[4/22/10] A 1-by-5-mile sheen of crude oil mix has spread across the Gulf of Mexico's surface around the area where an oil rig exploded and sank, a Coast Guard lieutenant said Thursday.
"This is a rainbow sheen with a dark center," Coast Guard Rear Adm. Mary Landry told reporters Thursday afternoon.
Officials do not know whether oil or fuel are leaking form the sunken Deepwater Horizon rig and the well below, but BP Vice President David Rainey said "it certainly has the potential to be a major spill." BP PLC operates the license on which the rig was drilling.
***
[4/25/10] Efforts were under way Sunday to contain and stop oil leaking from a well after a rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico, the U.S. Coast Guard said.
Officials found oil was leaking Saturday from the well. The Deepwater Horizon oil rig was drilling when it exploded Tuesday night, the Coast Guard said. Rescuers on Friday suspended the search for 11 people missing after the blast and subsequent sinking of the rig.
***
[4/28/10] The estimated amount of oil spilling in an underwater leak from last week's oil rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico has increased to 5,000 barrels a day, five times more than what was originally believed, a Coast Guard official said late Wednesday.
Rear Adm. Mary Landry said the increased estimate is based on analysis from the federal National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. She noted that there are "a lot of variables" in calculating the rate of the spill.
Additionally, a third underwater oil leak has been located in the pipeline that connected the rig to the oil well, said Doug Suttles, chief operating officer for BP, who joined Landry at a news conference. Two other leaks were located within 36 hours of the April 20 explosion.
The head of BP Group told CNN's Brian Todd in an exclusive interview Wednesday that the accident could have been prevented, and he focused blame on rig owner Transocean Ltd.
CEO Tony Hayward said Transocean's "blowout preventer" failed to operate before the explosion. A blowout preventer is a large valve at the top of a well, and activating it will stop the flow of oil. The valve may be closed during drilling if underground pressure drives up oil or natural gas, threatening the rig.
"That is the ultimate fail-safe mechanism," Hayward said. "And for whatever reason -- and we don't understand that yet, but we clearly will as a consequence of both our investigation and federal investigations -- it failed to operate.
"And that is the key issue here, the failure of the Transocean [blowout preventer]," Hayward said, describing the valve as "an integral part of the drilling rig," which is operated by Transocean.
***
[4/29/10] Experts still hope to close a stuck valve that's let oil flow into the Gulf of Mexico for more than a week. But if those efforts fail, the next-best plans will take weeks more to stop the flow, officials say.
The undersea oil well, following a drilling rig's April 20 explosion 50 miles off Louisiana's coast, is spewing up to 210,000 gallons of light sweet crude a day into the Gulf, officials say.
Eleven workers from the rig are missing and presumed dead.
Part of the Gulf Coast was bracing for oily water to reach shore early Friday.
BP, the well's majority owner, has been trying to stop the flow by using remote-controlled submarines to activate a valve atop the well. But the valve, known as a blowout preventer, is not working.
A stopgap plan -- putting a chamber over the well area and sending the oil to a ship -- is unproven at that depth and could take four weeks before it's ready. And the ultimate plan -- drilling a different well to access the first and close it with concrete -- could take three months. Meanwhile, efforts to contain the spill and stop the leak are costing the well's owners about $6 million per day, BP says.
***
[5/5/10] A four-story containment vessel left Port Fourchon, Louisiana, on a barge Wednesday en route to the Gulf of Mexico's gushing oil well, where BP will attempt to lower the container onto a ruptured deep-water pipe in an unprecedented operation.
"If all goes according to plan, we should begin the process of processing the fluid and stop the spilling to the sea on Monday," Doug Suttles, BP's chief operating officer, said Wednesday.
But he added: "It's very complex, and it will likely have challenges along the way."
The hope is that the container will collect the leaking oil, which would be sucked up to a drill ship on the surface. If the operation is successful, BP plans to deploy a second, smaller dome to deal with a second leak in the ruptured pipe, the company has said.
***
[5/10/10] BP is moving on to plan "B" today to try to contain a massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. A 40-foot high containment dome lowered into the water over the weekend failed to work.
The company is scrambling to figure out how to clog a leak that's spewing more than 200,000 gallons of oil into the sea every day. Doug Suttles is BP's chief operating officer for exploration and production and he joined us on Monday's American Morning.
***
[5/12/10] The "top hat" oil containment device has reached the sea floor in the Gulf of Mexico and should be in position over a leaking well head and operational by the end of the week, BP said Wednesday. Meanwhile, one man says while all that's going on, he's sitting on a potential solution to saving the wetlands, if they're over-run with oil.
