BP Considers Various Plans to Plug Leak
Shrimpers have choice words for the company as nothing seems to work.
May 9, 2010 <br />BURAS, LOUISIANA -- A day after announcing its much-anticipated containment system failed to work as planned, BP has rolled out a series of measures that the company hopes will plug the leak.
The most daring is a plan to sever the broken riser on the sea floor and suction the entirety of its output through a pipeline to the surface. BP Chief Operating Officer Doug Suttles told ABC News the process could begin as early as Friday.
Also being considered is something called a junkshot. Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, the national incident commander for the spill, said the procedure involves taking a "bunch of debris, shredded up tires, golf balls and things like that and under very high pressure shoot it into the preventer itself and see if they can clog it up and stop the leak."
The junk would be blasted through an enormous high-pressure pipeline into the blow-out preventer, the 900,000-pound contraption at the sea bed. "We are progressing that at pace and it may be able to be used the later part of this coming week," Suttles said.
As with the containment system, this effort would be yet another gambit that has never been tried at such a depth.
The last never-been-tried-before gambit seems to have failed. The so-called sub-sea containment system, a squat four-story-tall obelisk engineered to siphon oil leaking from the broken riser on the sea floor to a barge waiting on the surface ran into trouble today.
As deep-sea robots nudged it over the pipeline's largest leak, hydrate crystals formed inside the contraption. The slushy admixture plugged the 12-inch hole through which the oil was to be pumped up to an oil rig waiting 5,000 feet above on the surface. The crystals also made that 78 ton box buoyant.
It now lies a couple of hundred feet from the broken pipeline.
But BP is still scrambling to salvage that dome system, which is sitting at the bottom of the gulf. BP says the likely solution would be to attach a pipeline to the dome and then circulate methanol through the pipeline to melt the crystals.
BP is also considering placing another, smaller box over the leak. The smaller intake of water, the theory goes, would help reduce the formation of crystals. Called Top Hat, BP officials say, the smaller container could be in place by the middle of next week.
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