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For Now, Oil Spews Unchecked in Effort to Cap Well
NEW ORLEANS - Hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil are being allowed to spew into the fouled waters of the Gulf of Mexico while BP engineers prepare to install a new containment system they hope will catch it all in the coming days.
This image from video provided by BP PLC early Sunday, July 11, 2010 shows oil continuing to leak after the flange was removed from atop the broken wellhead, at the site of the Deepwater Horizon oil well in the Gulf of Mexico. (AP Photo/BP PLC) There's no guarantee for such a delicate operation nearly a mile below the water's surface, officials said, and the permanent fix of plugging the well from the bottom remains slated for mid-August.
"It's not just going to be, you put the cap on, it's done. It's not like putting a cap on a tube of toothpaste," Coast Guard spokesman Capt. James McPherson said.
Robotic submarines removed the cap that had been placed on top of the leak in early June to collect the oil and send it to surface ships for collection or burning. BP aims to have the new, tighter cap in place as early as Monday and said that, as of Sunday morning, the work was going according to plan. BP hopes the capping operation will be done within three to six days.
Kent Wells, a BP senior vice president, said during a Sunday morning news briefing he was pleased with the progress but cautioned that unforeseen bumps could lie ahead.
"We've tried to work out as many of the bugs as we can. The challenge will come with something unexpected," Wells said.
If tests show the new cap can withstand the pressure of the oil and is working, the Gulf region could get its most significant piece of good news since the April 20 explosion on the BP-leased Deepwater Horizon rig, which killed 11 workers.
It would be only a temporary solution to the catastrophe. Hope for permanently plugging the leak lies with two relief wells, the first of which should be finished by mid-August.
With the cap removed Saturday at 12:37 p.m. CDT, oil flowed freely into the water, collected only by the Q4000 surface vessel, with a capacity of about 378,000 gallons. That vessel should be joined Sunday by the Helix Producer, which has more than double the Q4000's capacity.
But the lag could be long enough for as much as 5 million gallons to gush into already fouled waters. Officials said a fleet of large skimmers was scraping oil from the surface above the well site.
The process begun Saturday has two major phases: removing equipment currently on top of the leak and installing new gear designed to fully contain the flow of oil.
BP on Sunday said it had successfully removed the top flange that had only partially completed the seal with the old cap, almost a day earlier than a previous estimate.
Now that the top flange is removed, BP is considering whether it needs to bind together two sections of drill pipe that are in the gushing well head. The following step involves lowering a 12-foot-long piece of equipment called a flange transition spool onto the well head and bolting it to the bottom flange still in place.
After the spool is bolted in place, the new cap - called a capping stack or "Top Hat 10" - can be mounted. The equipment, weighing some 150,000 pounds, is designed to fully seal the leak and provide connections for new vessels on the surface to collect oil. The cap has valves that can restrict the flow of oil and shut it in, if it can withstand the enormous pressure.
That will be one of the key items for officials to monitor, said Paul Bommer, a professor of petroleum engineering at the University of Texas at Austin.
"If the new cap does work and they shut the well in, it is possible that part of the well could rupture if the pressure inside builds to an unacceptable value," Bommer wrote in an e-mail Saturday.
Ultimately, BP wants to have four vessels collecting oil within two or three weeks of the new cap's installation. If the new cap doesn't work, BP is ready to place a backup similar to the old one on top of the leak.
The government estimates 1.5 million to 2.5 million gallons of oil a day are spewing from the well, and the previous cap collected about 1 million gallons of that. With the new cap and the new containment vessel, the system will be capable of capturing 2.5 million to 3.4 million gallons - essentially all the leaking oil, officials said.
The plan, which was accelerated to take advantage of a stretch of good weather forecast to last seven to 10 days, didn't inspire confidence in residents of the oil-slicked coast.
"I want to believe it and I'm going to take them at their word because it's good news," Mayor Tony Kennon of Orange Beach, Ala., said Saturday.
But for the popular tourist destination, any halt to the leak comes too late to save the season, Kennon said.
Louisiana State University environmental sciences professor Ed Overton said he's less concerned with the strategy than with the unknown. As long as the cap is put on properly, the plan should work, he said.
"The problem is that almost everything they've done, there's been some unknown about it," he said. "I don't see why this is all that much different."
Associated Press Writers Vicki Smith in New Orleans and Carrie Schumaker in Washington contributed to this report.
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17 Comments so far
Show AllWhy are we (the people and the government) dependent on only so much of the information BP has at its disposal as BP wishes us to have? By what right is BP let to withhold any information as proprietary in the face of the harm they are doing to us (and the world) with a resource that is owned by us? (Well, not to mention with their own additives...such as corexit.) The government could have access to and control of every bit of information in the snap of a finger (and could have from the first moments of the disaster). At what point did BP become the sole arbiter of what we are allowed to know? At what point did the US Government become the tool by which BP can impose its knowledge screen or filter on the rest of us? Lots of questions (not being asked by the media)...no answers.
Not quite true, of course. There are good and competent people out there scrabbling for the facts that BP won't volunteer, and making assessments and conclusions that BP (and our government, apparently) doesn't want them to make...but who's listening...or reporting?
For instance, the corexit...that BP told EPA to take a flying whatever about:
www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=20090
My sentiments exactly. Why do we not demand to know what is in Corexit and make a determination ourselves as to whether or not to use it? It's not like people aren't positively getting sick from this stuff. I think they are softening us up for something more to come. Anyone's guess?
I actually don't really know the answer to your question.
They have certainly created a frankenstein with the plume situation which i assume is a morphing of oil, corexit and methane and ????? I assume they have people working for them who are scientifically aware and know what the deal is. And i am also sure there are unknowns.
