flat.  Then again, for political reasons, maybe he’s telling us part of the  truth.  (This could very well affect the mid-term elections.)  Is this Obama’s Katrina?  Well it’s not the same of course, since about 2,000 people died in Katrina, but it’s hard not to argue that this is a bigger mess overall, and Obama seemingly ignored it much longer than Bush ignored New Orleans.    Of course we don’t know all that Obama has been doing behind the scenes since the blowout occurred. He claims it has been a huge priority since [...]