tagged w/ Oiled Sea Mammals
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PART ONE…
http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/07/12/gulf.oil.disaster/index.html?hpt=T1&iref=BN1
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.
CONTINUED…PART ONE…... more
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Obama setback in deepwater drilling case
Appeals court won't reinstate six-month ban while it weighs merits
msnbc.com news services
updated 2 hours 52 minutes ago
WASHINGTON — The Obama administration lost an attempt Thursday to keep a temporary moratorium on deepwater oil drilling in place while it appeals a court ruling against the six-month ban.
The administration had asked the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, based in New Orleans, to stay a lower-court ruling until a full hearing on the moratorium was heard. But the appeals court found that the Interior Department failed to show the federal government would suffer "irreparable injury."
In the lower court ruling last month, a federal judge, also in New Orleans, lifted the moratorium after Hornbeck Offshore Services Inc. argued it was arbitrary because it was a blanket ban on all new drilling in depths below 500 feet.
The Obama administration appealed, saying the suspension was needed to give time to investigate the cause of the BP blowout and ensure other drilling rigs operate safely.
The U.S. Energy Information Administration said the ban would reduce crude output by an average of 82,000 barrels a day, more than previously estimated.
The appeals court set arguments on the government's appeal seeking to reinstate the original moratorium order for the week of Aug. 30.
Also Thursday, the head of BP's Gulf Coast restoration unit, Bob Dudley, told NBC and the Wall Street Journal in separate interviews that it could be possible to stop the well before the mid-August date that had been widely discussed.
"In a perfect world with no interruptions, it is possible to be ready to stop the well between July 20 and July 27," Dudley told the Wall Street Journal.
A BP spokeswoman later clarified his comments, saying that "the expectation is that it will be August" before a relief well will be ready to stop the blowout, and that Dudley was providing "the very, very best scenario if everything went absolutely superbly according to plan."
National Incident Commander Thad Allen said Thursday that the relief well is expected intercept and penetrate the Deepwater Horizon well pipe about 18,000 feet below sea level within seven to 10 days.
But he said they won't know how long it will take to stop the oil until they get there. The gushing well has several rings, and oil could be coming up through multiple rings.
The plan is to pump heavy mud and then cement into the well to overcome the upward pressure of the huge oil reservoir below.
If the oil is coming through the outer ring of the well, then they will have to pump in mud and cement to stop that layer first. Then they would have to drill through the hardened cement and repeat the process in each ring until they reach the center pipe and do it again.
That scenario would push into the middle of August, which is the timeline the company and government officials have held to for weeks.
"If you have to exhaust all means for the ways that hydrocarbons are coming up the pipe, then that puts you into middle August," Allen said.
If the oil is only coming up the center pipe, then it's possible to stop the leak sooner.
The relief well is currently the best hope for stanching the oil leak sparked by the April 20 explosion aboard the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, which killed 11 workers and began an environmental catastrophe for the region.
Shaving even days off the mid-August timeline would stop millions of gallons of oil from escaping into the Gulf. The broken well has spewed between 86 and 169 million gallons of oil, according to federal estimates. That's enough oil to fill about 3.4 million standard bathtubs.
A new collection vessel that should more than double BP's oil-capture capacity to 53,000 barrels a day from around 25,000 is projected to take three more days to hook up, as rough seas hamper efforts to finish the job.
Reuters and The Associated Press contributed to this report.Obama setback in deepwater drilling case
Appeals court won't reinstate six-month... more
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Added On June 24, 2010
Florida wildlife officers are conducting tests to determine what killed a young dolphin that beached itself Wednesday.Added On June 24, 2010
Florida wildlife officers are conducting tests to determine... more
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Video explanations really worth watching...
http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/06/25/gulf.oil.disaster/index.html?hpt=T2
Weather could push oil spill farther along Florida's beaches
By the CNN Wire Staff
June 25, 2010 7:38 p.m. EDT
New Orleans, Louisiana (CNN) -- The disaster thousands of feet deep in the Gulf of Mexico may be exacerbated by a different type of calamity in the coming week -- tropical weather -- that could push the oil farther along Florida's pristine panhandle beaches.
It all depends up whether a weather system now brewing off Honduras grows in intensity, possibly to a tropical cyclone, and where it heads. The National Hurricane Center upgraded the system to a tropical depression late Friday -- the first of the Atlantic hurricane season.
Meanwhile, there been some promising news for potentially tens of thousands of people seeking claims against BP.
Kenneth Feinberg, who is administering the $20 billion fund set up by BP under White House prodding, says that people who work in support of oil rigs will be able to file claims -- and not just fishermen and businesses along the coast. Employees of businesses that brings tools to oil rigs, for example, also would be able to file a claim.
