On Thursday July 15th, 2010, BP finally managed to shut off the oil leak. I'm hoping that this will finally stop the leak once and for all, but I'm not getting my hopes up. I knew that their "top kill" plan wasn't going to work, ("top kill", "top hat", "junk shot" - clearly they have some brilliant minds at work on solving this) and I'm suspecting that this won't work either. This is why I think it isn't going to work (or more accurately, why they don't want it to work) - I was watching CBC news earlier this week, and they were talking to an oil industry expert (whose name I can't remember at the moment), and he said that his theory about why this has gone on so long is because in the US, the EPA determines fines for environmental spills by how many barrels of the substance are spilled into the environment. (Whereas here in Canada, there is a set fine per incident per day. Each day that a spill goes on is considered a separate incident, and is issued another fine). He says that BP hasn't been trying to determine how many barrels of oil per day are spilling out of the pipe because if they don't know how much has been spilled, they can negotiate a lower fine.
This theory sounds plausible to me. They clearly haven't been in any rush to cap the leak, and clearly all they care about is money.
I think what's going to happen with the new cap they've put on it (that they're presently testing to see if it can withstand the pressure) is that it's either going to stark leaking because the pressure is too high, or they're going to say they have to remove it because the pressure is too high. With a cap on the pipe, it would be possible for them to measure how much oil is leaking from it, which I don't think they want, so I don't think they have any intentions of keeping the cap in place for very long.
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