Special thanks to Donna Windle

http://news.remedy.org.ua/2425df10/ 

June 13th, 2010 by admin

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said on Tuesday the U.S. government was investigating another big BP oil rig while admitting his agency came up short in preventing the massive Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

Salazar told the committee the government was now investigating safety concerns at BPs Atlantis oil production platform in the Gulf after the April 20 explosion on the Deepwater Horizon killed 11 people and spilled vast amounts of crude.

Salazar testified at a Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing about the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon, BP Plc a drilling rig, four weeks ago that caused a massive oil spill deep in the Gulf. He said offshore drilling was vital to meeting U.S. energy needs but that additional safety measures were required.

Atlantis is one of the largest production facilities, producing about 200,000 barrels of oil per day. BP owns 56 percent of the field while BHP holds the rest.

Salazar gave no further details but an Interior spokeswoman confirmed the departments Minerals Management Service – the agency that has come under criticism from Congress and President Barack Obama for being too “cozy” with oil companies – was investigating the BP platform.

A consumer group and a whistle-blower asked a U.S. court to stop production at Atlantis until safety documents are produced. The lawsuit accuses the MMS of failing to enforce its own regulations.

About 30 percent of U.S. oil production comes from the Gulf of Mexico.
“Responsibility starts first at the Department of Interior and the Minerals Management Service. We have to clean up that house,” he said.

Salazar, who has ordered the MMS to separate its oil royalty collection and safety inspection roles, admitted the MMS fell short in preventing the explosion oil spill.

But despite the problems with offshore drilling, Salazar also said it still was a necessary part of meeting U.S. energy needs.

Democratic Senator Ron Wyden said the MMS has been in denial over its safety problems for years. “It is long past time to drain this safety and environmental swamp,” he told the hearing.

“If left unchecked and uncorrected, we may very well see another terrible disaster of this magnitude,” he said.

Senate Commerce Committee chairman Senator Jay Rockefeller said it would be difficult for him to support future offshore drilling until the Deepwater Horizon accident is fully investigated.

Senator Robert Menendez, one of the Democrats seeking approval for the bill that would increase the liability cap per company per incident to 10 billion from 75 million, said Democratic senators were considering pushing legislation that would place no limits on the liability.

Election-year politics made their way into the oil spill debate on Tuesday when Democrats for the second time in a week tried to force a Senate vote on a bill to increase oil companies liability for accidents. The move was blocked by Republicans as expected.
Salazar said the Obama administration agreed that the liability cap needed to be lifted though he would not give a specific number for how high it should be.

Special thanks to Richard Charter

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/14/us/14spill.html 

By JACKIE CALMES
Published: June 13, 2010
WASHINGTON – President Obama for the first time will address the nation about the ongoing oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico on Tuesday night and outline his plans to legally force BP executives to create an escrow account reserving billions of dollars to compensate businesses and individuals if the company does not do so on its own, a senior administration official said on Sunday.
“The president will use his legal authority to compel them,” said Robert Gibbs, the White House spokesman.

Mr. Gibbs did not elaborate on the legal basis for such a move but said that White House lawyers have been researching the matter for days. The president is seizing the initiative after reports on Friday from London that BP would voluntarily establish an escrow account – either for compensating victims or for delaying a planned dividend for BP shareholders – turned out to be less certain than the White House initially thought.

The escrow account that the White House envisions would be roughly modeled after the fund established for victims of the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, and it would be administered by a third party to provide greater independence and transparency and to guard against the company too narrowly defining who is entitled to payments and how much.

“We want to make sure that money is escrowed for the legitimate claims that are going to be, and are being made, by businesses down in the Gulf – people who’ve been damaged by this,” said David Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s senior White House strategist, on NBC’s “Meet the Press” television news program on Sunday. “And we want to make sure that that money is independently administered so that [they] won’t be slow-walked on these claims.”

