NEW ORLEANS — Robotic submarines working a mile underwater removed a leaking cap from the gushing gulf oil well Saturday, starting a painful trade-off: Millions more gallons of crude will flow freely into the sea for at least two days until a new seal can be mounted to capture all of it.
There is no guarantee for such a delicate operation almost a mile below the water’s surface, officials said, and the permanent fix of plugging the well from the bottom remains slated for mid-August.
“It’s not just going to be, you put the cap on, it’s done. It’s not like putting a cap on a tube of toothpaste,” said Coast Guard spokesman Capt. James McPherson.
Robotic submarines removed the cap that had been placed on top of the leak in early June to collect the oil and send it to surface ships for collection or burning. BP aims to have the new, tighter cap in place as early as Monday and said that, as of Saturday night, the work was going according to plan.
If tests show it can withstand the pressure of the oil and is working, the gulf region could get its most significant piece of good news since the April 20 explosion on the BP-leased Deepwater Horizon rig, which killed 11 workers.
It would be only a temporary solution to the catastrophe that the federal government estimates has poured between 87 million and 172 million gallons of oil into the gulf as of Saturday. Hope for permanently plugging the leak lies with two relief wells, the first of which should be done by mid-August.
With the cap removed Saturday at 11:37 a.m. MDT, oil flowed freely into the water, collected only by the Q4000 surface vessel, with a capacity of about 378,000 gallons. It should be joined today by the Helix Producer, with more than double the Q4000’s capacity.
But the lag could be long enough for as much as 5 million more gallons to gush into already fouled waters. Officials said a fleet of large skimmers was scraping oil from the surface above the well site.
The new cap, weighing about 150,000 pounds, is designed to fully seal the leak and provide connections for new vessels on the surface to collect oil. The cap has valves that can restrict the flow of oil and shut it in, if it can withstand the enormous pressure.
The government estimates that 1.5 million to 2.5 million gallons of oil a day are spewing from the well, and the previous cap collected about 1 million gallons of that. With the new cap and the new containment vessel, the system will be capable of capturing 2.5 million to 3.4 million gallons — essentially all the leaking oil, officials said.
Other developments
New containment ship: BP worked Saturday to hook up a containment ship called the Helix Producer to a different part of the leaking well. The ship, which will be capable of sucking up more than 1 million gallons a day when it is fully operating, should be working by today. The plan had originally been to hook up the Helix Producer and install the new cap separately, but the favorable weather convinced officials the time was right for both operations.
Fish fry’s still on: Shrimp, grouper, tuna and other seafood snatched from the fringes of the oil in the Gulf of Mexico are safe to eat, according to a federal agency inspecting the catch. To date, roughly 400 samples of commonly consumed species caught mostly in open waters — and some from closed areas — have been chemically tested by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The Associated Press
