The tough bit is getting the requisite amount of drilling mud far enough down the well.
The control pod will open the valves that allow the drilling mud to be forced into the well.
Drilling engineers use tons of a thick fluid called drilling mud to lubricate drill bits as they chew through rock.
The next step is to try to staunch the flow proper with drilling mud, a mixture of water and clay minerals.
And in some regions, cottonseed hulls are processed into oil-drilling mud, a sticky, industrial-strength type of Play-Doh that is used to plug leaks in oil wells.
The speculation is that something went wrong with the circulation of this drilling mud such that it could no longer control the reservoir pressures.
Union Carbide was a popular target for such suits because it produced the asbestos that was used in drilling mud sold by another company.
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The solutions for -- the solution with the top kill, first in stabilizing the well with heavy drilling mud, ultimately would lead to the cement capping of that well.
There, by making it harder for anything to get out of the top, the junk will give the drilling mud a better chance in a second bout of arm wrestling.
In a lot of wells I saw that the zone was taking drilling mud, soaking it up and leaving a layer of mud cake across a permeable interval of the wellbore.
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During the pumping and displacement of the heavyweight spacer used to displace the mud, a breach in pressure integrity resulted in the undetected loss of drilling mud into the probably uncemented well-bore.
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Above it the Q4000 rig and three attendant vessels have 50, 000 barrels of peculiarly heavy drilling mud and pumps capable of providing 30, 000 horsepower with which to muscle that mud into the well.
The friction caused by the gas bubble pushing up the pipe and displacing the drilling mud used to control the pressure could have created a static charge that ignited the gas into a fireball.
On May 26th BP, the company responsible for the well that Deepwater Horizon had drilled, started to pump heavy drilling mud into the well's blowout preventer, a set of valves on the sea floor.
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The plaintiff, Thomas Brown, claimed he came down with asbestosis after being exposed to the mineral in drilling mud but even his own physicians including two pulmonologists and six radiologists denied it.
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Davy Jones was so eager to cough up its bounty from a massive high-quality reservoir 200 feet thick that McMoran several months ago had to control the flow by filling the hole heavy drilling mud.
Late last year Chevron and deepwater driller Transocean incurred a relatively minor spill of a couple thousand barrels of oil-laced drilling mud at the Frade prospect they were drilling off the coast of Brazil.
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When the heavy drilling mud that provides the pressure needed to keep things from coming up the well was removed, first as a test, then as part of a procedure for closing down the well and moving the rig, telltale signs that something was wrong were missed.
Halliburton said that the report "accurately places responsibility on BP as the well owner for its operational decisions, " which included using a heavy fluid designed to keep gas from entering the well, called drilling mud, that was "too light" and probably mixed with the cement at the bottom of the well, and drilling too narrow a well.
There was in fact a discharge from a drilling rig in March, but the oil people say it consisted of mud containing no substances that would affect the environment.
Plus the rig also must be kept at the same position, so energy must be expended fighting the ocean currents, and mud must be pumped, workers helicoptered on and off the rig, drilling materials delivered, etc.
On Friday, one day after announcing it had pinpointed the source of the leak, Total detailed its dueling approaches to stop it: blocking the outflow with "heavy mud" (consisting of a mixture that contains mineral compounds) and drilling a pair of relief wells.
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