#
00378708 Spill Fight Shows Progress
BP Inserts Improvised Siphon Into Shattered Seabed Oil Pipe; Success Still Unclear
By GUY CHAZAN The Wall Street Journal, Online Edition, Monday, May 17, 2010.
HOUSTON—BP PLC had its first breakthrough in the effort to stem the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, using robots to insert one end of a mile-long tube into a shattered oil pipe on the ocean floor. The goal is to siphon up some, if not most, of the crude gushing into the Gulf of Mexico.
In an early sign of success, BP said it had begun burning off natural gas emerging from the apparatus at the ocean's surface.
At BP's crisis center—where some 500 people are working round-the-clock—a bunker mentality eased a bit. "Everyone's encouraged now," said Richard Lynch, who is leading BP's subsea containment effort.
There's no assurance the risky maneuver will pan out. Company executives said it was still too early to say what percentage of the oil and gas is being captured.
Like BP's previous efforts to curb the leak, this one has an improvised quality that exposes the difficulties of working at the frontiers of oil production. Several earlier attempts, including an attempt to place a large dome over the leaking oil well on the ocean floor, have failed.
The current strategy involves snaking a tube snugly into the leaking pipe. The tube is bent at one end like a hook and equipped with thick rubber fins intended to keep oil from leaking out around the edges.
For more than three weeks, oil and natural gas have been spewing unchecked into the Gulf from a ruptured well nearly a mile under the surface of the sea, threatening an environmental catastrophe along the Gulf Coast.
The leak was caused when the Deepwater Horizon rig, which had been drilling the well for BP, exploded April 20 and sank, killing 11 crew members.
In this latest attempted fix, a pipe leading to the surface is full of nitrogen, which is gradually being bled to allow oil and gas to flow into it.
The process must be done slowly to prevent seawater, which can form slushy hydrates, from entering the pipe. If hydrates form, the pipe can become clogged.
Even in the best-case scenario, the tube won't capture all the leaking oil.
The siphon doesn't advance the company's key goal of shutting off the oil by capping the well, rather than merely containing the flow.
BP says it hopes to implement a plan to shut the well within the next week. A definitive solution, which involves drilling a relief well to intercept the leak, could take another two months.
In Houston, the hub of BP's crisis response, the company's campaign has become an industrywide effort.
Drilling and well-control experts from rivals like Exxon Mobil Corp. and ConocoPhillips are in BP's offices, as are officials from the U.S. Coast Guard and Minerals Management Service.
The pace of work there telescopes into just a few hours some tasks that might normally take years.
"We usually spend months in concept selection," said Mr. Lynch. "Here you're doing it in the morning and starting fabrication in the afternoon."
In one room in the crisis center, a team guides the robotic submersibles that performed the task of inserting the tube. Live pictures transmitted by the robots are fed to a huge bank of video screens.
Updates on weather conditions and wave heights flash on another screen at the side.
Next door is Simops, or simultaneous operations, which choreographs the complex dance of drill ships, drill rigs and service vessels that crowd the sea above the leaking well.
"It's like air traffic control on water," says Geir Karlsen, BP's expert on such operations.
In another room, about a hundred BP employees work on a "top kill"—the main option being explored to shut off the ruptured well.
That starts off with a "junk shot," in which material such as rubber tires and golf balls is pumped into the shut-off valve, or blowout preventer, that sits atop the well.
The procedure was simulated on land to model potential obstacles.
For instance, the elaborate system of manifolds and pipes had to be designed to avoid any 90-degree corners, so the bulky material used in the junk shot didn't get stuck.
With that leak sealed, the plan is to inject heavyweight "kill mud" into the lower part of the blowout preventer, followed by cement that will effectively entomb the well.
Officials continue to study the impact of the growing spill, including the possible effects of a detected deepwater plume several miles southwest of the spill.
Raymond Highsmith, executive director of the National Institute for Undersea Science and Technology, a Mississipi consortium coordinating the ship's research, says there are a lot of unknowns about the plume, but that he fears that if it is oil it could harm the small sealife that bigger fish and mammals depend on for food.
