Another Chance to Stop the Gulf Leak
But BP's "top kill" method to stanch the spill could also break it wide open.
BP is preparing to launch a procedure as early as Sunday to clog the flow of oil and gas from the month-old Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico. But the proposed "top kill" method is untested at the 5,000-foot depth of the spill, and could easily join the growing list of fixes thwarted by the spill's punishingly remote environment. It is also the most invasive maneuver attempted to date, and could rupture the leaking well and actually accelerate the flow of crude.
The potential environmental impact of the spewing oil picked up gravity this week when observers saw the first evidence of oil entering the loop-flow current that washes out of the Gulf and up the eastern side of the Florida panhandle. The oil threatens to foul Florida's sensitive coral reefs and its tourism economy by the end of May.
Oil containment operations simultaneously gained ground last week as BP installed a tube in the crippled mile-long riser that once linked the Deepwater Horizon rig to its seafloor wellhead. By Wednesday, the ad-hoc Riser Insertion Tube Tool was sucking 3,000 barrels of oil per day into the holding tank of a drilling vessel, cutting releases to the sea by roughly half; the vessel is also flaring off about 14 million cubic feet of captured natural gas per day.
BP's riser insertion operation marks its first real technology success after a string of high-profile failures. One early effort to suck up spilling crude--a 100-ton steel box lowered over the wellhead--jammed within hours with a frozen slurry of natural gas and seawater. This fiasco followed weeks of fruitless attempts to stimulate the blowout preventer, or BOP, that sits atop BP's crippled wellhead. Ongoing Congressional investigations last week highlighted design limitations and potential maintenance lapses involving the equipment, which the offshore industry hitherto regarded as a "fail-safe" defense against deepwater spills.
http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/25359/?a=f