Oil Options Weighed as Obama Travels to Gulf
BY LESLIE KAUFMAN and JOSEPH BERGER
Published: May 2, 2010
NEW ORLEANS — As President Obama traveled to Louisiana on Sunday for a first-hand briefing on the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, federal officials in Washington said they were putting their hopes on drilling a parallel relief well to plug the unabated gusher. Drilling such a well could take three months.
“The scenario is a very grave scenario,” Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar said on the NBC news program “Meet the Press.” “You’re looking at potentially 90 days before you get to the ultimate solution, which is drilling a relief well 3 1/2 miles below the ocean floor. In that time, lots of oil could spread.”
After arriving in New Orleans by midday, President Obama was expected to travel by helicopter to Venice, La., for a briefing with Coast Guard officials.
The slick, emanating from a pipe 50 miles offshore, was creeping into Louisiana’s fragile coastal wetlands as strong winds and rough waters hampered cleanup efforts. Oil could hit the shores of Alabama and Mississippi on Monday.
The spill was set off by an explosion on April 20 at the Deepwater Horizon rig in which 11 workers were killed. Two days later, the rig sank leading to the first visible signs of a spill.
The objective of drilling a relief well parallel to the original rig would be to pour cement into the damaged well and plug it. Efforts to turn off the ruptured well by using remotely operated underwater vehicles working a mile below the surface have failed so far.
The president and chairman of BP America, Lamar McKay, told ABC’s “This Week” program on Sunday that another possible solution — placing a dome over the damaged well, effectively capping it — could be deployed in six to eight days. He defended his company’s response as “extremely aggressive,” but he acknowledged that fail-safe mechanisms on the rig that were designed to prevent an oil spill had not worked as predicted and that a “failed piece of equipment” was to blame for the spill.
On Saturday, officials in charge of the cleanup said that a new technique in battling the leaks 5,000 feet beneath the sea showed promise.
Among the various weapons employed against the gushing crude has been the distribution of chemical dispersants on the water’s surface to break down the oil. The new approach involves the deployment of the dispersants underwater, near the source of the leaks. Officials said that in two tests, that method appeared to be keeping crude oil from rising to the surface. They said that the procedure could be used more frequently once evaluations of its impact on the deepwater ecology were completed.
Those experiments at the wellhead of the collapsed Deepwater Horizon oil rig were just one sign of the frantic efforts to contain the estimated 210,000 gallons a day still leaking 11 days after the rig exploded and sank.
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The dome idea sounds like the best option at this point for stopping more leaking.
