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Exxonmobile CEO said that it is harder to resolve the situation once the well is blown up, and thus the focus had always been to prevent it in the first place.
This just shows how ill-equipped the industry is in handling such situation, and the lack of contingency plans.
Drilling a relief well takes months, and it is not feasible to pre-drill a relief well for every drilling operations. Think of what happens if the relief well blows up instead of the main well. Then another relief well for the first relief well had to be in place, etc.
The key still lies with the blow out preventer. One suggestion would be to install a secondary blow out preventer, which can be mechanically and manually operated by robotics on the sea floor (in case the control tower got blown up as in this BP case).
Previous post on BP:
http://sgretailinvestor.blogspot.com/2010/05/bp-plc-adr.html
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