Small globules of oil, seen as a possible leading edge of the spill, increasingly have washed ashore in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama in recent days.
The Coast Guard has reported oil sheen at the Chandeleur Islands off Louisiana.
In Venice, La., the small town closest to the sunken rig, there were no fishermen to be seen Sunday. They were kept away by fierce rainstorms and ever-changing rules about where they can and can't fish.
"We're getting fewer fishing people and more oil-spill workers," said Nancy Nguyen, 20, a waitress at Craw Gator's Bar and Grill at Venice Marina.
Back in Houston, the risk that the tube operation could fail remained high. No one has attempted anything like it at such depths.
Earlier, BP suffered a blow when a massive dome it planned to lower onto the leak had to be abandoned after it became blocked by hydrates.
The tube operation itself wasn't plain sailing. It was initially inserted Saturday night in what Mr. Lynch describes as a "gut-wrenching" procedure with very poor visibility.
The operation seemed to be a success and gas collected at the surface was burnt.
But then one of the subsea robots—notorious among engineers for their poor peripheral vision—collided with the pipework and the pipe got dislodged. The whole operation had to be started again.
—Jeffrey Ball and Mike Esterl contributed to this article.
#
00378712 On Coast, BP Encamps for Long Haul
In Places Like Venice, La., the Oil Giant Sets Up Military-Style Operations
to Protect, Clean Shore
By GUY CHAZAN And JIM CARLTON The Wall Street Journal, Online Edition, Monday, May 17, 2010.
VENICE, La.—This tiny port on the Mississippi River could be deemed BP-ville, one of several coastal settlements virtually requisitioned by the British oil company as it mobilizes to defend Louisiana's shoreline from the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.
Venice's population of 450 has doubled over the past three weeks as it turned into a crucial hub for the military-style cleanup operation.
So far, little oil has washed up onshore since the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded and sank last month. And an effort to siphon oil from the oil well's gushing pipe showed some signs of success this weekend.
But BP PLC is digging in for the long haul. In Venice, it has taken a three-month lease on an 18-acre site that can be renewed for up to a year, reflecting deep uncertainty as to how long this crisis might last.
The port, which in normal times is a small hub for the offshore oil industry, is now full of BP employees plucked from their 9-to-5 jobs in other parts of the country and dumped in the Mississippi Delta. BP has set up a dining hall dispensing lunches to 900 people.
Slade Brockett, BP's area staging manager for Venice, has no idea when he will return to his regular job as project engineer at BP's Cherry Point refinery in Washington state.
"We're here until the job's done," he said. A colleague, Jason Tieman, a U.S. Coast Guard reservist, normally works for a software company in Houston.
To keep local staff happy, Mr. Brockett has been tasked with setting up an air-conditioned recreational tent, which he is stocking with two flat-screen TV sets, magazines ranging from Deer & Deer Hunting to Popular Mechanics, a set of dominoes and a cribbage board. A 280-bed hotel complex of tractor trailers has been set up. Some employees have found lodging in local houseboats and motels.
Meanwhile, on nearby South Pass, a barrier island to the south of town, some 80 cleanup staff wearing heavy white suits, plastic gloves and rubber boots comb the beach for tar balls, which they carefully shovel into big garbage bags. On one day last week, they filled some 450 of them, BP said.
BP has also signed up some 200 fishing boats to lay boom, a plastic protective barrier, and skim oil from the surface of the Gulf. Flying over the marshy landscape of inlets and bayous south of Venice, one can see the boom along the length of the sand bars that dot this area. But BP officials admit it is not fail-safe: A lot of oil has slipped under the plastic, and some has washed over it as well.
Across the East Bay on the South West Pass, the National Guard is trying a new tack—a Tiger Dam, a seawater-filled plastic barrier held in place by 4-foot stakes that is strong enough to withstand waves and tides.
