the latest, filtered through the Gray Lady filters....
Storm brewin'
The chance that some oil will continue to leak for months was underscored by the managing director of BP, Robert Dudley, who described plans to put in place a second version of a containment dome, a strategy that failed earlier this month. Mr. Dudley, speaking on ABC’s “This Week” program, said that attempt had given the company’s engineers valuable lessons that would be applied to the new dome. But he added that even if it worked, some oil would seep out until the relief wells provided an “end point” by cutting off the flow beneath the seabed.
Carol Browner, President Obama’s adviser for environment and energy, said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that the government had ordered BP to drill a second relief well in case the first did not work, and that the administration had played a significant role in calling an end on Saturday to BP’s “top kill” effort to plug the well with heavy drilling mud.
Interviewed on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” Ms. Browner acknowledged that the new strategy, called a containment cap, came with significant risks. It could actually increase the flow of oil by as much as 20 percent because a key pipe — a riser — needed to be cut to allow for the cap to have a spot over which it could fit cleanly.
“What our experts are saying is that when you cut the riser, the kink may be holding some of the oil in, and so we could see an increase,” she said.
“According to BP, the riser cutting will likely start Monday, or Tuesday,” Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, said in a statement on Sunday.
Even if the cap works, it might not fit snugly enough to capture all the leaking oil. “The worst is that we have oil leaking until August, until these relief wells are dug,” Ms. Browner said, “and we will be prepared for the worst.”
Ms. Browner called the Gulf spill, which started April 22, “probably the worst environmental disaster we’ve ever faced in this country,” and said that it was being met with “the biggest environmental response.”
The Obama administration has come under increasing criticism for the scope of the disaster and pressure to do more to contain it. In her interviews today, Ms. Browner reeled off a litany of specific steps the government had taken and was getting underway.
Ms. Browner said that it had been the opinion of Energy Secretary Steven Chu that BP should abandon the “top kill” technique they had hoped would plug the leak, in which heavy drilling mud was pumped down at high pressure to counteract the oil flow, saying that he had been “very, very concerned” that continuing to pump the fluid down could lead to “something worse” happening. She said Mr. Chu was leading a team of 150 scientists who were consulting on every aspect of the response.
In the meantime, Ms. Browner said that the federal government was helping arm local officials with a number of remedies to clean up as much of the oil as possible. She said oil was being burned from the surface of the sea in 80 locations, that 1,400 vessels were skimming up oil in other places, and that booms were capturing much oil along the shore.But Louisiana’s governor, Bobby Jindal, complained in an interview on ABC’s “This Week” that the federal government was not supplying as much of the booms and other resources as local officials need. He said Terrebonne Parish had submitted a plan for 180,000 feet of hard boom — about 34 miles — and was only approved by the Coast Guard for half that amount, and ultimately the required supply was not made available. “They literally had hard boom sitting on the dock and they didn’t deploy it,” said Mr. Jindal, a Republican.
Mr. Dudley said there were several reasons to think that the containment cap would have better odds at success than the “top kill” or an earlier dome. The “engineering on this is more simple” than top kill, and the failure of the first dome, which was clogged by ice crystals, had given the company new ideas, he said, including wrapping the cap in pipes carrying warm water to offset the formation of ice crystals. He acknowledged, however, that the cap would not seal tightly enough to block all the oil from escaping.
The spill began after the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded on April 20, killing 11 people. Since then, it has dumped an estimated 18 million to 40 million gallons into the gulf.
Mr. Dudley denied that BP, the British oil company, had cut corners in drilling the original well. He shrugged off a report Sunday in The New York Times that said that as far back as last June BP engineers expressed concern that the metal casing the company wanted to use might collapse under pressure.
“The casing designs that are used in the Gulf of Mexico, we’ve used those in other places,” he said. “I think those are statements that an investigation needs to go through and look at. Cutting corners is not the way I describe how we do our business.”
He conceded that in the weeks before the explosion BP was concerned that it was losing control of the well, though he seemed to put the blame on the contractors that drilled the well. “There were issues of well control, signs out there and there are strict procedures that are written — the rig owners to walk through well control.”
He also said that the failure of the blowout preventer, the mechanism that was meant to cut off the flow of oil in case of an emergency, is “something that is very, very troubling.”
“It is the piece of equipment that is not expected to fail, and that’s going to have implications for everyone around the world,” he said
Ms. Browner was asked why BP did not have a contingency plan that anticipated the kind of blowout that took place on the Deepwater Horizon. She said that deepwater wells have been drilled for several decades and there had never been this kind of accident.
“But going forward we have to learn from this accident,” she said, adding: “How can we make sure that there are redundancies in place and what happens when those redundancies don’t work.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/31/us/31spill.html?hp
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