The plans for a prime-time speech and Mr. Obama’s ultimatum on an escrow account escalate Mr. Obama’s personal engagement in the eight-week-old environmental and economic crisis. And they set the tone for a week of events that will have the oil giant publicly on the defensive more than at any time in the nearly two months since the explosion aboard the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig a mile below the Gulf’s surface.

The BP board is to hold an emergency meeting on Monday at which it is expected to discuss both the escrow issue and other issues company officials will address in a meeting at the White House on Wednesday that Mr. Obama has summoned them to.

Mr. Obama on Monday and Tuesday will make his fourth trip to the Gulf coast since the disaster struck on April 20. It will be his first overnight visit and, after three trips to Louisiana, his first to the states to its east – Mississippi, Alabama and Florida – which are in the direction of the spewing oil’s drift.
The president will return to Washington in time to report to the nation on Tuesday night, and on Wednesday will meet with the chairman of BP’s board, Carl-Henric Svanberg, accompanied by the company’s chief executive, Tony Hayward, who has been criticized for statements that many people considered insensitive and self-serving. And Mr. Hayward will be in the hot seat on Thursday, testifying before one of several Congressional committees investigating the calamity.

Administration officials say that Mr. Obama, in his speech from the White House on Tuesday, will not only discuss the issue of claims against BP but also update the nation on efforts to capture and contain the oil, and on his proposals to reorganize the federal system for regulating offshore oil drilling.

Amid some grumbling from Britain that the Obama administration and the country are unfairly bashing BP, the president on Saturday discussed the oil spill and the London-based company in a phone call with the new British prime minister, David Cameron. A White House statement afterward described a wide-ranging conversation that covered the countries’ alliance in Afghanistan, sanctions against Iran, the global economy and the upcoming G of 20 summit meeting of developed nations, and the day’s World Cup soccer game between England and the United States, which later ended in a tie.

But the statement also noted, “The President and the Prime Minister discussed the impact of the tragic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, reiterating that BP must do all it can to respond effectively to the situation.”

Inside BP, there is a view that President Obama’s unflinching criticism of BP and its chief executive represents an unprecedented example of a chief of state interfering in the affairs of a corporation.

And while some officials inside the company recognize that the president faces severe political pressures, there is also a resentment that the company has become a whipping boy even as it does its best on the clean-up.

Coast Guard Admiral Thad W. Allen, who is heading the federal response to the disaster, said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” that he expected an answer later on Sunday to his request to BP late last week asking its officials for “a faster plan” to siphon off and collect the gushing oil, one with “greater redundancy and reliability.”

He also acknowledged the recent determination from government scientists that the volume of spewing oil could be higher than estimated – up to 40,000 barrels a day. But Adm. Allen tempered his estimate by saying that the “mid-30,000 range is what we’re looking at.”

Meanwhile, the governors of three of the affected Gulf Coast states continued to complain that the news media were harmfully exaggerating the impact of the oil on their beaches and coastal waters, with Mississippi’s Haley Barbour calling the coverage “very sensational.” Mr. Barbour said that so far his state has had a “a couple of incursions” of oil on its barrier islands, but as a result of the coverage on cable television and other news outlets, “we’ve lost the first third of our tourist season.”

“They have been clobbered because of the misperception that our whole coast is knee-deep in oil,” he said of his state’s tourist businesses.

Gov. Bob Riley of Alabama and Gov. Charlie Crist of Florida echoed his criticism, with Mr. Crist calling his beaches “clean and pristine” and Mr. Riley urging Americans to “come down and rent a condo, stay in a hotel, play golf.”

Joseph Berger contributed reporting from New York and Landon Thomas Jr. from London.

Special thanks to Richard Charter

Oil collects on the water’s surface near the site of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico Sunday, June 13, 2010. Oil continues to flow from the wellhead some 5,000 feet below the surface.

BP was also trying to meet a Sunday deadline to respond to a letter from the Coast Guard demanding that it intensify the efforts to stop the spill. One of the actions BP took Sunday was to use robotic submarines to position sensors inside the well to gauge how much oil is spilling.

