George Rebane

With all due respect, I strongly disagree with the Big Bomb approach to plug BP’s oil gusher as suggested by Franz Gayl, civilian scientist for the Marine Corps (here).  Gayl recommends “dropping” a version of the Air Force's giant 21,600 lbs bomb on the wellhead.  Wrong solution – exploding it at the wellhead would create a huge hemispherical fragment zone directly above the drill pipe going to the oil reservoir several thousand feet below the sea bottom.  In all likelihood this will not seal the high pressure oil channel, but will now give the pressurized oil a hundred different places over a large area to come up through the fractured sea bottom.   Result – the leaking oil problem is amplified by a hundredfold.

A couple of weeks ago as I was noodling on how to seal the well with explosives (I bet every other engineer in the country was also thinking of solutions, especially if they’re former cannon cockers).  My solution is to use the two boreholes now being drilled next to the drill pipe and casing feeding the gusher.  These are intended to relieve the pressure by siphoning off the oil into two new, controlled and functional wellheads.  To do this they must intercept the current well casing, a very precise task indeed.

Instead of attempting this intercept and pressure relief approach, I would just bring the two new bores to within a computed distance of the active borehole.  Then pack the bottom so many feet of the new bores with fused explosives and detonate them either concurrently or sequentially.  At the proper distance, such an explosion would send a tremendous compression wave of the known underground strata against the oil-filled casing, and essentially seal it by squeezing it shut.  The technique is known as ‘explosive forming’ and is a manufacturing technique used to form thick metals.  Most certainly this should be done if the new bores fail to achieve their exact intercepts.

The result would be a tightly squeezed, but not broken/penetrated, casing and drill pipe which would seal the gusher and reduce the wellhead flow to a trickle that could easily be shut off by the standard wellhead seals.  Well anyway, you get the idea.