A4
Politics & The Nation
FAIL
April 20:
Deepwater Horizon explodes and sinks two days later.
April 25:
Submersibles are unable to activate the shutoff valves on the blowout preventer.
A timeline of BP’s attempts to stop the flow of oil
Gulf of Mexico surface
FA URE
MAY 2:
BP starts to drill a relief well to reduce the pressure, a process that will take up to three months.
Relief well No. 2
MAY 5:
One leak is
capped, but does not alter amount of oil leaking.
Discoverer Enterprise
Insertion Tube
Insertion Tube
Sea floor approximately 5,000 feet beneath the surface
Approximately
18,000 feet into the bedrock
The two relief wells are designed to intersect at the original wellbore above the oil reservoir. This will allow heavy fluid to be pumped into the well, which will stop the flow of oil from the reservoir. Cement will then be pumped down to permanently seal the well.
Containment dome
Preventer Blowout
Preventer Blowout
Containment dome
Manifold Manifold
Existing well
S
KLMNO
FAILURE
MAY 7:
Containment dome placed over leak, but fails when crystallized gas builds up.
MAY 16:
Insertion tube begins siphoning a portion of the leaking oil onto Discoverer Enterprise tanker ship. Begins to drill another relief well.
SUNDAY, MAY 30, 2010
FAILURE
Helix Q4000
Relief well No. 1
MAY 26:
Officials attempt a “top kill” maneuver to plug the well by rapidly pumping dense mud from the Helix Q4000 into the blowout preventer, which is releasing the most oil.
SATURDAY:
BP’s top kill attempt fails. The gusher has spilled as much as 40 million gallons of oil in five weeks. In its next attempt to cap the well, BP will try a new containment dome.
SOURCES: BP, U.S. Coast Guard Image is schematic.
To kill the well, engineers must hit a 7-inch target miles under sea
oil from A1
wellhead. Then engineers will guide the LMRP cap onto the pipe. The cap is fitted with a grommet designed to keep out seawater and prevent the forma- tion of slushy methane hydrates that bedeviled an earlier contain- ment dome effort. The cap pro- cedure will take four to seven days, officials say. “This operation should be able to capture most of the oil,” Suttles said. “I want to stress the word ‘most,’ because it’s not a tight, me-
chanical seal.” After that, the company could place another blowout preventer on top of the existing one. Mean- while two drilling rigs at the sur- face continue to drill relief wells. That’s a long-term strategy that requires engineers to hit a seven- inch target, the bottom of the leaking well, 31
⁄2 miles below the
surface of the gulf. The first of the two relief wells to hit the target will send a massive dose of ce- ment to seal the leaking well. That will not be until August, BP predicts.
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Saturday’s news was hardly a shock, given the doubts expressed by engineers and even by BP itself about whether it’s possible to kill awell 5,000 feet below the surface and accessible only with robotic vehicles. But the gulf was still hoping for good news. After BP executives began the top kill Wednesday, chief executive Tony Hayward said the effort was pro- ceeding as planned. Then the na- tional incident commander, Thad Allen, gave news media inter- views Thursday and Friday sug- gesting that the effort was going well. As he put it, “We’ll get this under control.” The well had other ideas. It ceased to spew oil only when it was force-fed the drilling mud. When the pumping stopped, the well returned to form, churning out oil and gas. It was like hitting aBozo punching dummy — it goes down, then springs back up. Though some might prefer the analogy of the slasher-movie vil- lain who always comes back for
the sequel. “This well is evil,” moaned en-
ergy analyst Byron King. President Obama on Saturday called the calamity in the gulf “as enraging as it is heartbreaking.” As it became apparent that the top kill would not work, coastal residents took stock of the demor- alizing situation. “We’re in for a tough time now,” said Ed Overton, environmental science professor at Louisiana State University, noting that one saving grace of the spill — its rela- tively slow progress toward the coast — will fade as more and more of the dark slick reaches shore.
Despite BP’s and the govern-
ment’s claims of a massive de- fense effort — “the battle offshore, we’re winning that battle,” Suttles said Friday — far more resources will be required to deal with the coming slick, Overton said. “We’ve got to get more vessels.
We don’t need 1,300, we need 10,000,” Overton said. “Now’s the
time to stop being optimistic and get the assets out there.” John Tesvich, head of the state Oyster Task Force, reacted to the reports from BP with weary fatal- ism: “For them to say that its suc- cess ratio was 60 to 70 percent, for a company that’s trying to spin ev- erything as positive as it can, that probably means they knew it wasn’t likely to have an effect. And that’s what’s being borne out now. It now looks likely that this will be an ordeal — that the oil will be spewing most of the sum- mer.” Wayne Landry, parish council president in Louisiana’s St. Ber- nard Parish, said that local com- munities are going to take a more aggressive and independent ap- proach to fighting the effects of the spill rather than rely on BP or the federal government. He and other leaders from parishes and counties in Louisiana and Missis- sippi have organized their own re- sponse, what they call the “coastal zone authority for recovery.”
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He lashed out at BP’s decision to use dispersants that Landry and others think have under- mined the miles of boom laid out to stop oil on the surface. “Let’s start getting at some of the hard, hurtful truths. We don’t know what we’re dealing with,” Landry said. “It’s unacceptable that BP can have this problem, can destroy our marshes, our es- tuaries, destroy our way of life and at the end of the day can still lie to us about how it’s not as bad as anybody thinks. . . . Our people are furious about this.” The measure of the disaster can be seen in maps the government released that show the vast amoe- boid-shaped slick that has gradu- ally glommed onto coastal Louisi- ana as if trying to swallow the Mississippi River delta whole. The slick continues to have many manifestations, from silver sheen to red pancakes to orange emul- sion to brown mousse. The fine print will note that scattered tar balls are not visible from the air. Taking perhaps the starkest
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view of the events is Matthew R. Simmons, founder of a Houston investment banking firm special- izing in the energy industry. “You have to hire as many su- pertankers as you can find and pump as much of it into them be- fore hurricane season. Once the hurricane’s come, the game is over,” Simmons said. “You can take a big tar mop and paint the Gulf Coast black.” The failure of traditional well- killing methods may also height- en the pressure on authorities to try unconventional approaches. Simmons, for example, suggests a military takeover of the whole op- eration, and possibly even an at- tempt to seal the well with an ex- plosive device. Allen, the national incident commander, dismissed the idea. “My view is since we don’t know the condition of that well bore or the casings, I would be cautious about putting any kind of kinetic energy on that well head,” Allen said, “because what you may do is create open com- munication between the reservoir and the sea floor.”
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KLMNO
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