Perilous Times
Coast Guard: Massive leak continues near site of now-capped Gulf of Mexico oil well

* By staff writers * From: NewsCore * July 19, 2010 11:37AM
BP was today ordered by the Coast Guard to continue monitoring the capped Gulf of Mexico oil well after a massive leak and other anomalies were discovered early Friday morning a distance from the well.

Thad Allen, the retired Coast Guard admiral directing the US Government's oil spill response, ordered BP to immediately report on the issues as experts monitor the seabed for more expanding cracks after the months-long gusher was capped.

"Given the current observations from the test, including the massive leak a distance from the well and undetermined anomalies at the well head, monitoring of the seabed is of paramount importance during the test period," Admiral Allen said in a letter to BP chief managing director Bob Dudley.

"When large leaks are detected, you are directed to marshal resources, quickly investigate, and report findings to the government in no more than four hours.

"I direct you to provide me a written procedure for opening the choke valve as quickly as possible without damaging the well.

The oil giant said today it would keep a mechanical cap used to seal its blown oil well closed indefinitely.

Doug Suttles, BP's chief operating officer, told reporters the original plan of fitting pipes to the new cap and siphoning oil up to ships would have allowed oil to start flowing back into the Gulf for at least three days.

Yesterday, Admiral Allen said testing of the cap would continue until today, after which oil collection would resume.

The containment cap was successfully fitted to the blown well head on Thursday to stop an oil leak that has raged since the April 20 Deepwater Horizon rig explosion. On Thursday, BP said integrity tests on the cap would last 48 hours.

"I think that nobody wants to see any more oil go into the Gulf," Mr Suttles said. "Absolutely no one does, but clearly we have to make sure that we don't make the situation worse and that's the reason why we're taking this integrity test so cautiously and carefully and have this very, very extensive monitoring program in place."

Capping the well only serves as a temporary solution until BP can complete drilling two relief wells intended to permanently seal off the well near the bottom of the original well bore. The relief wells are expected to start sealing the well as early as late July or as late as mid-August.

BP's containment of the leaking well has been fraught with problems since May, when a 100-tonne dome was placed over the blown well and later removed when it became clogged with a slushy mixture of gas and ice. Another smaller device, a two-tonne "top hat" used a few days later, failed for similar reasons.

Finally, on May 17, a siphoning tube was installed in the well's riser pipe but only managed to siphon a fraction of the thousands of barrels of oil a day spewing into the Gulf. On May 26, BP tried to pump heavy drilling mud and debris into the riser pipe but this "top kill" solution proved to be ineffective.

By June, BP managed to install a containment cap on the riser pipe that did not completely stanch the flow of oil into the Gulf but allowed the company to capture about 18,000 barrels of oil a day from the estimated flow of 35,000 to 60,000 barrels a day.

Related Link:

You can watch a live video feed of the BP Oil Spill from the ocean floor, 5000 feet below the surface. http://www3.telus.net/thegoodnews/deepwater-live.htm

Please refresh this page for the latest video feed

If you look in the background of the current live video feed from under the Gulf you can see the oil and gas spewing up out of the seabed and up to the surface, It is a vast cloud of murky sand,debris and oil and gas shooting up from underneath.