The New Containment Cap on BP's Oil Well Appears to Be in Place | But Will It Work? | Underwater Photo
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Containment cap on BP well appears to be in place
By the CNN Wire Staff
July 12, 2010 7:56 p.m. EDT
An underwater camera captures efforts to put a new sealing cap on the breached well.
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
* NEW: BP appears to have placed a new containment cap on well in Gulf
* Sen. Landrieu calls new deepwater drilling ban "economic disaster for Gulf Coast"
* Ship Helix Producer begins recovering oil from crippled well
New Orleans, Louisiana (CNN) -- BP appears to have placed a new containment cap on its well in the Gulf of Mexico that's been leaking oil since an explosion and fire April 20. BP hopes the new cap will be able to completely contain the gushing oil, but tests are still needed to determine its effectiveness.
Earlier Monday, the U.S. Interior Department said Monday it was issuing a new moratorium order in a second effort to block deepwater oil and natural gas projects.
The new moratorium is to "protect communities, coasts, and wildlife" while oil and gas companies implement safety measures to reduce the risks of blowouts and oil spills associated with deepwater drilling, the government said.
The ban will be in effect through November 30, 2010, or until Interior Secretary Ken Salazar determines that deepwater drilling operations can proceed safely.
"More than eighty days into the BP oil spill, a pause on deepwater drilling is essential and appropriate to protect communities, coasts, and wildlife from the risks that deepwater drilling currently pose," Salazar said in a statement. "I am basing my decision on evidence that grows every day of the industry's inability in the deepwater to contain a catastrophic blowout, respond to an oil spill, and to operate safely."
He added, "I remain open to modifying the new deepwater drilling suspensions based on new information."
But Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana called the moratorium "unnecessary, ill-conceived and a second economic disaster for the Gulf Coast."
She spoke before a presidential commission, tasked with reviewing the response to the oil spill and the priorities going forward. Landrieu called the BP oil spill the "exception instead of the rule" and said the deepwater drilling moratorium will kill jobs.
The National Oil Spill Commission is holding meetings in New Orleans Monday and Tuesday.
Shallow water drilling activities can continue to move forward, under the Interior Department's order, if operators comply with all safety and environmental requirements. The department said that's because they don't present the same type or level of risks that deepwater drilling operations can, it said.
A previous six-month ban issued in the wake of the Gulf oil disaster was thrown out by a federal judge in New Orleans. Last week, a federal appeals panel rejected the government's request to overturn the lower court judge's decision.
Like the initial drilling ban, the new moratorium probably also will face stiff opposition from commercial interests in the Gulf region. Michael Hecht, president and chief executive officer of the economic development group Greater New Orleans Inc., told the the National Oil Spill Commission, "Economically speaking, the BP oil spill is really a tale of two impacts: it's the impact of the oil spill itself and the impact from the moratorium on deepwater drilling."
The commission is a presidential panel tasked with investigating the Gulf oil gusher and making recommendations about the future of offshore drilling,
What's next
New containment cap that has a better fit appears to have been placed over the well.
BP and U.S. officials will conduct a "well integrity test" to determine the pressure inside the well.
If it works, oil will stop flowing and oil collection via Q4000 and Helix Producer will cease. BP will then close in on the perforated pipe.
This process, which is still a temporary measure, might take up to 48 hours.
The first relief well BP plans to use to shut down the well is 5 feet away from the main well and 30 feet above the hoped-for intersection point.
The ban would prevent further deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico until officials determine what went wrong in the April 20 explosion and fire at an oil rig that led to oil gushing into the ocean 5,000 feet below the surface.
A new sealing cap could cover the breached well as early as Monday, the man in charge of the federal response team told CNN's "American Morning."
Retired Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen said Monday that once the cap is placed on the well, scientists will be able to gauge the pressure inside the well, then determine whether the cap is holding the oil in or if crews will need to continue siphoning up oil.