The company previously agreed to set aside the $20 billion in an escrow account for spill-related costs, a sum that does not cover fees and penalties that could be imposed by the federal government.
BP had resisted approving claims by people who said they were affected by the moratorium on oil drilling, saying it was imposed by the Obama administration. But Feinberg said BP and the adminstration now have agreed those claims will be covered.
"I now have discovered -- I didn't realize this until yesterday, but the moratorium claims will fall under my juridiction," he told CNN.
To date, almost 74,000 claims have been filed and more than 39,000 payments have been made, totaling almost $126 million, according to the company.
As for the weather, the National Hurricane Center said the tropical depression is heading west-northwest and packing winds of 35 miles an hour, with some higher gusts. If it becomes a tropical storm, it will be named Tropical Storm Alex, the first named storm of the 2010 Atlantic hurricane season.
An Air Force "hurricane hunter" plane headed into the storm Friday afternoon to learn more about the weather system.
The tropical depression is centered between the northern coast of Honduras and Grand Cayman and is expected to move northwest, toward the Yucatan Peninsula -- although it's unclear exactly what path it will take.
Meteorologist Karen Maginnis says the "preferred scenario" actually would be for it to head to northern Florida. That's because the oil spill has been gradually rotating counterclockwise. If the storm heads to the east of it, it would send the oil farther out to sea. If the storm heads more directly towards the central Gulf and Louisiana, it might push the oil toward Florida.
Of course, forecasting where oil spills are headed in not easy.
"We're really in unchartered territory," Maginnis said."We've never been in this situation before. We've never seen an oil spill that encompassed the Gulf like this, end up so close to shore."
She noted that the latest models do point to the storm heading to the central Gulf.
Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, who's heading the federal cleanup operation, says he'll have to redeploy people and equipment to safer areas 120 hours (five days) in advance of gale-force winds.
And he agreed there is "no playbook" when it comes to responding to a massive oil spill as a storm brews. "But I will tell you there's been an extraordinary amount of planning being done," he told CNN. "We are going to try to merge two response structures. One has proven effective in the past, and that's a central coordination of search and rescue and how operations are conducted, and that's done out of Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida for hurricanes. And we are in the process of integrating our planning processes so the oil spill response is integrated fully within the search and rescue recovery operations."
Sen. Ben Nelson, D-Florida, issued a statement Friday saying there needs to be a detailed plan for a "surge" in ships, in case cleanup crews need to abandon their efforts because of a storm, leaving the crude gushing unabated until the weather lets up. In a letter sent Thursday to Allen, Nelson asked whether Navy and other vessels have been identified for prepositioning in order to most quickly respond in the aftermath.
Allen responded, "At the time we would break away is the time you need to be seeking shelter. I understand the need to skim the oil as soon as we can but it's going to be after the storm passes. I don't think anybody wants a vessel out there trying to skim oil with the weather building beyond gale-force winds, so the goal would be to get to a safe quadrant of the hurricane, come in behind it and as soon as we can. We have the ability to do that."
Allen said he and some top Obama administration officials will be headed back to the Gulf region next week to assess the oil relief efforts. He said Vice President Joe Biden would travel to the Unified Command Center in New Orleans and to the Florida panhandle next Tuesday. Also, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and presidential environmental advisor Carol Browner will visit the region "next week," said Allen.
Meanwhile, there has been a promising new development in the effort to permanently stop the leak.
BP said Friday its "ranging" process, by which it sends an electrical current that puts out an electromagnetic field down the well bore, detected Wednesday where the leaking well is in relation to the first relief well, at a depth of 16,275 feet. BP said subsequent ranging runs will be needed to more precisely locate the leaking well and figure out how to best intersect the two.
"What they will do is continue to drill down in short intervals, withdraw the pipe, put that sensing device down and slowly close on the well bore to the point where they're ready to do the intercept drilling. This last part takes some time because they only do several hundred feet at a time." said Allen. "They'll also have a vessel standing by full of mud on the top, so in the event there were to get really close and potentially nick the well bore, they could actually put the mud down to control any hydrocarbons that might come out."
Drilling and ranging operations will continue over the next few weeks toward the target intercept depth of approximately 18,000 feet. "Kill" operations are expected to begin when the relief well reaches the leaking well. BP said drilling also continues on a second relief well, which has reached 10,500 feet.
Costs associated with the Gulf oil disaster have gone up more than $300 million in less than a week, BP said Friday.
"The cost of the response to date amounts to approximately $2.35 billion, including the cost of the spill response, containment, relief well drilling, grants to the Gulf states, claims paid and federal costs," a company statement said. BP put the tab at $2 billion on Monday.
