Saving the Gulf
Written by Mark Fitzgerald
CGF 2010 Volume: 2 Issue: 3 (July)
The Coast Guard Swiftly Responded To The Deepwater
Horizon Drilling Rig Explosion And Has Worked Tirelessly
To Mitigate The Massive Oil Spill In The Gulf Of Mexico.
The Coast Guard’s immediate response efforts—performing a massive search and rescue and helping to evacuate over 90 people, including three that were critically injured—following the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig on April 20 were exemplary. Sadly, the explosion claimed the lives of 11 people and eventually caused an unprecedented oil catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico. Multiple Coast Guard helicopters, planes and cutters responded to the incident, and fire boat response crews battled the fire relentlessly before the rig sank on April 22.
“As the fire continued, most of the product was rising through the pipe but consumed by the fire,” Admiral Thad Allen, the Coast Guard’s commandant and the National Incident commander, explained in a briefing. “When the drill unit sank . . . we began a series of events where we were trying to discover the implications of the sinking, the status of the riser and the status of the wellhead. That required extensive investigation by remotely operated vehicles over the entire 5,000 feet of pipe that was arrayed around the floor of the ocean.”
Subsequent investigation efforts revealed various oil leaks and spurred numerous mitigation, containment and cleanup activities. Skimmers, tugs, barges and recovery vessels were quickly dispatched, as well as aircraft, remotely operated vehicles and multiple mobile offshore drilling units. In addition, 17 staging areas (at Dauphin Island, Ala., Orange Beach, Ala., Theodore, Ala., Panama City, Fla., Pensacola, Fla., Port St. Joe, Fla., St. Marks, Fla., Amelia, La., Cocodrie, La., Grand Isle, La., Shell Beach, La., Slidell, La., St. Mary, La., Venice, La., Biloxi, Miss., Pascagoula, Miss., and Pass Christian, Miss.) were set up to protect vital shoreline in all potentially affected Gulf Coast states.
“We are working closely with the Gulf states and local communities to help every American affected by this crisis,” President Obama said following the rig collapse. “Let me be clear: [British Petroleum] is responsible for this leak; BP will be paying the bill. But as president of the United States, I’m going to spare no effort to respond to this crisis for as long as it continues. And we will spare no resource to clean up whatever damage is caused. And while there will be time to fully investigate what happened on that rig and hold responsible parties accountable, our focus now is on a fully coordinated, relentless response effort to stop the leak and prevent more damage to the Gulf.”
MITIGATION EFFORTS
By mid-May, approximately 1.3 million feet of containment boom and 400,000 feet of sorbent boom had been deployed to contain the spill, more than 6.5 million gallons of an oil-water mix had been recovered, and nearly 630,000 gallons of dispersant had been deployed.
Despite these efforts, Allen recognized the obliquity of mitigation. “The first [priority] is to stop this thing at the source,” he said. “Continuing to fight this thing at the surface and on the shore is not the right way to do that. The extensive pressure on British Petroleum to come up with technical solutions to first stop the leakage that is apparent around the wellhead and the pipe riser, and then to facilitate the drilling of a relief well which will relieve the pressure on the current well and allow it to be capped—only that will remove the threat.”
In addition to deploying boom, skimming and applying dispersant, the Coast Guard has conducted numerous controlled burns to remove oil from the open water in an effort to protect shoreline and wildlife. These burns are dependent on the weather and condition of the sea. A successful burn lasting about 30 minutes can remove thousands of gallons of oil from the surface.
But how to stop the flow of oil from its source? The question plagued engineers and industry experts. “One of the real problems we’re having working in that area is what I would call the tyranny of distance and the tyranny of depth,” Allen said. “Trying to use some of these technologies at that depth with remotely operated vehicles is proving to be somewhat of a challenge. The riser is already crimped about two feet above what they call the stack, and the stack is where the broad preventers are placed above the wellhead, and those are the ones that we’re not sure are activated or activated all the way.”
TRY AND TRY AGAIN
A plan to place a 78-ton steel and concrete box known as a cofferdam failed when slush-like hydrates that form in the ocean’s low temperatures and high pressures collected in the structure, clogging the pipes and making the cofferdam too buoyant to settle tightly into the sea bottom.
At the time of this writing, BP was considering multiple shortterm fixes, including installing a new blow-out preventer on the leak site and trying to clog up the existing failed blow-out preventer with an injection of rubber and other solids, known as a junk shot. “These oil spill response plans suffer from what I would consider a failure of imagination,” said Representative Nick Rahall (D–W. Va.), the chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee, which is investigating federal oversight of oil spills. “It seems to me that there should be a Plan B, C and D in place before the accident occurs, not created in haste while millions of gallons of oil are spewing into the Gulf.”
The cofferdam was supposed to redirect the unchecked flow of crude from nearly one mile below the water and, once connected, pump it to a surface tanker. In the long term, BP is drilling a relief well to cut off the leaking oil well, which could take two to three months.
The Minerals Management Service—which is actively working with the U.S. Coast Guard, Transocean and BP to try to secure the well, stop the oil spill and protect the environment—is overseeing the relief well drilling. The Development Driller III was charged with drilling the first relief well and installing the blowout preventer on the wellhead. By late June, a second relief well had progressed 12,000 feet into the seafloor.
BP needs to drill deep to create a relief well with sufficient mass to counteract the force of flowing oil, pointed out Andy Radford, a petroleum engineer and senior policy advisor for offshore issues at the American Petroleum Institute. “You have pressure coming up the well from the producing formation,” he said. “It’s thousands of pounds per square inch coming up the hole. You need to be able to overcome that pressure with the kill fluids. The deeper you intersect, the less pump pressure you need to overcome the pressure of the well coming up.”
THREATS AND UNCERTAINTIES
Over 24,241 square miles—approximately 10 percent of the Gulf of Mexico exclusive economic zone—has been closed to commercial and recreational fishing as a result of the oil spill. BP has been paying out up to $5,000 in individual claims to fishermen and others who suffered economic losses. Some estimates have put the total figure for cleanup operations and damages at four billion dollars, although it could be higher depending on when the leak is stopped.
Hundreds of local fishermen have helped in the cleanup effort. “If we can’t crab or sell seafood for the next three or four years, we’d like a job doing something,” Bret Ainsworth, a crabber who has depended on catches from the Gulf for over 30 years, told The Associated Press.
According to the Louisiana State University Agriculture Center and the state Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, commercial fishing in Louisiana is a $2.6 billion-a-year industry that supplies up to 25 percent of the seafood to states outside Alaska and Hawaii. “We stand with America’s fisherman, their families and businesses in impacted coastal communities during this very challenging time,” said Secretary of Commerce Gary Locke. “Fishing is vital to our economy and our quality of life and we will work tirelessly to protect it.” ♦