After finally capping the well last week, BP appears poised to have the first of its two relief wells make an attempt to intercept the damaged well in the coming days and expects to have the well safely shut down in a few weeks. Fears had risen recently when monitors detected oil seepage in areas near the blown out wellhead, but further testing showed the seepage was not from the damaged well.
Some small leaks had also been detected around the new well cap itself, but the volume is so small as to not be significant from a safety standpoint. Initially, the government wanted to remove the cap and resume pumping oil to the surface so that pressure within the well would not build to dangerous levels and potentially make containment impossible.
Indications from both BP and the US government - reliable sources indeed - are that the well cap is holding up well and that pressure levels within the well are at expected levels. With no large storms appearing on the horizon, it seems that BP is going to have a shot at reaching the damaged well with a relief well by the end of the month.
There is still risk that the relief well will not hit its target or that the process of killing the damaged well through the relief well will not go as planned. At the moment, however, the well is contained and appears to be fairly stable. Clean-up and relief efforts are ongoing at the surface level and will likely be under way for the next few years as the impact of the oil is felt and studied.
BP has already moved to sell assets in order to facilitate payment of the record fines that it will face in addition to the $20 billion fund that it set up to help victims of the oil spill.
Alex arrived earlier than any Atlantic hurricane in the last 15 years and is perhaps an ominous sign that this hurricane season will be especially active. With clean-up efforts already being overwhelmed by the volume of oil spewing into the Gulf, the arrival of high seas and winds have only made the impossible even more difficult. Fortunately, Alex is far enough from the oil spill zone and the site of the gushing pipe that efforts at the source of the spill are not believed to be impacted.
Of course, it's likely that they are, in fact, being impacted but that BP is choosing not to disclose exactly what is happening with the efforts at the leak in relation to the weather. In BP's official disaster response plans, there is no mention of contingencies involving hurricanes or tropical storms. Again, a massive oversight at both the corporate and government levels, as anyone planning large-scale operations in the Gulf of Mexico would certainly have to account for the potential weather issues in that part of the world.
And as the spill continues to spew oil into the Gulf, the most obvious questions still linger about why the pipe itself can't be capped and shut down entirely. Even with the considerable depths and pressures involved, we're basically looking at a plumbing problem. There are countless available strategies and techniques for capping high-pressure pipes, but none seem to be available to some of the best minds in the world.
Royer, TC | Vermersch, JA | Weingartner, TJ | Niebauer, HJ | Muench, RD
Oceanography. Vol. 3, no. 2, pp. 3-10. 1990.
In March 1989, North America's largest marine oil spill occurred in one of its largest estuaries: Alaska's Prince William Sound. Observations of the spill trajectory serve to delineate the circulation within the sound and along the southern coast of Alaska. This region has very high rates of freshwater discharge and intense wind stresses: the average annual amount of fresh water entering the Northeast Pacific drainage system is at least 20% larger than the Mississippi River system, and the seasonal signals of wind stress and wind stress curl here are the largest in the North Pacific. Even as the oil was being released in the sound, it came under the influence of this coastal circulation. The spilled oil and subsequently released surface drifters have served as tracers that can be used to examine our knowledge of the processes affecting regional coastal flow. This knowledge might be applied to coastal processes elsewhere.
Descriptors: Article Subject Terms bay dynamics | coastal currents | estuarine dynamics | estuarine environment | ocean circulation | oil spills | pollution dispersion | tracers | water circulation | water pollution
Obviously, BP doesn't know exactly how to handle a crisis the likes of which is unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico. Even a multi-national juggernaut like BP is not equipped to deal with the growing ire of the entire United States of America - still the most powerful and influential nation on earth, even if no longer the most loved or respected. As a result of dealing with this unprecedented disaster, BP has revealed itself to be dis-organized and bumbling when it comes to dealing with PR and exactly what to say and how to say it.
Perhaps the most damning piece of information to surface was the revelation in newly released documents explaining that very soon after the oil rig exploded, BP made internal worst-case estimates of 2.5 million gallons per day leaking from from the well-head. Those numbers were never disseminated and instead BP floated estimates of 60,000 gallons per day for some time and allowed other early government estimates to become mainstream estimates.
Obviously, BP knew every piece of information about the well - the size of the pipes, the pressure of the oil that it had pumped from the well and so on and so forth. So when the well exploded, the company clearly would have very easy access to the numbers necessary to generate accurate estimates of the oil flow. But instead they failed to be forthright about the size of the spill, perhaps gambling that they could stop it before any accurate third-party estimates could be obtained.
Because of the live video feed and the fact that the well has been gushing unabated for nearly two full months, BP was exposed for withholding the key information about the size of the spill. Now everyone has that information, even though that knowledge alone probably doesn't mean much at this point. It simply means that BP knew from the beginning just how bad the spill could be, but they didn't have the integrity to be honest about it.
Linden, O | Elmgren, R | Boehm, P
Ambio Vol 8, No 6, p 244-253, 1979. 13 Fig, 26 Ref.
The Tsesis study describes an attempt to investigate the full spectrum of effects of an oil spill on the ecosystem of a rather sheltered coastal archipelago in the atidal brackish Baltic Sea. The study demonstrated a number of effects of oil on various types of organisms. In general, however, the impact seems to have been of relatively short-term nature in the pelagic system, a conclusion supported also by the results of the investigations following the Torrey Canyon and Argo Merchant accidents. Increases in primary production among phytoplankton in impacted areas have been observed earlier. The stimulation of primary production in the area affected by the Tsesis oil spill is probably related primarily to the higher phytoplankton biomass in the area. The observed decrease of zooplankton in the vicinity of the ship was undoubtedly due to the acute toxic effects of the oil. The results of the investigations of the effects of the Tsesis oil on littoral communities indicate severe acute effects on all major faunal groups. These results together with results from a study of a very similar spill in the Stockholm archipelago suggest that complete recovery of a littoral community under these circumstances will take two to three years. (Sinha - OEIS)
Descriptors: Oil spills | Water pollution effects | Ecosystems | Outer Continental Shelf | Baltic Sea | Coasts | Environmental effects | Tsesis oil spill | Soviet tankers
