Weep For The Coast

It just gets worse, and worse, and worse! For some reason, the "top down" procedure keeps getting delayed [updates to this several-day's old article in brackets]:

BP is preparing to launch a procedure as early as Sunday [now postponed till Wednesday] 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.

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 [today, being reported as overestimated, with no more than 1,000 barrels/day captured]; 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.

...The top kill procedure, if it works, will stanch the flow of oil and ultimately allow workers to cap off the well with two relief wells-but these caps won't be ready for several months. It will use the BOP's three-inch-diameter choke and kill lines, which open into the space between the well's casing and the drill pipe that runs up the riser. The lines are being cut and spliced into hoses connected to the Q4000, a vessel on the surface, whose 30,000-horsepower pumps will drive a dense mix of clay and other substances called kill mud into the lines. If the mud cannot stop the flow of oil, BP says it will be ready with a "junk shot," in which a mix of materials from shredded rubber to golf balls are pushed into the lines to further gum up the flow paths through the BOP.

Federal officials acknowledge that the top kill carries a risk of breaking open the well or the BOP and exacerbating the spill. "We're carefully looking at all the pressures involved--what the BOP can handle, what the down-hole [pipe] can handle," says Lars Herbst, director of field operations in the Gulf for the U.S. Minerals Management Service (MMS), the federal regulator that both sells offshore oil and gas leases and regulates the resulting drilling.

Paul Bommer, a senior lecturer in petroleum engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, says he believes the junk shot will prove necessary. But he also sees it as a gamble--the junk shot could fail to block the BOP and further damage and open up the riser. "The bent riser is the weak link. The riser probably does not have the pressure rating of the BOPs and possibly could rupture," says Bommer.

Infighting is beginning to start as people try to dodge the blame. I was amazed by Sarah Palin's efforts in this regard, not only to shift blame to the Obama Administration, but to continue shilling for Big Oil:

Palin, who has supported drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife, told Fox News that onshore drilling is "even safer than way offshore." She said:

Maybe this (Gulf spill) is a lesson too for those who oppose safe, domestic supplies being extracted on our shores and on the land."

It's a tautology, I suppose. It's now crystal-clear that we really do lack the technology to safely exploit deep sea oil reserves, which just means we'd better step up our onshore drilling exploitation.

Can't figure out whether to laugh or cry about that.....