Frank Pajaujis is a partner at Aabaco and says he has a product that could actually "eat" away at the oil and turn it into dirt. He showed us a demonstration of his product on Wednesday's American Morning.
***
[5/13/10] Oil company BP will attempt to insert a new section of pipe into the riser of its damaged undersea well to capture the gusher of crude now spewing into the Gulf of Mexico, a company spokesman said Thursday.
The operation could begin Thursday night, BP spokesman John Crabtree said. The goal is to use the new section of pipe, which is ringed with a gasket, to seal the 22-inch riser pipe -- the section that connects the well with the main pipe running to the surface -- then pump the oil up to a ship on the surface.
The new attempt is the latest plan by BP to seal the well that was uncorked when the drill rig Deepwater Horizon exploded April 20 and sank two days later, about 50 miles off the southeast coast of Louisiana, leaving 11 workers lost at sea. A previous effort to cap the gusher with a four-story containment dome failed when natural gas crystals collected inside the structure, plugging an outlet at the top.
[5/14/10] President Obama on Friday criticized executives from BP and two other companies for blaming each other for the continuing oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico.
"I did not appreciate what I considered to be a ridiculous spectacle during the congressional hearings into this matter," the president said after meeting with Cabinet members to discuss the situation. "You had executives of BP and Transocean and Halliburton falling over each other to point the finger of blame at somebody else. The American people could not have been impressed with that display, and I certainly wasn't."
"I understand that there are legal and financial issues involved, and a full investigation will tell us exactly what happened. But it is pretty clear that the system failed, and it failed badly. And for that, there's enough responsibility to go around. And all parties should be willing to accept it," he said.
"It is absolutely essential that going forward, we put in place every necessary safeguard and protection so that a tragedy like this oil spill does not happen again.
"This is a responsibility that all of us share," he said. "The oil companies share it. The manufacturers of this equipment share it. The agencies in the federal government in charge of oversight share that responsibility. I will not tolerate more finger-pointing or irresponsibility."
[5/15/10] A mechanical problem prevented BP from inserting a tube into a ruptured pipe that would help siphon off oil leaking into the Gulf of Mexico, BP official Doug Suttles said Saturday.
Suttles said the device was hoisted back to the surface Friday for readjustments and the company expects to have it working by Saturday night. The plan is for the mile-long tube to collect the oil and send it to a surface vessel.
Millions of gallons of crude have gushed into the Gulf since the fiery explosion and sinking of the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig more than three weeks ago.
***
[5/16/10] Oil company BP says it has resumed pumping oil to a ship on the surface after a weekend setback that halted efforts to siphon off the crude spewing from a damaged well at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico.
Crews re-inserted the tube into the well's riser stack Sunday. The 4-inch pipe is now connected to a ship on the surface, 5,000 feet above the sea floor, and is pumping oil back to the surface, BP spokesman Mark Proegler told CNN.
If successful, the technique will capture most of the oil that is pouring out of the well. The well has been spewing an estimated 210,000 gallons, or 5,000 barrels, of light sweet crude a day into the Gulf since the sinking of the drill platform Deepwater Horizon in late April.
[5/17/10] For now, oil continues a-gush into the Gulf of Mexico. BP is attempting to stem the flow of oil using a "mile-long tube" to siphon the crude onto awaiting tanker ships, but even as that attempt gets underway, there's word of "giant oil plumes" forming under the water, which sounds -- let's say... menacing.
Against this backdrop, the Obama administration has escalated its efforts to resolve this crisis by assembling a "rag-tag band of big-think scientific renegades." It's a five-man group (no ladies, not in Larry Summers's America!) said by TPM's Zachary Roth to include Los Alamos veteran Richard Garvin, nuclear scientist Tom Hunter, MIT mechanical engineering professor Alexander Slocum, Lawrence Berkeley Labs engineer George Cooper, and Washington University physics professor Jonathan Katz. While so many aspects of these various "plug-the-leak" operations have come to resemble episodes of "Futurama" (Friendly robots! Shooting trash at the problem!), there's no indication that former Vice President Al Gore or chess-playing supercomputer Deep Blue have been asked to participate.
[5/17/10] After more than three weeks of efforts to stop a gushing oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico, BP engineers achieved some success on Sunday when they used a milelong pipe to capture some of the oil and divert it to a drill ship on the surface some 5,000 feet above the wellhead, company officials said.
After two false starts, engineers successfully inserted a narrow tube into the damaged pipe from which most of the oil is leaking.
[5/27/10] BP shares were up 7% to $45.38 on reports that its "top kill" operation to stem the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico was making progress.
[5/28/10] As BP labored for a second day Thursday to choke off the leak at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, dire new government estimates showed the disaster has easily eclipsed the Exxon Valdez as the biggest oil spill in U.S. history.