Crews were going through final checks Monday afternoon before installing the cap. Once it's installed, the next critical step is making sure there's no hydrate buildup, according to BP Chief Operating Officer Doug Suttles. He said testing the well's integrity could begin Tuesday, with a monitoring period that could take anywhere from six hours to two days.
While robots replace the old cap, crude is leaking out. Scientists estimate that 35,000 to 60,000 barrels of oil are spewing daily from BP's breached well.
But now, more of that gushing oil is being collected, Suttles added. He said the oil-gathering ship, the Helix Producer, began recovering oil from the ruptured well Monday. He said it should "ramp up to full capacity" in several days after two setbacks Sunday delayed its implementation.
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Suttles blamed the delays on problems with a hydraulic system used to operate the valve and a leak in the methanol system. But he said the Helix Producer had only been set back less than a day and both issues had been resolved.
Now with the Helix Producer hooked up, between that ship and the Q4000, which is already active, crews should be able to collect up to 33,000 barrels of oil per day, Suttles said.
In the best-case scenario, the containment cap would have the ability to close down the valves and slowly contain all the oil, Allen said Monday. But if oil collection was still necessary, over the next two to three weeks, 60,000 to 80,000 barrels (2.52 million to 3.36 million gallons) a day could be collected as part of the containment process, BP Senior Vice President Kent Wells said Sunday. That's because the new containment cap would allow four collection ships to access the well, rather than the maximum of three allowed by the old cap, Allen said earlier.
Allen said Monday he has asked BP for plans on how to do "integrity" testing on the sealing cap and hopes the company will "move on that" later Monday to determine how to move forward. The testing could take 48 hours, Suttles said.
"What we are talking about now is containing the oil. That's far different than actually killing the well and plugging it with cement," Allen said. "We will need to do that, ultimately, but this will significantly improve our situation regarding the amount of oil coming to the surface while we finish the relief wells, which are the final solution."
The first relief well that BP plans to use to shut down the leaking oil well in the Gulf of Mexico is now 5 feet away from the main well and, at 17,840 feet deep, it's 30 feet above the hoped-for final casing point, Suttles said Monday. That's where BP will run additional tests, then aim for the final intersection point. Given the closeness to the target, he said that BP was estimating "kill" operations to shut down the main well could take place at the end of the month.
The second relief well, which has been drilled as a redundancy measure at the behest of the Obama administration, is now at 15,874 feet deep, Suttles said. He added that BP is going to stop drilling that well farther unless it ends up being needed.
"If the relief wells for whatever reason happen to fail, the other option we are working on how do we install what I will call a permanent collection system, which is where we're working on pipelines to other facilities," BP's senior vice president, Kent Wells, told the National Oil Spill Commission on Monday.
While response crews were hard at work over the weekend, seven members of the National Oil Spill Commission visited different areas of the Gulf Coast affected by the oil disaster ahead of their meetings in New Orleans. Committee co-chairman William K. Reilly, a former Environmental Protection Agency administrator, went to Gulfport, Mississippi, to talk with disaster victims and inspect recovery efforts.
The visits and meetings will help the presidential commission "begin to lay the groundwork for our efforts going forward, to determine what really to concentrate on and where to put our priorities and, very importantly, what the people most affected by all of this think about how effective the response has been," Reilly said.
Minutes after the commission's first public meeting Monday morning, a protester stood up and disrupted it. He was escorted out by security. A second protester, New Orleans environmental activist Kimberly Wolf, interrupted the meeting about 45 minutes later to question the responders' use of dispersants in the Gulf.
After Wolf was removed, Coast Guard Rear Adm. Peter Neffenger told the panel, "I understand that concern. I think that's shared by all. This is a very difficult trade-off," he said. "The use of dispersants is to avoid significant shoreline impact."
"In my opinion, they're using us as guinea pigs," Wolf said by phone after she had been ousted from the meeting room. "What's happening is people in the street don't know the name of the dispersant that's going to kill them."