The robots were expected to insert the pressure sensors through a line used to inject methanol — an antifreeze meant to prevent the buildup of icelike slush — into a containment cap seated over the ruptured pipe, BP spokesman David Nicholas said.

BP was installing the sensors at the request of a federal team of scientists tasked with estimating the flow, Nicholas said. He did not know when the request was made.

Scientists haven’t been able to pin down just how much oil is leaking into the Gulf, although the high-end estimates indicated the spill could exceed 100 million gallons. The government has stressed that the larger estimates were still preliminary and considered a worse-case scenario.

The Obama administration’s point man on the oil spill, Adm. Thad Allen, on Sunday said government officials think the best figures are from a middle-of-the-road estimate, which would put the spill at around 66 million gallons of oil. That is about six times the size of the Exxon Valdez spill.

BP is currently capturing about 630,000 gallons of oil a day, but hundreds thousands more are still escaping into the Gulf. The company has said that it could begin siphoning an additional 400,000 gallons a day starting Tuesday by burning it using a specialized boom being installed on a rig — and any new success would be welcome news for Obama as he returns to the Gulf.

The president was scheduled to arrive in the Gulf on Monday for a two-day visit that will be followed by a nationally televised address to the American people on Tuesday and a sit-down with BP executives Wednesday. The crisis has already become a crucial test for the Obama presidency as it takes a greater toll on his image with each day that more oil gushes into the sea.

“We’re at a kind of inflection point in this saga, because we now know that, what essentially what we can do and what we can’t do, in terms of collecting oil, and what lies ahead in the next few months,” senior adviser David Axelrod said on NBC’s “Meet the Press. “And he wants to lay out the steps that we’re going to take from here to get through this, through this crisis.”

Obama wants an independent, third party to administer an escrow account paid for by BP to compensate those with “legitimate” claims for damages. The amount of money set aside will be discussed during talks this week between the White House and BP, but the request will most definitely be in the billions.

Louisiana’s treasurer has told The Associated Press that it wants $5 billion. Florida said it wants $2.5 billion.

“We are aware of the request,” said BP spokeswoman Sheila Williams in London. She declined to comment further.

BP could have to tap its cash reserve to pay the fund while also borrow money to comply. That, however, presents a potential problem because the company’s borrowing costs are likely to be a lot higher due to investor concerns.

Oil again began washing up in heavy amounts along the shores of Orange Beach, Ala. on Sunday afternoon as the winds shifted, turning the surf into an oily red mixture that left brown stains at the surf line.

A plane flew along the coast pulling a sign that read: “Obama, 55 days. What’s it gonna take?”

Earlier in the day, crews wearing rubber globes and boots used shovels to scoop up the oil, sand and tar ball mixture and put it into trash bags.

The disposal of oil-soaked dirt and sand is part of a broad effort playing out across the Gulf Coast to clean up the mess.

Waste Management received a contract from BP to transport waste produced by cleanup crews assigned to work the stretch of the coastline. Ken Haldin, a Waste Management spokesman, said Sunday that the company has designated 65 trucks and 535 containers that are being filled with solid oil waste.

Waste Management has designated three landfills in three different states that are operated by the company to handle the oily refuse. Haldin noted that before the refuse is dumped, it has to be analyzed by both the waste removal company and by local government environmental authorities to make sure it is nonhazardous.

Waste Management also is handling some of the liquid waste skimmed from the ocean by cleanup crews, and has set up special equipment, including vacuum trucks, along the docks that separates oil from the water. Once separated, the oil will be resold to oil services companies.

“This is a major mobilization effort,” noted Haldin.

___

Skoloff reported from Orange Beach, Ala. Associated Press Writers Anne D’Innocenzio in New York, Harry R. Weber in Houston and Jay Reeves in Orange Beach, Ala., contributed to this report.

