‘Top Kill’ Fails to Plug Leak; BP Readies Next Approach
By LESLIE KAUFMAN and CLIFFORD KRAUSS
May 29, 2010
nytimes.com
NEW ORLEANS — In the most serious setback yet in the effort to stem the flow of oil gushing from a well a mile beneath the Gulf of Mexico, BP engineers said Saturday that the “top kill” technique had failed and, after consultation with government officials, they had decided to move on to another strategy.
Doug Suttles, BP’s chief operating officer for exploration and production, said at a news conference that the engineers would try once again to solve the problem with a containment valve and that it could take four to seven days for the device to be in place.
“After three full days of attempting top kill, we now believe it is time to move on to the next of our options,” Mr. Suttles said.
The decision to abandon the top kill technique, the most ambitious effort yet to plug the well, comes as the latest in a series of failures. First, BP failed in efforts to repair the blowout preventer with submarine robots. Then its initial efforts to cap the well with a containment dome failed when it became clogged with a frothy mix of frigid water and gas. Efforts to use a hose to gather escaping oil have managed to catch only a fraction of the total spill.
BP has started work on a relief well, but officials had said that the project would not be completed until August — further contributing to what is already the worst oil spill in United States history.
The latest failure will undoubtedly put more pressure — both politically and from the public — on the Obama administration to take some sort of action, perhaps taking control of the repair effort completely from BP — and increase the public outcry.
And for BP, the besieged British-based company, the failure could mean billions of dollars of additional liabilities, as the spill potentially worsens in the weeks and months ahead.
“I am disappointed that this operation did not work,” Tony Hayward, chief executive of BP, said in a statement. “We remain committed to doing everything we can to make this situation right.”
A technician who has been working on the project to stem the oil leak said Saturday that neither the top kill nor the “junk shot” came close to succeeding because the pressure of oil and gas escaping from the well was simply too powerful to overcome. He added that engineers never had a complete enough understanding of the inner workings of drill pipe casing or blowout preventer mechanisms to make the efforts work.
“Simply too much of what we pumped in was escaping,” said the technician, who spoke on condition of remaining unnamed since he is not authorized to speak publicly for the company.
“The engineers are disappointed and management is upset,” said the technician. “Nothing is good, nothing is good.”
The oil 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 of Mexico. After the announcement Saturday, the disappointment was palpable along the Louisiana shoreline, where the oil has increasingly washed up in sticky, rusty globs.
Michel Claudet, the president of Terrebonne Parish, 60 miles southwest of New Orleans, said that when he heard the news, he felt “sorrow, despair and like this ordeal will never finish. If you go around the parish, it is all our folks talk about.”
He said he was trying to remain hopeful, but that it was increasingly hard. “As every item fails,” Mr. Claudet said, “I am less and less optimistic.”
Last week, BP described the top kill — which was an effort to pump heavy mud into the well to counter the flow of oil — as its best hope for stopping the well. During the course of the operation, BP officials had often expressed optimism that it would work.
But on Saturday, Mr. Suttles said the operation had pumped 30,000 barrels of mud into the well and yet failed to stop it from flowing.
Rear Adm. Mary E. Landry of the Coast Guard called the failure “very disappointing.”
The new strategy is to smoothly cut the riser that the oil is leaking from and then place a cap. Pipes attached to the cap would then take the oil to a storage boat waiting at the surface.
An effort at a containment dome was tried earlier this month, but failed when gases escaping from the oil, froze and blocked the pipe. Mr. Suttles said, however, that BP had learned from that experience and now believed that this cap, which is custom fitted to the riser, will be more successful.
He said it would not capture all of the oil leaking from the well, which is thought to be gushing some 12,000-19,000 barrels a day, but most of it.
He would not give odds for the operations success, but said he had “a lot of confidence” that it would work.
Earlier in the day, Mr. Suttles said preparations for such an alternative plan were already under way just in case. “That equipment is on stage and ready to go,” he said. Equipment is deployed on land and on the seabed, he said.
If this new cap is not successful, the company has said it will look into attaching another blowout preventer to the one that already exists at the well head and has not functioned.
But officials emphasized that the real solution to the spill is the relief well. They said one of the relief wells was currently proceeding ahead of schedule, but it is still at least a month away. |
