The containment cap placed over the stricken well on the floor of the Gulf of Mexico is capturing as much oil as BP can collect, so another ship is being sent to the site to increase capacity, the Coast Guard said on Monday.
Though considerable amounts of oil are still escaping from the well into the gulf, some 11,100 barrels were collected on Sunday, the admiral heading the federal response to the spill said on Monday at a briefing in Louisiana. The additional equipment on the way will increase the capacity to 20,000 barrels a day.
The sheer volume of oil gushing from the well — now known to be several times greater than the rough estimate used for weeks after the accident that left the well out of control — has forced BP to temporarily halt its attempts to close the vents on the capping device. . Oil continues to escape through some of the vents. One technician, amazed at the power of the oil gushing from its depths, called it “one hell of a well.”
Adm. Thad W. Allen, the Coast Guard commander, said over the weekend and on Monday that BP officials were continuing to try to secure the cap over the wellhead and increase the amount of oil recovered. But he said the only solution to the problem would be the successful completion of relief wells to finally stop the flow from the bottom of the 18,000-foot-deep well, a job that will not be completed until August at the earliest.
“The spill will not be contained until that happens,” Admiral Allen said on the CBS program “Face the Nation” on Sunday. “But even after that, there will be oil out there for months to come. This will be well into the fall.”
He added: “This is a siege across the entire gulf. This spill is holding everybody hostage, not only economically but physically. And it has to be attacked on all fronts.”
Officials say it is not yet possible to gauge what fraction of the total flow is being captured and what fraction is still escaping.
Before BP began the procedure to put the containment cap on the well, a federal panel estimated that 12,000 to 25,000 barrels of oil was flowing from the well daily. BP had to cut a riser pipe on the stricken well last week to accommodate the capping device, which administration officials have said could have increased the flow rate by as much as 20 percent.
The area of gulf shoreline potentially affected by the spill has continued to grow, extending from central Louisiana to Port St. Joe in the middle of the Florida Panhandle, a 400-mile front in a widening sea, air and land war. Admiral Allen, who appeared on four television programs on Sunday morning to discuss the disaster, said he was fighting the oil and the elements with a flotilla of skimmers and boom-laying boats to try to keep the oil from making landfall.
“The problem we have, this is not a large, monolithic spill anymore,” he said on “Fox News Sunday.” “It is an aggregation of thousands of smaller spills that could come ashore at any particular time based on wind and current.”
It was too early to judge the degree of success of BP’s latest maneuver to control the leak, although company officials continued to express optimism that the containment cap and a new device to be installed later in the week could eventually collect the majority of the oil.
After two days of trying to gradually close the four vents on the capping device, engineers on Sunday decided to keep some open when they realized that more oil was being captured than could be processed on a drill ship floating in the gulf above. In a statement late Sunday, the company said it “may leave some” of the valves open “to ensure system stability.”
Engineers had feared that the volume and velocity of oil escaping might create so much friction on the new pipe that it might force it entirely off the cap. All day Saturday they worked to shut two of the vents, and they spent the afternoon measuring the results, mindful that if they closed the vents too quickly, water could rush in and form the kind of icy hydrates that doomed a previous containment effort.
Though considerable amounts of oil are still escaping from the well into the gulf, some 11,100 barrels were collected on Sunday, the admiral heading the federal response to the spill said on Monday at a briefing in Louisiana. The additional equipment on the way will increase the capacity to 20,000 barrels a day.
The sheer volume of oil gushing from the well — now known to be several times greater than the rough estimate used for weeks after the accident that left the well out of control — has forced BP to temporarily halt its attempts to close the vents on the capping device. . Oil continues to escape through some of the vents. One technician, amazed at the power of the oil gushing from its depths, called it “one hell of a well.”
Adm. Thad W. Allen, the Coast Guard commander, said over the weekend and on Monday that BP officials were continuing to try to secure the cap over the wellhead and increase the amount of oil recovered. But he said the only solution to the problem would be the successful completion of relief wells to finally stop the flow from the bottom of the 18,000-foot-deep well, a job that will not be completed until August at the earliest.
“The spill will not be contained until that happens,” Admiral Allen said on the CBS program “Face the Nation” on Sunday. “But even after that, there will be oil out there for months to come. This will be well into the fall.”
He added: “This is a siege across the entire gulf. This spill is holding everybody hostage, not only economically but physically. And it has to be attacked on all fronts.”
Officials say it is not yet possible to gauge what fraction of the total flow is being captured and what fraction is still escaping.
Before BP began the procedure to put the containment cap on the well, a federal panel estimated that 12,000 to 25,000 barrels of oil was flowing from the well daily. BP had to cut a riser pipe on the stricken well last week to accommodate the capping device, which administration officials have said could have increased the flow rate by as much as 20 percent.
The area of gulf shoreline potentially affected by the spill has continued to grow, extending from central Louisiana to Port St. Joe in the middle of the Florida Panhandle, a 400-mile front in a widening sea, air and land war. Admiral Allen, who appeared on four television programs on Sunday morning to discuss the disaster, said he was fighting the oil and the elements with a flotilla of skimmers and boom-laying boats to try to keep the oil from making landfall.
“The problem we have, this is not a large, monolithic spill anymore,” he said on “Fox News Sunday.” “It is an aggregation of thousands of smaller spills that could come ashore at any particular time based on wind and current.”
It was too early to judge the degree of success of BP’s latest maneuver to control the leak, although company officials continued to express optimism that the containment cap and a new device to be installed later in the week could eventually collect the majority of the oil.
After two days of trying to gradually close the four vents on the capping device, engineers on Sunday decided to keep some open when they realized that more oil was being captured than could be processed on a drill ship floating in the gulf above. In a statement late Sunday, the company said it “may leave some” of the valves open “to ensure system stability.”
Engineers had feared that the volume and velocity of oil escaping might create so much friction on the new pipe that it might force it entirely off the cap. All day Saturday they worked to shut two of the vents, and they spent the afternoon measuring the results, mindful that if they closed the vents too quickly, water could rush in and form the kind of icy hydrates that doomed a previous containment effort.
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