They provide the fuel for the u.s. military, so i imagine they call the shots. Who knows what they've got on the u.s.? It is all being treated as a classified operation. That is one fact we do have.
Something we haven't conjured yet is going on here. I agree.
Incredibly incompetent journalism.
"Hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil are being allowed to spew into the fouled waters of the Gulf of Mexico"
That should be hundreds of thousands of barrels.
Incredibly incompetent journalism-gonzonews
I was thinking the same thing! The whole article sounds like b.s. Thanks for the info, BP.. I don't think anyone believes anything you say anymore.
"....install a new containment system they hope will catch it all in the coming days...."
The key words are "....will catch it all...."
Of course, nothing will catch ALL of it. They are too inept, too unprepared, and don't give a S#%T.
However, they want to "catch" more, a lot more - to salavage and resell, and they have all but out & out said that.
Thus, they have abandoned better solutions from around the world. So much for BP being any kind of "green" ever. Not that they ever were.
As always with BP --- they take a high risk strategy. Should they pressurize what is left of their piping and well casing there is a serious risk of total rupture and dislocation of the casing. It was established early on that it was almost certainly improperly cemented to the well bore.
A safer, and just as effective plan would be to place a large tall open ended cylinder over the whole mess, cement a flange on the bottom of it to the sea floor ---- then pump from the inside of the cylinder the encapsulated oil at a rate matching or slightly exceeding the flow from the well. Any sea water pumped could be separated topside.
Methanol could be pumped down into the cylinder to prevent the freeze up problem that they had with their little outhouse they tried early in the disaster. The top of the cylinder could be made a smaller diameter than the main portion but vented sufficiently that in the case of pump failure the oil would escape as it does now, hence avoiding the "float away" problem experienced with the earlier structure.
The government and the corporations always have control over the information that we need in order to understand the full impact of what is coming down. We need to regain the upperhand and we need to operate from a position of power and understanding.
What needs to be done, at least attempted, is to rally conscious folks together and begin the weaning process. We could apply pressure to their bottom line and go around the institutions by direct action. A global boycott/slowdown could get us the answers we need. We want to be kept in the loop, to be leveled with. Conservation of fossil fuels is long over due, perhaps because the powers have sufficient confidence in our addictive stupor. Maybe their conclusion is justified.
If you need to drive a vehicle...slow down and drive easy, if you can...park-it and take a bus, bike, walk, carpool. Voluntary behavior change is not on their radar. If they could begin to feel a global groundswell, well who knows. Remember to DRIVE EASY...CONSERVE or park-it, bus, bike, walk.
"The government and the corporations always have control over the information..."
They control the "flow" of information because the masses are docile and conditioned to consume, consume, consume. Why is it that the availability of the internet and electronic media is being so readily applied towards marketing and consumer behavioral patterns as opposed to being used more for individual research and greater in-depth analysis of historical events. Just like school children choose to use the internet to plagiarize information bits and pieces gathered online and copy them onto their school work instead of going further down the google entries and scavenging for real facts to develop ideas and conclusions of their own, people in general show the same kind of intellectual laziness in consuming what is being marketed to them by way of headlines and copy/pasted web pages.
And so BP (with the government's complicity) has managed to divert and forestall the flow of real scientific data on the current calamity in the Gulf of Mexico as a way of manipulating the news cycle by denying free access to scientists and the press while controlling the pace of information through a cynically orchestrated process of language usage manipulation. Instead of oil gushing out of the ocean floor we get oil spill containment, as if the oil has been spilled and the effort is clean-up related. This thing is STILL gushing thousands of barrels a minute! Yet BP's propaganda has managed to de-sensitize the public from the adverse on-going catastrophe actually happening.
The government, being so beholden to the manipulation of the media cycle for their own interests has been largely complicit in this process. Let BP take the blame even if means further endangering the physical country itself (political expediency being more important to the politicians inherent survival), don't come across as anti-corporate, and tinker with "the issue" when the rumble from "the masses" starts rising towards the "politically damaging" level. Which is why instead of galvanizing all national resources to mitigate as much of the damage as possible for the sake of the ecosystem and its neighboring land masses we witness a process where the first served are the corporate interests of BP and its partner in crime the "for-hire", government entities, federal AND local.
What if BP and the powers that be want to destroy the Gulf of Mexico?
Strange idea, but... it keeps returning.
Why would the Corprocracy be ok with this regional armageddon?
What if this black hole in the Gulf is being encouraged?
'dere's somting scwewy going on here'
Exactly, keep asking the questions and then come at them from a direction they haven't figured out how to control...the grassroots. We need to wean ourselves of mindless consumption, re-localize, become a shadow and regain our power. Start with simple actions and pass it on...conservation is something that they can't bust us for...REMEMBER...DRIVE EASY...CONSERVE.
jjrousseau-
The tin-foil hat answer is that with the Gulf turned into a desert, there will be little need or reason to regulate the oil companies' operations, and the companies
will be able to operate with a free hand. I think I saw this somewhere...I didn't think it up by myself.
ah, but bp is 'happy' with the effort...............
Peak OIl Peak OIl Peak oil Peak oil PEAK OIL....
"Kent Wells, a BP senior vice president"
He means senior kaka-grinder. I have no idea why anyone should address them in a way that they approve of. Do you?
I suppose a few still aspire to become senior kaka-grinders themselves. Or feed from the crumbs. That's very unfortunate.
I know almost all rock'n'roll lyrics to be coherent collections of words/phrases. At the very least they tend to rhyme. Yet the stewardship of our planet is in the hands of people who can't even form coherent sentences and here's the Associated Press quoting them in news articles. What signal is the AP sending to the youth?