BP plc Plans Final “Kill” Of Leak: A Legacy Of Scientfic Failure

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Aug 1, 10:36PM EDT · Published Aug 1, 7:30AM EDT

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BP plc (NYSE: BP) says that it is within a week of a final solution to the leak from the wreckage of the Deepwater Horizon spill. It has begun to inject much into the well and relief wells are about to be completed.

BP has prepared 12,000 barrels of the heavy mud. Industry experts say that the move has an excellent chance of working.The media, government, and residents of the Gulf region will be plagued for years by two questions. The first is why the well did not have the proper safety features to stop the leak from happening altogether. The other is why all the best scientists and oil industry experts in the world took more than 100 days to cap the well completely.

The first question can be answered by the fact that it is certain the well did not have all the proper technologies in place and probably was not following the proper protocol to keep those features implemented.

There may never the an answer to the second.

Douglas A. McIntyre

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.