Wall Street Journal:
Oil giant BP PLC announced Sunday that a test on the cementing operation needed to plug its troubled well in the Gulf of Mexico was successful.
In an announcement on its website Sunday, the company said that the pressure testing following the cementing operations indicates an effective cement plug in the pipe, “which was the desired outcome.” The announcement was expected as the process known as “static kill” appeared to have worked after a string of failures in getting control of the blown-out well.
The blowout on April 20 on a well attached to the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig took 11 workers’ lives and caused 4.9 million barrels of oil to flow from the well, making it the worst offshore spill in U.S. history.
BP started injecting cement into the well Thursday, the latest stage in its static kill process, which began when the company’s engineers used hundreds of barrels of heavy drilling mud to push the oil back into its reservoir. It completed the cementing operation Thursday afternoon, much earlier than expected.
The company said it still will complete its efforts to drill a relief well as a precautionary measure.
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