Term 2 Blog Post 2: Oil Spill article

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Size of Spill in Gulf of Mexico Is Larger Than Thought

NEW ORLEANS — Government officials said late Wednesday night that oil might be leaking from a well in the Gulf of Mexico at a rate five times that suggested by initial estimates.

In a hastily called news conference, Rear Adm. Mary E. Landry of the Coast Guard said a scientist from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration had concluded that oil is leaking at the rate of 5,000 barrels a day, not 1,000 as had been estimated. While emphasizing that the estimates are rough given that the leak is at 5,000 feet below the surface, Admiral Landry said the new estimate came from observations made in flights over the slick, studying the trajectory of the spill and other variables.

An explosion and fire on a drilling rig on April 20 left 11 workers missing and presumed dead. The rig sank two days later about 50 miles off the Louisiana coast.

Doug Suttles, chief operating officer for exploration and production for BP, said a new leak had been discovered as well. Officials had previously found two leaks in the riser, the 5,000-foot-long pipe that connected the rig to the wellhead and is now detached and snaking along the sea floor. One leak was at the end of the riser and the other at a kink closer to its source, the wellhead.

But Mr. Suttles said a third leak had been discovered Wednesday afternoon even closer to the source. “I’m very, very confident this leak is new,” he said. He also said the discovery of the new leak had not led them to believe that the total flow from the well was different than it was before the leak was found.

The new, far larger estimate of the leakage rate, he said, was within a range of estimates given the inexact science of determining the rate of a leak so far below the ocean’s surface.

“The leaks on the sea floor are being visually gauged from the video feed” from the remote vehicles that have been surveying the riser, said Doug Helton, a fisheries biologist who coordinates oil spill responses for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, in an e-mail message Wednesday night. “That takes a practiced eye. Like being able to look at a garden hose and judge how many gallons a minute are being discharged. The surface approach is to measure the area of the slick, the percent cover, and then estimate the thickness based on some rough color codes.”

Admiral Landry said President Obama had been notified. She also opened up the possibility that if the government determines that BP, which is responsible for the cleanup, cannot handle the spill with the resources available in the private sector, that Defense Department could become involved to contribute technology.

Wind patterns may push the spill into the coast of Louisiana as soon as Friday night, officials said, prompting consideration of more urgent measures to protect coastal wildlife. Among them were using cannons to scare off birds and employing local shrimpers’ boats as makeshift oil skimmers in the shallows.

Part of the oil slick was only 16 miles offshore and closing in on the Mississippi River Delta, the marshlands at the southeastern tip of Louisiana where the river empties into the ocean. Already 100,000 feet of protective booms have been laid down to protect the shoreline, with 500,000 feet more standing by, said Charlie Henry, an oil spill expert for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, at an earlier news conference on Wednesday.

On Wednesday evening, cleanup crews began conducting what is called an in-situ burn, a process that consists of corralling concentrated parts of the spill in a 500-foot-long fireproof boom, moving it to another location and burning it. It has been tested effectively on other spills, but weather and ecological concerns can complicate the procedure.

Such burning also works only when oil is corralled to a certain thickness. Burns may not be effective for most of this spill, of which 97 percent is estimated to be an oil-water mixture.

A burn scheduled for 11 a.m. Wednesday was delayed. At 4:45 p.m., the first small portion of the spill was ignited. Officials determined it to be successful.

Walter Chapman, director of the Energy and Environmental Systems Institute at Rice University, said a 50 percent burn-off for oil within the booms would be considered a success. Admiral Landry called the burn “one tool in a tool kit” to tackle the spill. Other tactics include: using remote-controlled vehicles to shut off the well at its source on the sea floor, an operation that has so far been unsuccessful; dropping domes over the leaks at the sea floor and routing the oil to the surface to be collected, an operation untested at such depths that would take at least two to four more weeks; and drilling relief wells to stop up the gushing cavity with concrete, mud or other heavy liquid, a solution that is months away.

The array of strategies underscores the unusual nature of the leak. Pipelines have ruptured and tankers have leaked, but a well 5,000 feet below the water’s surface poses new challenges, officials said.

