http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/business/energy/6976990.html
By BRETT CLANTON and MONICA HATCHER HOUSTON CHRONICLE
April 26, 2010, 8:27PM
As a major oil spill in waters off Louisiana tripled in area, a growing task force led by BP kept trying and failing today to plug a leaking well one mile below, damaged when a massive drilling rig sank last week into the Gulf of Mexico.
Efforts remained focused on the quickest fix – using robot submarines to close valves sitting atop the well. BP also said it has made progress with back-up plans to build a dome-like device to collect seeping oil at the sea floor, which could be installed in as little as two weeks, and with a worst-case plan – possibly taking months – to drill relief wells into the damaged one to stop the bleeding.
“We don’t know which technique will ultimately be successful,” said Doug Suttles, BP’s chief operating officer of exploration and production, in a news conference. “Just like everyone, we want to bring this to conclusion absolutely as fast as possible.”
The leaking well was discovered Saturday after the Deepwater Horizon sank Thursday morning about 40 miles off the coast of Louisiana.
The rig, owned and operated by Swiss-based Transocean and under lease to BP, went down after an apparent blowout sent the hulking structure up in flames the night of April 20. Eleven of the 126 aboard at the time of the blast remain missing and are presumed dead.
The situation has cast a glaring light on the physical and environmental risks of offshore oil drilling at a time when the industry is pushing for greater access to domestic oil and gas resources and after the Obama administration recently called for opening more federal waters for energy exploration. And some political opponents of offshore drilling have seen an opening for attack.
“The explosion, ensuing fire, and continuing spill raise serious concerns about the industry’s claims that their operations and technology are safe enough to put rigs in areas that are environmentally sensitive or are critical to tourism or fishing industries,” Senate Democrats Robert Menendez and Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey and Bill Nelson of Florida wrote in a letter today to leaders of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee and the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.
They requested a hearing on the Deepwater Horizon incident. “This may be the worst disaster in recent years, but it’s certainly not an isolated incident,” they wrote.
Aware perhaps of what could be at stake for the industry, BP has gone to great lengths to ensure the cleanup goes smoothly and quickly.
As of today, the British oil giant had tapped an army of more than 1,000 people to brainstorm fixes for plugging the well, and had marshaled a small armada of boats, planes and other resources to fight the spill as far from the shore as possible. Under a 1990 U.S. oil pollution law, BP is required to foot the bill for the clean-up.
The Deepwater Horizon spill now covers an estimated 1,800 square miles, the Coast Guard said today, dramatically increasing its estimate of 600 square miles on Sunday. But it noted that the slick was not continuous over that entire area, and that 97 percent of it is a thin sheen that dissipates easily, while the rest is thicker oil.
Government forecasters said the spill posed no immediate threat of making landfall, based on three-day weather models.
“Our biggest concern is that it continues to spill,” said Doug Helton, incident operations coordinator for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “We’re not expecting any landfall at this point, but at some point we’ll start to see some of the shoreline impacts.”
The Coast Guard has been working on contingency plans with state governments in Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Florida, which would have ample time to respond if the spill came ashore, said Rear Adm. Mary Landry, commander of Coast Guard District 8.
But Chuck Kennicutt, professor of oceanography at Texas A&M University, doubts it will come to that. “This is far enough offshore that at least for the time being the likelihood of it washing up into the sensitive areas on the shore is probably fairly low,” he said.
As a precautionary measure, Houston-based Diamond Offshore Drilling said it evacuated more than 100 employees from its Ocean Endeavor drilling rig because the oil sheen had moved within a few miles of a well it is drilling for Exxon Mobil.
BP and Coast Guard officials said they remain hopeful of sealing off the well, which is leaking up to 1,000 barrels or 42,000 gallons a day, in two places – from a section of drill pipe near the wellhead and from the end of the long riser column that had connected the rig to the well and broke when the rig sank.
Workers were using up to four remotely operated vehicles in an effort to activate shut-off valves on a giant piece of equipment called a blowout preventer that rests on top of the well at the sea floor. None of the multiple attempts to activate the 50-foot stack of valves had been successful yet, BP’s Suttles said.
Separately, the company has begun constructing three of the dome-like oil-collection devices that could be deployed in two to four weeks, he said. Also, BP was expecting the arrival of a rig tonight night to drill relief wells should they be needed, Suttles said.
Special thanks to Richard Charter