Special thanks to Erika Biddle.

http://www.ogj.com/index/article-display/1896118812/articles/oil-gas-journal/general-interest-2/hse/2010/06/bp-might_burn_some/QP129867/cmpid=EnlDailyJune102010.html

Jun 10, 2010
Paula Dittrick
OGJ Senior Staff Writer

HOUSTON, June 10 — BP PLC expects to install another collection system that will supplement its lower marine riser package (LMRP) cap system on the deepwater Macondo well in efforts to divert more oil from the spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

The new system, called the Q4000 direct connect, will receive oil and gas, which will be flared. BP plans to burn both oil and gas using a specialized EverGreen burner made by Schlumberger Ltd.

It will be the first time for industry to use the EverGreen burner in the gulf although it has been used elsewhere, Kent Wells, BP senior vice-president of exploration and production, told reporters during a June 10 technical briefing from BP’s west Houston offices.

Pending the anticipated August completion of a relief well to 18,000 ft to permanently seal the well, BP is working to contain the oil spill and developing systems so that surface vessels can be moved if a hurricane hits the gulf.

Transocean Ltd.’s semisubmersible rig Deepwater Horizon drilled the Macondo well on Mississippi Canyon Block 252 for BP and partners. The Deepwater Horizon exploded Apr. 20, leaving 11 crew members dead. The semi sank Apr. 22 (OGJ, May 3, 2010, p. 31).

Direct connect system
The Q4000 was used as the command center during the “top kill” effort in which heavy drilling fluid was pumped into the well in a failed attempt to stop the flow of oil and gas. Wells said top kill equipment on the Q4000 is being replaced with production equipment.

A manifold on the seabed, also part of the top kill operation, will be used in the direct connect system. An additional 14,050 ft of hose was added between the manifold and the Q4000, a surface vessel, so it could be moved away from the Discoverer Enterprise drillship, which receives oil and gas collected by the LMRP cap system.

“We hope early next week to collect more oil and gas through this (direct connect) system,” in addition to volumes collected by the LMRP cap sitting on top of the failed blowout preventer (BOP) stack, Wells said.

The LMRP cap system has collected more oil daily since it was installed. On June 9, the LMRP cap system collected 15,800 b/d. The total volume collected since June 4 is 73,300 b/d. On June 4, the LMRP collected 6,100 b/d.

National Incident Commander and retired Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen told reporters the Q4000 direct connect system is expected to add 5,000-10,000 b/d collection capacity.

Meanwhile, Wells believes daily volumes being collected by the LMRP cap will continue to increase.

“We will never be satisfied until no oil is going into the gulf,” Wells said. Oil from the Enterprise drillship is going into a tanker, which will take it to Mobile, Ala. A second tanker is on the way so it will be available while the first tanker travels to Mobile.

The first tanker has a 140,000 bbl capacity, and the second tanker will have 230,000 bbl capacity, Wells said.

NOAA provides update
Jane Lubchenco, administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, on June 8 released NOAA’s analysis that confirmed the presence of less than 0.5 ppm of Macondo oil in samples taken from the surface to 3,300 ft of water.

Sampling was done 40 nautical miles and 42 miles northwest of the wellhead and 142 miles southeast of the well, she said.

“Along with the analysis of the oil, we have also been fingerprinting the oil,” Lubchenco said. “You can fingerprint it and determine if it’s from the Mississippi Canyon 252 site or some of the other oil that is in the gulf naturally. What we have found is that hydrocarbons in the surface samples taken 40 nautical miles northeast from the wellhead were indeed consistent with the BP oil spill.”

Oil found in samples 42 miles from the well at the surface, 162 ft, and 4,500 ft were in concentrations too low to do fingerprinting, she said. Oil found in samples taken 142 miles from the wellhead at 330 ft of water and 1,000 ft of water were inconsistent with oil from the oil spill.

Lubchenco said the subsurface oil is being moved around by subsurface currents.

“We will continue to do research to understand where it is and in what concentrations and what impact it will have,” Lubchenco said.

Contact Paula Dittrick at paulad@ogjonline.com.

Special thanks to Richard Charter