This Article is From May 27, 2010

BP begins attempt to seal oil leak with new procedure

Houston:
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Oil company BP went ahead on Wednesday afternoon with its most ambitious - and potentially most consequential - effort to plug the mile-deep gusher of oil that has been streaming into the Gulf of Mexico for more than a month.

The procedure, known as a 'top kill', begun at 1 pm Central time, the company said.

The procedure involves pumping thousands of pounds of heavy fluids into a five-story stack of pipes in an effort to clog the well and stop the torrent of oil. BP officials said the method of containing spills had never been tried so far underwater, and that it could take days to determine whether it had succeeded. They cautioned there was no guarantee that the gambit would work.

The Coast Guard gave BP approval on Wednesday morning to move forward with the maneuver after consulting with government scientists, as technicians completed preparatory diagnostic work. A live video feed of the leak will be available online throughout the procedure, BP officials said.

Tony Hayward, chief executive office of BP said, it would be "a day or two before we can have certainty that it's worked." On the other hand, failure could become apparent within minutes or hours, a technician involved in the procedure said.

Either way, President Obama will return to Louisiana on Friday to survey the spill's damage, the White House said.

The consequences for BP are profound: A successful capping of the leaking well could finally begin to mend the company's brittle image after weeks of failed efforts, and perhaps limit the damage to wildlife and marine life from reaching catastrophic levels.

A failure could mean several months more of leaking oil, devastating economic and environmental impacts across the gulf region, and mounting financial liabilities for the company. BP has already spent an estimated $760 million in fighting the spill, and two relief wells it is drilling as a last resort to seal the well may not be completed until August.

BP said on Wednesday that it had paid more than $32 million so far to settle claims from people and businesses in the Gulf Coast states over harm from the disaster. A company spokesman, John Curry, said BP had paid out $19.7 million in Louisiana alone through Tuesday.

The investigation into what caused the explosion aboard the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig on April 20 and the resulting oil spill continued Wednesday at hearings in Louisiana and Washington.

At a hearing in Covington, La., held by the Coast Guard and the Minerals Management Service, the chief mechanic for the Deepwater Horizon testified that he witnessed a "skirmish" between an officials of BP, which leased the rig, and Transocean, the owner and operator, on the morning of the explosion.

The mechanic, Douglas H. Brown, described a "skirmish" or "slight argument" on the rig between the BP well site leader (whom he referred to as "the company man") and Transocean officials, including the Offshore Installation Manager (OIM). The argument concerned BP's desire to replace heavy drilling fluid with lighter saltwater before the well was sealed with cement plugs.

"The driller was outlining what would be taking place, whereupon the company man stood up and said, 'No, we'll be having some changes to that,' " Mr. Brown said. "The OIM, tool-pusher and driller disagreed with that, but the company man said, 'Well, this is how it's going to be,' and the tool-pusher, driller and OIM reluctantly agreed."

A former senior Coast Guard official warned during the hearing that tensions between oil company officials and rig operators can be dangerous.

"You're always going to have a conflict between the people that are representing the owners of the rig and the people that are renting it," said the former official, Capt. Carl R. Smith, who has 15 years of drilling experience but did not work on Deepwater Horizon. "The people that are renting it want to go faster and drill, and the people that own the rig want to maintain the integrity of the rig."

He said offshore drilling rigs often cost oil companies $500,000 a day to drill.

"The company men I've seen vary widely in ability," he said. "Some of them are very, very capable people that add a lot to the operation. Some of them, on a couple of occasions, have become outright adversaries" of rig employees trying to maintain safety.

Mr. Obama is expected to call on Thursday for tougher safety requirements for offshore oil drilling and to announce a more rigorous inspections regimen for such operations, administration officials said.

Mr. Obama is expected to make the announcement after he receives a report from the Interior Department.

The department is preparing more stringent regulations governing safety and environmental practices, to replace the current system, which depends largely on self-regulation by the oil companies. Drilling companies objected to the new rules, saying they were overly prescriptive and would be costly to comply with.

The new rules were progressing slowly before the spill, but a senior interior department official said they would be accelerated.

The top kill technique has been used successfully for other spills, notably for stopping the oil flooding out of Kuwaiti oil wells sabotaged by the Iraqi army at the end of the first Persian Gulf war, but those were in fairly shallow water; the stricken well in the Gulf is 5,000 feet down.

Several veterans of the Kuwait operation are orchestrating the technicians in the Gulf of Mexico. To lead the effort, BP has brought in Mark Mazzella, its top well-control expert, who was mentored by Bobby Joe Cudd, a legendary Oklahoma well firefighter.

But at a mile below the gulf surface, the pressures of the surging oil and gas may be too much for the injected material, known as drilling mud, to counteract and reverse the flow, BP officials warned.

"It has been done successfully in the past, but it hasn't been done at this depth," said Kent Wells, BP's senior vice president for exploration and production. "We always have to be careful about setting expectations."

BP officials said that if the flow of oil can be stopped, cement will be poured into the well and the old, leaky blowout preventer, the stack of pipes above the well that failed to control the blowout, might be replaced with a new one as an added safety measure. The officials said the well would never be used for production purposes.

Mr. Wells said that if the top kill fails, the next option would be to place a containment dome over the well. This approach was tried three weeks ago, but an icy slush of gas and water clogged the dome. Officials said a different approach might avoid that problem.

(The image above shows an oil plume during the 'top kill' operation launched by oil major BP to plug the oil spill. Courtesy: AP)
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