Drill, Baby, Drill!

Just a little excerpt from the Times

With options narrowing, BP officials are considering solutions that would entail more risk than the containment dome. One would be to place a new blowout preventer — a stack of valves designed to shut off a well — on top of the one that now sits on the seabed and is not working.

The other option is what Mr. Suttles called a “junk shot,” which he likened to stopping up a toilet. The procedure would involve reconfiguring the blowout preventer and injecting heavy material like rubber into it, then pumping heavy drilling mud down into the well to overcome the pressure of the oil from below. That might stop the leak.

But the mud would have to be pumped through new pipes from the surface, as existing pipes that might have been used for such an operation collapsed along with the riser when the drilling rig sank April 22.