All of this activity is not enough to make local residents happy. At the Cypress Cove Marina in Venice, about 110 of the 150 boat slips sat empty one day last week at a time when normally they are full with sports and commercial fishing vessels, said Rene Cross Jr., manager of the marina.
On the docks, Kevin Aderhold was readying his charter boat, the Stress Management, to ferry out a group of sports fishermen to one part of the ocean where fishing was still open. But he said he has already had 20 groups cancel on him, in part, he said, because of all the publicity about the spill. "Every day, the phone rings and it's to cancel a trip," Mr. Aderhold said.
Most fishing has been curtailed because of the spill, and the economic ripple effects of its lost fisheries have begun to ripple through the swamps and bayous of Plaquemines Parish, population 25,000, where many businesses still operate out of pre-fabricated buildings that were brought in as temporary replacements to the hundreds of structures that were destroyed in Katrina.
Irene and Jerry Walker say the spill is threatening not only their fishing business, but also their health. Mrs. Walker, 57, complains she has suffered itchy eyes, headaches and asthma attacks from fumes at her home in Boothville, La. that she believes are related to the spill. Coast Guard officials who have been monitoring air quality say they have detected no harmful levels of chemicals in the air around Plaquemines Parish.
Byron Encalade lost not only his home but all five of his oyster boats in that hurricane, and only last year was able to repair or replace three to begin plying the waters again. With market demand rising for oysters and other seafood, Mr. Encalade, who also runs a fish-hauling business, had been looking forward to a prosperous year.
The 55-year-old lifelong fishermen, after a community meeting in Port Sulphur, La., with BP and federal officials last week resolved few of his worries, asked, "What am I going to do for income now?"
00378713 Disaster Could Be Felt Under The Ocean
By JEFFREY BALL The Wall Street Journal, Online Edition, Monday, May 17, 2010.
The Gulf of Mexico oil spill is having only minimal environmental effects on land, but it may be causing serious problems in the water, some scientists say.
Wind, currents and chemicals being sprayed on the oil are combining to keep most of the oil gushing from the sea floor out in the water. Scientists say they are growing increasingly concerned about two effects: the damage the oil might do to sea life and the possibility that currents might take some oil around Florida and up the East Coast.
Researchers on a ship studying the underwater area around the spill have detected a plume of what they believe could be oil several miles southwest of the spill site at depths of 2,300 feet to about 4,300 feet, said Raymond Highsmith, executive director of the National Institute for Undersea Science and Technology, a university consortium based in Mississippi that is coordinating the ship's research.
Mr. Highsmith, whose institute is funded by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, stressed that researchers don't know how much oil might be in the plume, where the plume might end up, or the extent of potential damage. "It's much harder to study it at those depths than it would be at the surface," he said.
But underwater oil, if present in large amounts, has the potential to snuff out big amounts of oxygen deep in the water, harming a range of life from corals to crabs to squid, Mr. Highsmith said. But he added that scientists still don't know many of the facts that would determine how the plume, if it is oil, might affect the environment.
"If the oil is thin and dispersed enough, we might detect it, but it might not be enough to do any major harm," Mr. Highsmith said.
NOAA officials who are studying the slick say they are growing increasingly concerned that at least some of the surface oil slick could be picked up by a movement of water in the Gulf known as the "loop current," because of its expanding size, and sent around Florida and up the East Coast.
The loop current turns into the Gulf stream, which typically goes up to Cape Hatteras, N.C., and then moves offshore. But spinoff currents then could take the oil farther up the east coast, said Stephan Howden, a scientist at the University of Southern Mississippi.
The upside of the bulk of the oil staying out in the Gulf Coast is that, at least so far, it is causing fewer effects on land than many scientists had feared.
Air testing along the coast hasn't shown any levels of chemicals that present a health risk to people that appear to result from the spill, said Mark Johnson, a toxicologist with the federal government's Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry.
Though authorities have seen some spikes in hydrogen-sulfide levels since the spill, those appear to result from refinery emissions and natural processes in coastal marshes unrelated to the spill, he said.
