preventers as early as sunday. today, the effort was postponed until possibly monday or tuesday because workers need to clean out debris they found in one of the relief wells being drilled. the debris is preventing a final section of pipe casing from being installed. that casing is essential for reinforcing the relief well and keeping it secure during the static kill. tom foreman has more for us tonight. tom? hey, randi. what they want to do is make sure that relief well is ready in case the static kill doesn t work. let s explain the static kill first. they ll pump fluid down into that blow-out preventer we ve heard so much about. this is like that top kill they tried before, down into the line. this fluid is much heavier than the oil and, in theory, it will exert downward pressure on the oil and ultimately stop it. they can do this because with that cap on top, the oil is now at a more constant pressure instead of fluctuating with bursts of gas, bursts of oil that give them a hard
final pipe casing right now, suzanne, and when they do that and get it cemented in they will go with a static kill. that will happen late sunday or monday. they will put mud down the top of the well that s heavier than the oil that s there right now and hopefully fill the well up. we ll still need to drill in from the bottom and kill the well from the bottom but at this point it looks like we ll be able to move ahead. we ve got good well integrity and trying to move forward it s a positive turn. does this mean this will be completely capped and sealed, that we re now at final stage of resolving this? suzanne, it will take both the static kill from the top which will fill the well pipe itself and drilling in from the bottom and filling it from the bottom up and filling it with cement which will finally plug the well and when that happens we ll announce that the well has officially been killed, yes. how soon do you think that will happen? we originally said monday for the static
and so bear in mind that in the earth s crust there in the seafloor, you have a big pipe casing. then you put in a smaller one. it gets down all the way to seven inches. down very deep, almost two miles down, in the earth s crust. so that whole drill string below the earth s surface may have been rattled. and i had this model rigged up. here s the new cap which has a relief valve on it. this would go to the surface. but you ve got to think of things below the seafloor. if this were the seafloor, this drill string goes down, down, almost two miles. so anywhere along this string, in the earth s crust, what you might think of as solid rock, after you give it a jolt big enough to explode a drilling platform, there could be cracks down there. what you end up with is oil coming out all over the place in the seafloor. now, everybody s hope is when this valve is closed, this valve up here or this series of valves
it had hoped to start a static kill, pumping mud and cement from above into the blow-out preventers as early as sunday. today, the effort was postponed until possibly monday or tuesday because workers need to clean out debris they found in one of the relief wells being drilled. the debris is preventing a final section of pipe casing from being installed. that casing is essential for reinforcing the relief well and keeping it secure during the static kill. tom foreman has more for us tonight. tom? hey, randi. what they want to do is make sure that relief well is ready in case the static kill doesn t work. let s explain the static kill first. they ll pump fluid down into that blow-out preventer we ve heard so much about. this is like that top kill they tried before, down into the line. this fluid is much heavier than the oil and, in theory, it will exert downward pressure on the oil and ultimately stop it. they can do this because with that cap on top, the oil is now at a more constant
to us once again what they are worried about could go wrong. reporter: well, they need to just by the name of the test. integrity testing. essentially what they re going to do in this test is close off all of the valves. you can imagine how intense the pressure with all of this oil shooting out into the gulf of mexico. we are talking about intense, intense pressure. when they cap that, all that pressure is kind of contained in there and they need to make sure that the cap that they ve put on there will be able to withstand that and that everything down the line, deep into the earth, would be able to withstand that. obviously they re saying when you are dealing with this kind of pressure, if there are other problems that they don t know about down there, that this could actually cause further damage into that well bore and the casing, that pipe casing that goes into the earth and they don t want to cause any damage there because that can complicate things further. so that s really wha