BP Struggles for Solutions

ON THE GULF OF MEXICO - Top hats and junk shots are on the list of possible next steps as BP, casting about after a 100-ton containment box failed, settles in for a long fight to stop its uncontrolled oil gusher a mile under the Gulf of Mexico.

Engineers at BP PLC were wrestling with a shopping list of ways to plug the well or siphon off the spewing crude, including a smaller containment box, dubbed a top hat, and injecting debris including shredded rubber into the well as a stopper, called a junk shot.

“The issue is how to keep some of the water out,” BP Chief Operating Officer Doug Suttles told NBC’s “Today” show Monday. The top hat, he said, “is a much smaller dome” than the failed chamber attempted over the weekend.

“And in addition it has the ability to inject methanol into the top of it, which should prevent the hydrates from forming,” Suttles said, referring to the icelike crystals that formed on the larger chamber, blocking the oil from being siphoned up.

Asked if BP was operating without a playbook in looking for options, Suttles said that “there’s a lot of techniques available to us. The challenge with all of them is, as you said, they haven’t been done in 5,000 feet of water.”

On Monday, BP said that the spill has cost it $350 million so far, suggesting the final bill could be much higher than many analysts predicted. In a statement, the firm said the sum referred to the cost of spill response, containment efforts, relief well drilling, payments to the Gulf Coast States to speed up their response plans, some compensation claims and federal costs.

The company’s shares was lower again on Monday. The stock has lost 16 percent since the Deepwater Horizon rig caught fire with the loss of 11 lives, wiping around $30 billion off BP’s market value.

Big problem for BP
The cold, pitch-black depth of the seafloor is a formidable problem. That’s where icy slush formed inside a a four-story container and foiled plans to funnel the oil to a surface tanker, which had been the best hope for containing the leak quickly while a drill rig spends up to three months boring a new well to shut down the old one permanently.

The engineers appear to be “trying anything people can think of” to stop the leak, said Ed Overton, a LSU professor of environmental studies.

On land, helicopters were expected to drop sandbags in Louisiana to guard against thick blobs of crude that began washing up on beaches as the well spills at least 200,000 gallons of oil a day into the Gulf.

On Sunday, in a waterfront yard in Port Fourchon, La., a tractor-trailer dumped a load of sand, which workers planned to pack into 5-cubic-yard bags. Once the bags are ready, the Army National Guard will airlift them on Monday to five spots along a four-mile stretch of coastline between Port Fourchon and the Jefferson Parish line, said Lafourche Parish compliance officer Robert Passman.

“We want to block it off to where the oil doesn’t get into the marsh areas,” said Passman. “What they’re trying to do is just prevent. I know it’s still east of here but they’re just trying to do a little prevention.”

Among plans under consideration for the gusher, BP is looking at cutting the riser pipe, which extends from the well, undersea and using larger piping to bring the gushing oil to a drill ship on the surface, a tactic considered difficult and less desirable because it will increase the flow of oil.

A junk shot would be followed by cement to seal the leak and the technique is something company officials said they might try next week. The smaller container, or top hat, could be tried first, around the middle of this week.

An estimated 3.5 million gallons of oil have spilled since an explosion on April 20 on the drilling rig, the Deepwater Horizon, 50 miles off the Louisiana coast. At that pace, the spill would surpass the 11 million gallons spilled in the Exxon Valdez disaster by next month.

Above the oil leak, waves of dark brown and black sludge crashed into the support ship Joe Griffin. The fumes there were so intense that a crew member and an AP photographer on board had to wear respirators while on deck.

Philip Johnson, a petroleum engineering professor at the University of Alabama, said cutting the riser pipe and slipping a larger pipe over the cut end could conceivably divert the flow of oil to the surface.

“That’s a very tempting option,” he said. “The risk is when you cut the pipe, the flow is going to increase. … That’s a scary option, but there’s still a reasonable chance they could pull this off.”

Johnson was less optimistic that a smaller containment box would be less susceptible to being clogged by icelike crystals.

“My suspicion is that it’s likely to freeze up anyway,” he said. “But I think they should be trying everything they can.”

Source (article): MSNBC

Source (picture): MSNBC