BP Oil Spill Endgame?

This weekend has seen a remarkable series of events in the ongoing spill saga. The previous Top Hat and choke line links were collecting a fair amount of oil and gas from the leak. Estimates vary as to what percentage of the total leak was being captured, so I will put aside such speculation as we may soon have real numbers to work with.

The decision was made to remove the partially successful Top Hat and return to a modified top kill procedure. This involves a hot stab of a second BOP stack which is also a hybrid collection device.

To achieve this, they had to let the leak free flow while this next procedure was done. It is free flowing now, but the procedure, which I’ll briefly outline below has been going extremely well, and the hard part is over.