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| Oil Flow Is Stemmed, but Could Resume, Official Says |
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HOUSTON — By injecting solid objects overnight as well as heavy drilling fluid into the stricken well leaking oil into the Gulf of Mexico, engineers appeared to have stemmed the flow of oil, Adm. Thad W. Allen of the Coast Guard, the leader of the government effort, said on Friday morning. But he stressed that the next 12 to 18 hours would be “very critical” in permanently stanching what is already the worst oil spill in United States history.
Admiral Allen, who spoke on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” said the biggest challenge would be to sustain the “top kill” effort, which involves pumping material into the well to counteract the upward pressure of the gushing oil so that the well can be sealed.
“They’ve been able to push the hydrocarbons and the oil down with the mud,” he said, referring to the heavy drilling fluid. “The real challenge is to put enough mud into the well to keep the pressure where they can put a cement plug over the top.”
The top kill effort has proceeded in fits and starts. BP officials, who along with government officials created the impression early Thursday that the strategy was working, disclosed later that they had stopped pumping on Wednesday night when engineers saw that too much of the drilling fluid was escaping along with the oil.
It was the latest setback in the effort to shut off the leaking oil, which federal officials said was pouring into the Gulf at a far higher rate than original estimates suggested.
If the new estimates are accurate, the spill would be far bigger than the Exxon Valdez disaster in 1989.
With President Obama planning to visit the Gulf on Friday, Tony Hayward, BP’s chief executive, said on “Good Morning America” that efforts to plug the well were "going pretty well according to plan."
“Much of the volume you see coming out of the well in the last 36 hours is mud,” he said, referring to live video shots of the oil leak.
He said that overnight, workers pumped what is known as “junk shot,” a mix of more substantial materials, like golf balls and shredded tires, into the well, and he said they would follow with more mud later Friday. The junk shot serves as a “bridge,” he said, for the injections of mud to strengthen its ability to counteract the leaking oil.
While he was optimistic, Mr. Hayward gave the effort a 60 percent to 70 percent chance of success because it had never been tried in water this deep.
Mr. Obama said Thursday at a news conference in Washington that he was angry and frustrated about the catastrophe, and he shouldered much of the responsibility for the continuing crisis.
“Those who think we were either slow on the response or lacked urgency, don’t know the facts,” Mr. Obama said. “This has been our highest priority.”
But he also blamed BP, which owns the stricken well, and the Bush administration, which he said had fostered a “cozy and sometimes corrupt” relationship between oil companies and regulators at the Minerals Management Service. Earlier Thursday, the chief of the Minerals Management Service for the past 11 months, S. Elizabeth Birnbaum, resigned, less than a week after her boss, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, announced a broad restructuring of the office.
“I’m hopeful that the reforms that the secretary and the administration are undertaking will resolve the flaws in the current system that I inherited,” she said in a statement.
Also on Thursday, Mr. Obama ordered a suspension of virtually all current and new offshore oil drilling activity pending a comprehensive safety review, acknowledging that oversight until now had been seriously deficient.
Mr. Obama’s trip Friday to inspect the efforts in Louisiana to stop the leak and clean up after it, will be his second trip to the region since the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig on April 20. He will also visit with people affected by the spreading slick that has washed ashore over scores of miles of beaches and wetlands.
Even as Mr. Obama acknowledged that his efforts to improve regulation of offshore drilling had fallen short, he said oil and gas from beneath the Gulf, now about 30 percent of total domestic production, would be a part of the nation’s energy supply for years to come.
“It has to be part of an overall energy strategy,” Mr. Obama said. “I mean, we’re still years off and some technological breakthroughs away from being able to operate on purely a clean-energy grid. During that time, we’re going to be using oil. And to the extent that we’re using oil, it makes sense for us to develop our oil and natural gas resources here in the United States and not simply rely on imports.”
In the top kill maneuver, a 30,000-horsepower engine aboard a ship injected heavy drill liquids through two narrow flow lines into the stack of pipes and other equipment above the well to push the escaping oil and gas back down below the sea floor.
Continuous: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/29/us/29spill.html?pagewanted=2&hp
By CLIFFORD KRAUSS and JOHN M. BRODER
Published: May 28, 2010
New York Times |
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