Fingers Crossed
The Gulf Coast found itself in an odd moment of limbo over the weekend: The oil has been stopped, but no one knows if its corked for good.
The clock expired on BPs 48-hour test period of the capped well, but the government added another day of critical monitoring. Scientists and engineers were optimistic that the well showed no obvious signs of leaks, but still were struggling to understand puzzling pressure readings emerging from the wellhead at the bottom of the sea.
Its possible the past three days will be only a brief reprieve from the flow of oil bleeding into the Gulf. Retired Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, the governments point man on the crisis, decided Saturday that after the testing was complete, the cap will be hooked up through pipes to ships on the surface that will collect the oil.
That probably means releasing some crude back into the water temporarily to relieve pressure. It still wouldnt be gushing at the rate it had been before BPs latest fix.
If we make the decision to open up the well, there will be a period when oil will go back into the Gulf, BP Senior Vice President Kent Wells said Saturday.
Along the Gulf Coast, there were signs that people were trying to get life or at least a small part of it back to normal.
In coastal Alabama, lounge chairs for rent outside of hotels were full, and swimmers bobbed in emerald green water virtually oil-free, save for a few small tar balls.
Calls started flooding into the reservations switchboard at Kaiser Realty Inc. in Gulf Shores, Ala., almost as soon as BP confirmed Thursday that oil had stopped flowing into the Gulf, said marketing director Emily Gonzales.
Are they what we want them to be? No, but it is far better than it was, she said.
People also were fishing again, off piers and in boats, after most of the recreational waters in Louisiana were reopened late last week. More than a third of federal waters are still closed and off-limits to commercial fishermen.
I love to fish, said Brittany Lawson, hanging her line off a pier beside the Grand Isle Bridge. I love to come out here.
Lawson and her boyfriends family were catching some fish Saturday. It is encouraging. Were getting bites. I mean, its catfish. But its bites. Its something, she said.
And even though it was only days since the oil was turned off, the naked eye could spot improvements on the water. The crude appeared to be dissipating quickly on the surface of the Gulf around the Deepwater Horizon site.
Members of a Coast Guard crew that flew over the site Saturday said far less oil was visible than a day earlier. Only a colorful sheen and a few long streams of rust-colored, weathered oil were apparent in an area that was covered by huge patches of black crude weeks earlier. Somewhere between 92 million and 184 million gallons have spilled into the Gulf, according to government estimates.
One tool that was tested on the slick was being shelved Saturday. The giant oil skimming vessel A Whale failed to collect enough oil to be useful. The U.S. Coast Guard said the converted oil tanker was too big to maneuver around the patches and ribbons of oil. Smaller, more agile vessels have been more useful in getting at the oil.
No new oil has been added to the mess for two days now because BPs experimental cap was holding, at least for now.
BP officials began Saturday saying they were feeling more comfortable, although Wells, the BP vice president, warned that the evaluation of the cap wasnt over. BP and the government want to make sure the well can stay bottled in case of a hurricane, when ships would have to leave the area.
Wells said engineers glued to an array of pressure, temperature, sonar and other sensors were seeing no evidence of oil escaping into the water or the seafloor. Undersea robots were also patrolling the well site for signs of trouble.
BP shut valves in the cap Thursday, stopping the flow of oil into the Gulf for the first time since the April 20 explosion on the leased oil rig Deepwater Horizon killed 11 workers and unleashed the spill 5,000 feet below the surface.
Concern that the cap could cause oil to break out of the well at the seafloor lessened.
Pressure readings Saturday morning were 6,745 pounds per square inch and rising slowly, Wells said. The figure was below the 7,500 psi that would have reassured scientists the well wasnt leaking somewhere below the seabed, but still high enough that it could be all right. A low pressure reading, or a falling one, could mean the oil is escaping.
But Wells said pressure continued to rise very slowly. The most likely reason the pressure is low is more oil has bled out than estimated, experts say. Last week, when an old cap was removed allowing oil to flow unimpeded into the water, the spewing wasnt as violent as it had been.
Depletion is actually pretty normal, said Don Van Nieuwenhuise, director of Professional Geoscience Programs at the University of Houston. At first it flowed very powerfully, and when youre producing too much too fast for too long, it takes longer to pull the oil.
Either way, the cap is a temporary measure until a relief well can be completed and mud and cement can be pumped into the broken well deep underground to seal it more securely than the cap. That means the best fix still wont be completed until later this summer.
BP is drilling two relief wells, one of them as a backup. Wells said work on the first one was far enough along that they expect to reach the broken wells casing, or pipes, deep underground by late this month.
Then the job of jamming it with mud and cement to permanently seal the well could take a number of days through a few weeks, he said.
Source: shipatlk