One likely reason there haven't been more air problems is that the oil is being released deep in the gulf. "By the time that reaches the surface, there's already a lot of chemicals that have been removed" from the oil, Mr. Johnson said.
The oil appears to be gathering underwater because it is shooting at high pressure out of a subsea well, mixing with water as it rises toward the surface. "The two together are denser than the oil alone," Mr. Highsmith said.
Workers fighting the spill are injecting the water with chemicals, known as dispersants, that break the oil into smaller particles so that natural bacteria in the water will digest the oil particles.
The dispersant being sprayed most heavily into the gulf is among the more toxic of those authorized by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to be used on oil spills.
The product—Corexit 9500 made by Naperville, Il.-based Nalco Co.—also is among the least efficient in breaking up the kind of oil typically found near this spill, the EPA says.
EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson said last week that large amounts of the chemical were quickly available at the time of the spill.
Erik Fyrwald, Nalco's chief executive, said Corexit 9500 meets EPA criteria, is an effective dispersant and is far less toxic than untreated oil.
00378714 Napolitano Under Fire Again
By KEITH JOHNSON The Wall Street Journal, Online Edition, Monday, May 17, 2010.
Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and her agency are under fire again after the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and the attempted bombing in Manhattan's Times Square.
While no one is calling for Ms. Napolitano's resignation, as happened after the failed Christmas Day bombing, her performance and that of the Department of Homeland Security are a key part of the political battleground over how to fight terrorism.
Ms. Napolitano will testify Monday on the federal government's response to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, involving a BP PLC well, before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs.
"We have lots of questions about what happened," said Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I., Conn.), who is chairman of the committee. He added that Ms. Napolitano, who "has one of the toughest jobs in the country," has done a "really good job marshalling resources" after the spill.
Since the oil-rig explosion, "federal authorities, both military and civilian have been working onsite and around the clock bringing every available resource to bear to respond to and mitigate the impact of the resulting BP oil spill on public health, the environment and the economy," said Nick Shapiro, assistant press secretary at the White House.
The hearing comes less than a week after a House Homeland Security subcommittee meeting grilled DHS representatives over the agency's efforts to overhaul how it shares intelligence, a hot-button issue in the wake of the Times Square terror plot.
Critics contend that the DHS and, more broadly, the Obama administration, tend to downplay the threat posed by radical Islamic terrorists.
Much as her comment that "the system worked" in the wake of the failed Christmas Day airliner bombing led to an avalanche of criticism, opponents seized on Ms. Napolitano's comment that the May 1 attempted bombing in Times Square was a "one-off" to launch a round of criticism charging that the DHS underestimates the threat of terrorism.
"Until they get hit over the head with it," the DHS and the Obama administration minimize and downplay the nature of the terrorist threat, said Rep. Peter King (R., N.Y.), the ranking member of the House Homeland Security Committee and a longtime critic of Ms. Napolitano.
"Secretary Napolitano has articulated repeatedly since her earliest days at the department, the threat to this country from terrorism is real," said Sean Smith, DHS assistant secretary for public affairs.
Mr. Shapiro at the White House said: "Our approach is to level with the American people, provide the facts when we know them. In both of these cases we called them attempted acts of terrorism only hours after they happened. It would be inappropriate to describe a plot before we have the facts, which is what some are demanding that we do."
Mr. King locked horns with the DHS and the Obama administration last week over a decision to cut homeland-security grants for New York less than two weeks after the Times Square attack. White House officials say New York anti-terror funding has actually increased, due to extra money included in last year's stimulus package.
Other former DHS officials voiced support for Ms. Napolitano. "She gets it, she got it from the start. She understands the threat," said Stewart Baker, the former assistant secretary for policy at the DHS from 2005 to 2009.
Mr. Baker said the DHS has done a particularly good job of responding to a different kind of terrorist threat, such as that posed by low-profile individuals with few formal connections to al Qaeda who are much more difficult to track before an attack.
