BP crafted a new plan on Tuesday hoping to seal for good a blown-out Gulf of Mexico oil well, with the disaster set to top a key White House summit between Britain and the United States.
The US government allowed BP to keep in place a cap stemming the flow from the ruptured wellhead for another 24 hours, as engineers floated a new plan to choke off the well with a massive injection of cement and mud.
BP said the aim would be to send down heavy drilling mud through the blow-out preventer valve system that sits on top of the well, and then inject cement into the wellhead to seal it.
“We’re still very much in the design and planning phase,” said senior BP vice-president for exploration and production Kent Wells. “We’ve got some real experienced teams working on this over the next couple of days.”
The latest plan is similar to a “top kill” bid at the end of May, weeks after the April explosion that tore through a BP-leased rig off Louisiana, when engineers spent days pumping drilling fluid into the leaking well.
That effort failed to smother the gushing crude, but officials believe the outcome could be different this time with the flow already contained.
US Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen, who is overseeing the disaster response, said the planning was still in initial stages, and stressed two relief wells being drilled close to the busted wellhead remain the ultimate fix.
Wells said Allen would decide whether to go ahead with the new so-called “static kill” in the coming days.
The spill, now the worst environmental disaster in US history, loomed large over summit talks between visiting British Prime Minister David Cameron and President Barack Obama.
But the White House insisted ahead of the meeting BP would not overshadow the talks. “I don’t think it will hamper any of our discussions,” White House spokesperson Robert Gibbs said.
“The president is certainly looking for BP to live up to its monetary obligations to pay the damages and the fines that it will be assessed as a result of this disaster” which has devastated communities along the Gulf coast.
“And I think that’s what the prime minister has said as well.”
Sensitive issue
Cameron, meanwhile, urged BP to live up to its responsibilities. But the fate of the company is a sensitive issue, since BP’s stock is the backbone of many British pension funds.
The British leader insisted BP must be kept solvent, with costs related to the spill already almost $4-billion.
“Of course we will discuss BP,” Cameron told Time magazine. “It is an important company, not just for Britain, it’s an important company for America as well. It employs tens of thousands of people in the US, as it does in the UK.”
Allen said five days of “integrity tests” on the tighter-fitting cap placed on the damaged wellhead last week had detected seepage and other anomalies, but said they did not appear to be of major concern.
But he ordered BP to produce a detailed timeline for restarting operations to contain the oil with a fleet of surface vessels if the cap has to be opened again if a large amount of oil starts seeping out of the wellhead or the cap.
Measuring devices on BP’s cap have given steadily increasing high-pressure readings, which would indicate there are no major leaks in the wellbore that stretches an astonishing 4km below the seabed.
The disaster began on April 20 when the Deepwater Horizon drilling platform exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, 80km off the coast of Louisiana, killing 11 workers.
The still burning rig sank to the bottom of the Gulf two days later.
Oil has washed up on the coasts of all five Gulf states — Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida — since the rig sank.
If is not known exactly how much oil has leaked into the sea, but if the upper estimate of more than four million barrels is confirmed, the disaster would be the biggest accidental oil spill ever. — AFP