Jeff Angers, president of the Center for Coastal Conservation said to the panel. "Frankly, the Gulf is a big experiment station, now. And I think people are learning the dispersant pretty much keeps oil out of sight."
President Barack Obama established the bipartisan commission last month and gave members six months to investigate the oil catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico. The panel will listen to public comments and official testimony from BP, the U.S. Coast Guard and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on the recovery efforts.
CNN's John King, Kim Segal, Vivian Kuo, John Lisk and Shelby Lin Erdman contributed to this report.
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Video shows cap put on leaking BP Gulf well
Updated at 04:37 PM todayNEW ORLEANS (KABC) -- Live underwater video shows a new cap has been placed onto the leaking well in the Gulf of Mexico, offering hope of containing the gusher for the first time since BP's deepwater rig exploded in April.
BP officials did not immedietely comment Monday evening on the video images streamed online by the company.
The company has said the next step will be running tests to make sure there are no other leaks from the well. Tests and monitoring could last from six hours to two days.
The old cap, removed Saturday, did not have a tight fit and allowed crude to escape.
BP is drilling two relief wells so it can pump mud and cement into the leaking well for a permanent fix.
The new 150,000-pound metal cap was dubbed the "Top Hat 10."
BP Chief Operating Officer Doug Suttles was careful not to inflate expectations Monday, emphasizing that once the cap is attached, it will take days to know whether it can withstand the pressure of the erupting oil and feed it through pipes to surface ships. The combination of the new cap and surface oil-collecting ships make up BP's plan to stop oil from spewing into the Gulf for the first time since April 20.
"Until we have the cap on, securely fitted in place, and know it's operating per the design, we have to recognize this is a complex operation," Suttles said.
Once the cap is firmly in place, the company will begin "shutting in" the well by closing perforated pipe at the top. The company will be looking to see if the pressure rises inside the cap. If it does, that means there are no other leaks, and the cap is stopping oil from leaking into the Gulf.
However, low pressure levels may mean that oil is leaking elsewhere in the well. If that is the case, Suttles said that BP will work to collect the leak with surface ships and drop yet another cap on top of the stack.
Shuttles said the testing of the new cap should last about 48 hours.
Even if the tests show the cap is successfully holding in the oil, it will not be the final fix for the blown well. That will have to wait until one of two relief wells reaches the leaking well from underground and can inject heavy drilling mud and cement to form a permanent plug.
BP expects one well will do the job, but it's still drilling a second well as a backup. Officials offered mid-August as the most common deadline for when the drilling will be finished.
After the old, leaky cap came off the well on Saturday, work on the new cap has been moving at a brisk clip. One snag in the operation has been a delay in the startup of a vessel called the Helix Producer, which is supposed to connect to the well by a link below the cap, ultimately collecting roughly 1 million gallons of oil a day.
The ship was supposed to begin collection Sunday, but officials said two minor technical glitches prevented that. BP expects the ship to begin Monday, reaching full capacity within two days or so.
Latest Developments:
* A senior adviser to President Barack Obama says the administration is confident that BP's latest effort to contain the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico will work. At the same time, Obama adviser David Axelrod acknowledges that BP's engineers are in "uncharted waters" when it comes to dealing with the leak.
* Ken Feinberg, the man in charge of administering the $20 billion compensation fund established by BP for victims of the Gulf oil spill, said Saturday he's ready to give those eligible a full six months' worth of emergency payments on a single request. Feinberg also said that speeding up the claims process is part of the effort to help people feel an added degree of financial certainty.
* BP declined to comment on a report that it is talking about possibly selling $12 billion worth of assets, including a stake in Alaska's Prudhoe Bay oil field to Houston-based Apache Corp. The Sunday Times of London newspaper did not cite a source for its report. BP is thought to be considering some asset sales to raise cash to cover its oil spill liability.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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