In the disaster planning for deepwater drilling it seems to me that there was no “Plan B”.
Both the oil company and the drilling contractor depended on the proper functioning of the BOP to prevent the huge environmental disaster that appears to be unfolding now.
When I have done Hazid (Hazard Identification) exercises in the past, we did our best to identify the worst possible things that could happen and then developed various contingency plans to handle them.
It seems to me that this was not done in this case.
The release of oil from the blowout of a deepwater well can be recovered with a pollution dome suspended from a DP2 vessel with large tank capacity, 2 ROVs, a heave compensated crane or A&R winch, and a large reel of steel reinforced hose. It would also require the support of a number of DP Supply boats taking and shuttling the recovered oil from the pollution dome vessel to shore disposal.
It appears that BP is now trying to put this kind of an operation together on the fly.
If there had been serious effort put into a Plan B, this type of equipment would have already been available and tested. Now the whole thing is going to cost BP & Transocean many Billions of dollars as the oil continues spill while they cobble together an untested and untried deepwater pollution dome.
It is likely that a response system similar to what I describe will be mandated after all the investigations. After the Exxon Valdez, escort tugs were mandated for all tankers in Valdez, Alaska and many other ports. I think Deepwater DP Pollution Recovery Vessels may be mandated after this event.