Robotic submarines working 1.6km underwater removed a leaking cap from the gushing Gulf of Mexico oil well, starting a painful trade-off: Millions more 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’s no guarantee for such a delicate operation so deep below the water’s surface, officials said, and the permanent fix of plugging the well from the bottom remains slated for the middle of next month.
“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,” US Coast Guard spokesman Captain James McPherson said.
Robotic submarines removed the cap that had been placed on top of the leak early last month 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 today 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.
“Over the next four to seven days, depending on how things go, we should get that sealing cap on. That’s our plan,” said Kent Wells, a BP senior vice president, of the round-the-clock operation.
It would be only a temporary solution to the catastrophe that the US government estimates has poured between 330 million and 650 million liters 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 finished by the middle of next month.
With the cap removed on Saturday at 12:37pm, oil flowed freely into the water, collected only by the Q4000 surface vessel, with a capacity of about 1.4 million liters. That vessel was to be joined yesterday by the Helix Producer, which has more than double the Q4000’s capacity.
However, the lag could be long enough for as much as 19 million liters to gush into already fouled waters. Officials said a fleet of large skimmers was scraping oil from the surface above the well site.
BP began trying on Saturday afternoon to remove the bolted top flange that only partially completed the seal with the old cap.
Video images showed robotic arms working to unscrew its bolts. Wells said that could last into today depending on whether the flange can be pulled off from above, as BP hopes. If not, a specially designed tool will be used to pry apart the top and bottom flanges.
Once the top flange is removed, BP has to bind together two sections of drill pipe that are in the gushing well head. Then a 3.66m long piece of equipment called a flange transition spool will be lowered and bolted over it.
After the flange transition spool is bolted in place, the new cap can be lowered. The equipment, weighing about 68,000kg, 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 — that is, if it can withstand the enormous pressure.
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