Meanwhile, Deepwater drilling could resume by the end of July. U.S. District Judge Martin Feldman in New Orleans, Louisiana, on Thursday denied a request to keep a six-month moratorium imposed by President Barack Obama on May 27 in place, pending a government appeal.
The government has 30 days to show it is beginning to comply with Feldman's order and start issuing permits. The appeals process can continue, but until the appeal, the government must act as if Feldman's order will be upheld.
Government lawyers filed an appeal to the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Friday, asking the court to stay Feldman's order pending the appeals.
CNN's Brandon Miller contributed to this reportVideo explanations really worth watching...... more
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PART ONE...
http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/06/21/oil.spill.okaloosa.county/index.html?hpt=C1
By Jamie Gumbrecht, CNN
June 21 2010 4:30pm EDT
Photo: Stephanie Neumann holds a Northern Gannet
Okaloosa Island, Florida - Vacationers were the first to notice the bird fumbling in the water near this popular tourist beach last week. He bobbed and swayed differently than other birds, and didn't react when humans came dangerously close. Once he was ashore, they could see why: a light sheen of oil covered his feathers.
Animal health technician Stephanie Neumann tried to rescue the Northern Gannet, but beach safety officers stopped her. Her coworkers at the Emerald Coast Wildlife Refuge already had stabilized birds and a sea turtle affected by the Gulf oil disaster, but officials wanted to know: Did she have a contract with BP? Could she - and the bird - wait while they verified her organization's status?
"They're trying to do their job," Neumann said as she crouched over the motionless bird, wrapped in a white sheet and barely hidden from the stares of kids and parents. "They have to make sure protocol is followed."
When brown clumps of tar began to wash up on the snow-white beaches around Destin last week, the mood in this sunny beach community shifted from optimistic denial to furious worry. Local ideas about how to protect the area clashed with plans from BP, state and federal agencies. Community volunteers struggling to cut through protocol cheered a decision by Okaloosa County to defy BP and the feds. They were done waiting. They'd use their own plans.
"This is ridiculous. We'll take the heat. We would do whatever it took to stop the oil," said the county commission chairman, Wayne Harris.
After months of wrangling with agencies responding to the spill, Harris wasn't willing to stake the county's ecology and economy only on boom that captures or absorbs oil. The commission authorized emergency management teams to add skimmers, barges and extra boom, and an air wall they hope will push the oil away. They plan to layer prevention measures in the pass that connects the Gulf to Choctawhatchee Bay, where fresh and salt water mix and dolphins play. Harris said the plan could cost up to $6 million per month, which he hopes will be covered by money from BP.
The county developed its oil plan in the days after the disaster began to unfold, but it was plagued by miscommunications, disagreements and bureaucracy once it left local hands, Harris said.
Communities along the Gulf Coast have made similar complaints. Mayors grilled a BP official about the response during a press conference earlier this month. In Magnolia Springs, Alabama, locals went outside the federal plan and risked incarceration by adding boom and barges to protect Weeks Bay. In Pointe Aux Chenes, Louisiana, Native Americans pitched in to string boom near an island where many of their ancestors are buried.
Harris said some of his county's efforts may work; others may not. "Doing something is better than doing nothing," he said.
On the Okaloosa Island beach, local response to the oiled Gannet was quicker, but the federal response had less red tape to work through. U.S. Fish and Wildlife workers arrived before Neumann's status was verified, so she left their bird in their care.
"Time is essential with these guys," she said. "Every minute counts."
For the rest of Okaloosa County, more boom and barges were starting to appear in the water. The county commission vote was "smart," and sped up the state and federal response, said public safety director Dino Villani, who was quickly invited to an "olive branch" meeting in Mobile. Most of the county's preferred plans are moving forward, Villani said, and they'll continue to adapt as the oil moves throughout their waters.
Harris said the plans would have gone forward even without approval from BP or other government agencies.
"I'm sure they're cussing. I'm sure they're cussing us bad," Harris said. "If we had waited, we'd still be waiting. Why did it take us giving an ultimatum?"
Charles Diorio, a Coast Guard commander in Mobile, said some communities decided to implement their own plans once they saw they didn't top the list of state and federal priorities, if they were on the list at all. Some just wanted to act before the mess - and response agencies' attention - began to move their way.
Now that oil is reaching Florida's shores, resources are shifting there, Diorio said, and there's a plan to meet with Okaloosa commissioners this week.
"Now is the time to make sure these relationships are still working and strong and the lines of communication are open," he said.
CONTINUED...PART ONE...... more
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