[5/29/10] A BP executive says the company has yet to stop the oil flowing into the Gulf of Mexico and is considering other ways to plug the leak.
BP chief operating officer Doug Suttles told reporters in Grand Isle, Louisiana, Saturday that the top kill has not stopped the flow of oil and he doesn't know whether it will succeed. He says the company is already preparing its next option to cap the well.
[6/4/10] Venice, Louisiana (CNN) -- On day 46 of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, BP, at last, began to siphon oil from the ruptured undersea well to the surface, where it was flowing onto the awaiting drill ship Discover Enterprise.
As the recovery process started Friday, BP said it would shut four vents on top of a containment cap from which oil was still escaping into the ocean. The company hoped that closing the vents would greatly reduce the amount of gushing crude, though there was still enormous uncertainty about the ultimate success of BP's latest effort to contain and recover the oil.
[6/8/10] NEW ORLEANS -- The cap on the blown-out well in the Gulf is capturing a half-million gallons a day, or anywhere from one-third to three-quarters of the oil spewing from the bottom of the sea, officials said Monday. But the hopeful report was offset by a warning that the farflung slick has broken up into hundreds and even thousands of patches of oil that may inflict damage that could persist for years.
Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, the government's point man for the crisis, said the breakup has complicated the cleanup.
"Dealing with the oil spill on the surface is going to go on for a couple of months," he said at a briefing in Washington. But "long-term issues of restoring the environment and the habitats and stuff will be years."
Allen said the containment cap that was installed late last week is now collecting about 460,000 gallons of oil a day out of the approximately 600,000 to 1.2 million gallons believed to be spewing from the well a mile underwater. In a tweet, BP said it collected 316,722 gallons from midnight to noon Monday.
The amount of oil captured is being slowly ramped up as more vents on the cap are closed. Crews are moving carefully to avoid a dangerous pressure buildup and to prevent the formation of the icy crystals that thwarted a previous effort to contain the leak. The captured oil is being pumped to a ship on the surface.
BP said it plans to replace the cap -- perhaps later this month or early next month -- with a slightly bigger one that will provide a tighter fit and thus collect more oil. It will also be designed to allow the company to suspend the cleanup and then resume it quickly if a hurricane threatens the Gulf later this season. The new cap is still being designed.
[6/12/10] (Reuters) - A top U.S. Coast Guard official has told BP Plc the company's plans to contain the gushing oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico do not go far enough or contain enough back-up measures.
"BP must identify in the next 48 hours additional leak containment capacity that could be operationalized and expedited," Coast Guard Rear Admiral James Watson said in a letter to BP dated June 11.
Watson, the federal on-scene coordinator for spill response, noted estimates of the amount of oil leaking from BP's damaged well have been raised sharply. He did not suggest what actions could be taken if the 48-hour deadline was not met.
Watson's letter was a response to one from BP that described the company's multi-phase plans to contain the spill, involving several elements to be phased in by mid-July.
[7/15/10] BP stopped the flow of oil into the Gulf of Mexico on Thursday — 85 days and hundreds of millions of gallons after the crisis unfolded — then began a tense watch to see whether the capped-off well would hold or blow a new leak.
[7/28/10] The oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico appears to be dissolving far more rapidly than anyone expected, a piece of good news that raises tricky new questions about how fast the government should scale back its response to the Deepwater Horizon disaster.
The immense patches of surface oil that covered thousands of square miles of the gulf after the April 20 oil rig explosion are largely gone, though sightings of tar balls and emulsified oil continue here and there.
Reporters flying over the area Sunday spotted only a few patches of sheen and an occasional streak of thicker oil, and radar images taken since then suggest that these few remaining patches are quickly breaking down in the warm surface waters of the gulf.
The dissolution of the slick should reduce the risk of oil killing more animals or hitting shorelines. But it does not end the many problems and scientific uncertainties associated with the spill, and federal leaders emphasized this week that they had no intention of walking away from those problems any time soon.
The effect on sea life of the large amounts of oil that dissolved below the surface is still a mystery. Two preliminary government reports on that issue have found concentrations of toxic compounds in the deep sea to be low, but the reports left many questions, especially regarding an apparent decline in oxygen levels in the water.
And understanding the effects of the spill on the shorelines that were hit, including Louisiana’s coastal marshes, is expected to occupy scientists for years. Fishermen along the coast are deeply skeptical of any declarations of success, expressing concern about the long-term effects of the chemical dispersants used to combat the spill and of the submerged oil, particularly on shrimp and crab larvae that are the foundation of future fishing seasons.
No comments:
Post a Comment