Reached in southern Louisiana on Wednesday, where he was visiting the response team’s command center, Tony Hayward, the chief executive of BP, said he did not yet know what went wrong with the oil rig. BP, which was leasing the rig from Transocean, is responsible for the cleanup under federal law.

Until Wednesday night, the well had been estimated to be leaking 1,000 barrels, or 42,000 gallons, each day.

The response team has tried in vain to engage a device called a blowout preventer, a stack of hydraulically activated valves at the top of the well that is designed to seal off the well in the event of a sudden pressure release — a possible cause for the explosion on the rig.

Mr. Hayward said the blowout preventer was tested 10 days ago and worked. He said a valve must be partly closed, otherwise the spillage would be worse.

There are a number of things that can go wrong with a blowout preventer, said Greg McCormack, director of the Petroleum Extension Service at the University of Texas, which provides training for the industry.

The pressure of the oil coming from below might be so great that the valves cannot make an adequate seal. Or in the case of a shear ram, which is designed to cut through the drill pipe itself and seal it off, it might have encountered a tool joint, the thicker, threaded area where two lengths of drilling pipe are joined.

Still, Mr. McCormack said, “something is working there because you wouldn’t have such a relatively small flow of oil.” If the blowout preventer were completely inoperable, he said, the flow would be “orders of magnitude” greater.

Mr. Hayward, of BP, said the crude spilling from the well was very light, the color and texture of “iced tea” and implied that it would cause less environmental damage than heavier crude, like the type that spilled from the Exxon Valdez into Prince William Sound in 1989. He said in most places it was no more than a micron thick and in the thickest areas was one-tenth of a millimeter, or the width of a hair.

Mr. Hayward declined to answer questions about any potential political fallout and said BP “will be judged primarily on the response.”

As the investigation into the cause continued, officials, scientists and those who make their living on the Gulf Coast were focused on the impending prospect of the oil’s landfall.

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Reflection:

Just yesterday I read an article(above) online on the recent Gulf Oil Spill. My first thought is that, during incidents like this, everybody gets affected. With several million gallons of medium crude already in the water and 210000 gallons of oil leaking into the gulf a day, what impact does it cause on mankind, and most importantly, the environment?

Although some people are saying that, the oil hasn’t gotten to shore yet, so it’s all good, but a lot of animals live in the ocean, and a spill like this becomes bad for marine life as soon as it hits the water. This would have endangered animals such as sea turtles, the larvae of bluefin tuna, shrimp, crabs and oysters. A lot of these are already being affected and have been for 10 days. Even though we are waiting now to see how bad the oil spill is at the shore, but we will never fully understand the full impacts on ocean life!

After I did further research on the internet, I realised that there had actually been some other oil spills that I never knew ever happen, such as the Exxon Valdez accident of 1989. I also found out that compared to the Exxon Valdez accident, the Gulf Oil Spill would have to get much worse before it approaches the impact of the Exxon Valdez accident, which contaminated 1,300 miles of largely untouched shoreline and killed tens of thousands of seabirds, otters and seals along with 250 eagles and 22 killer whales.

Although smaller in level compared to other oil spills, the Gulf Oil Spill still does harm to the environment. As I thought deeper into this incident, the Gulf Oil Spill also does great harm to our economy. All those oil that have leaked into the Gulf have been wasted, and such natural resources are irreplaceable. I know this particularly well as I used to play a game called "Oilgarchy", where I play as the CEO of a large oil company and my job is to drill oil out of places all over the world and sell it out. In the beginning of the game, oil was everywhere, and I never thought twice before placing a drill on a location and start making profits out of it, but in the much later part of the game, usually just before the end, oil deposits start to decline insanely fast, and pollution, politics and all sorts of other stuff start to come in. Simply put, the world turned into chaos. So in this case of the Gulf Oil Spill and as I read the article, I could feel a sense of heartache. All the oil has been wasted and money can no longer be made, but the worst thing is that something that was suppose to help mankind and nature, has instead cause great harm and damage to them.

As I read further into to the article, I am glad that BP is putting all its efforts into trying to remediate the effects of the Gulf Oil Spill. I hope that they will weigh their options carefully and execute the best solution in the least amount of time, as more time wasted means more marine life harmed and more money lost.