Page 7 - Drilling Mud News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

Time for today's "wordplay" where we take a term in the headlines that might be unfamiliar to a lot of people and explain it. today, we've got "mud," which doesn't mean what you think it means, at least in the context of the gulf oil disaster. your average mud is wet, soft earth, right? well, the mud everyone's focused on today is drilling mud, a manufactured fluid, usually a bentonite clay base. right now, it is the main ingredient in bp's static kill plan. v they've got more than 1 million gallons of this mud standing by. the plan is to start pumping it right down into that ruptured wellhead...

There is no flow. the reason for that is our students have injected drilling mud into the primary well which increased the weight of the fluid in the well. thin creased weight increased the pressure on bottom of this column of fluid and that was enough pressure to overcome the pressure of the reservoir. >> very simple model to explain what's going on. of course, actually in the gulf of mexico it's on a much larger scale with much larger pressures. joining me now to talk about the process, a professor of pred m petroleum geoscience. what is an injectivity test and what's that designed to take a...

Highway accident. police are blaming a drunken driver and illegal immigrant convicted and released after earlier ducks i cases. we want to welcome our viewers in the united states and around the world. i'm wolf blitzer and you are in i'm wolf blitzer and you are in "the situation room." -- captions by vitac -- www.vitac.com breaking news from the gulf of mexico where the static kill operation is under way. it is bp's effort to once and for all seal the ruptured oil well that led to a region-wise disaster. after a final round of testing, crews began to pump heavy drilling mud into the well a ...

It fixed in a matter of hours and as you said, they'll pump the heavy drilling mud down in to the well and if that is successful and can overcome the pressure of the oil that is trying to escape from the well, bp will then use cement and use this same system of piping, to shoot cement down there and could be over, at least, in terms of the oil leak itself. bill: that is one story today and the other one, there's reports bp is pulling out equipment, is that happening? how is that going over? >> reporter: it is not going over well at all, you can imagine, over the weekend the in coming bp ceo, b...

They'll pump heavy drilling mud and eventually cement at the top of the well. all of the pipes, all of the valves have to be able to withstand the pressure. thad allen was saying -- quoting him here, one of the things they're looking for is if they start pumping mud in and all of a sudden, the pressure doesn't go down, they would hit just a flat line and the pressure stays there. that means it's going somewhere and that would be of grave concern to them. here's something else that's happening. while the efforts are being made to create the right situation for that static kill of the well, abov...