BRITISH PETROLEUM yesterday began a much-delayed “top kill”, the most serious attempt so far to stop the spill that has poured six million gallons of petroleum into the Gulf of Mexico over the past 37 days.
Americans are growing increasingly impatient with BP’s failure to stop the spill, which has already fouled 80 miles of Gulf coastline. “Plug the damn hole,” President Barack Obama reportedly told BP officials.
Mr Obama’s approval ratings have dropped because of the widespread perception that the White House has failed to take control of the disaster.
The president will today announce new requirements for drilling permits and tougher inspections. Tomorrow, he will visit Louisiana for the second time since the spill started.
The “top kill” could take two days to complete, and results may not be clear for several days more. Tony Hayward, the chief executive of BP, says it has a 60 to 70 per cent chance of succeeding.
Some 50,000 barrels of dense heavy drilling fluid called “mud” in the industry will be pumped from a surface ship into a 1.5km long pipe. Hoses at the end of the pipe will direct the mud into the defective blowout preventer at the well through which the oil is gushing.
Some of the mud will mix with oil and gas that are spewing from the blowout preventer, BP says. But they hope most of the mud will sink to the bottom. “We know we’ll lose some (mud) out the top,” Kent Wells, BP’s senior vice-president in charge of exploration and production, told reporters in a conference call on Tuesday. “But can we pump fast enough to ultimately kill the well?”
The goal is to “outrun” the well. If the drilling mud is not sufficient to plug it, engineers plan to pump in golf balls and pieces of rubber in what is known as a “junk kill”. If they succeed in clogging the well, it will be sealed with cement.
Failure could actually increase the flow of oil into the Gulf. If a fallback plan to lower a second containment dome also fails, the spill could continue unabated until relief wells are completed in August.
"This is probably going to be the worst spill we've ever seen, and possibly the worst environmental disaster this country has ever seen," Carol Browner, Mr Obama's senior adviser on energy and the environment, told the Wall Street Journal.
A House energy committee memorandum released late Tuesday said that on the day the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded, BP continued work on the oil well after a test warned of a “very large abnormality”. The memorandum said cement used to seal the well may have been contaminated by natural gas. The well was not properly monitored for signs that gas was leaking in, and the mud that is used to keep gas out was removed when it should not have been. Failure to heed the test warning was “a fundamental mistake”, the memo said.
Mike Williams, the chief electronics technician on the oil rig, told the CBS 60 Minutes programme that the explosion was not a freak accident but the result of weeks of cost-cutting and sloppiness. About a month before the explosion, the rubber gasket at the top of the blowout preventer that was meant to seal the pipe in an emergency was damaged and never properly repaired, Mr Williams said.
Also on Tuesday, the inspector general of the Department of the Interior released a report on past actions at the Minerals Management Service (MMS), which is supposed to regulate the oil industry. It found that in some cases, oil companies completed their own inspection reports in pencil. MMS inspectors then traced over them in ink.
“This deeply disturbing report is further evidence of the cosy relationship between some elements of MMS and the oil and gas industry,” said Ken Salazar, the secretary of the interior. He has promised to “keep the boot on the neck” of BP. There have been calls to turn the disaster over to the US military, but the military does not possess underwater robots like those used by the oil company.
“To push BP out of the way would raise a question: to replace them with what?” says Adm Thad Allen, the head of the Coast Guard’s spill operation.