Dispersal of Oil Means Cleanup to Take Years

[Cees Binkhorst]

REPLY TO: D66 at nic.surfnet.nl

Die mensen drinken hun koffie dus allemaal zwart.
Als ik melk in een kopje doe en roer, verspreid de melk zich al vrij snel.
Die Mexicaanse Golf is één grote kop met draaiend zout water en iemand
spuit er olie in ;)

Bovendien draait het oppervlak met de klok mee, maar veel dieper gaat
het tegen de klok in. De olie verspreid dus in twee verschillende
richtingen op verschillende nivo's.

Groet / Cees

June 7, 2010
Dispersal of Oil Means Cleanup to Take Years, Official Says
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/08/us/08spill.html
By JOSEPH BERGER, BRIAN KNOWLTON and CLIFFORD KRAUSS

Although the Coast Guard had trained for the possibility of cleaning up
a disastrous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, it had never anticipated
that oil would spread across such a broad area and break up into
hundreds of thousands of patches as the current spill has done, the
commander heading the federal response to the spill said Monday.

“It’s the breadth and complexity of the disaggregation of the oil,” that
is now posing the greatest clean-up challenge, Coast Guard Admiral Thad
W. Allen said at a news conference at the White House.

He underscored the challenge by acknowledging, in response to a
reporter’s question, that it would take years to mitigate the impact of
the spill on the marshes, beaches and wildlife on the Gulf Coast. Just
the day before, he had said that it could take well into autumn to deal
with the slick spreading relentlessly across four states of the gulf.

“This is a long campaign and we’re going to be dealing with this for the
foreseeable future,” he said.

The assessment was among Admiral Allen’s gloomier reports on the spill
that began 47 days ago. But the admiral also reported some signs of
progress. The amount of oil being captured as a result of a containment
cap placed on the ruptured well last week continues to steadily
increase, he said, and is now up to 11,000 barrels a day. Federal
studies have put the amount of oil spewing out of the stricken well at
an estimated 12,000 to 25,000 barrels, but BP had to cut a riser pipe on
the stricken well last week to accommodate the capping device, which
administration officials have said could have increased the flow rate by
as much as 20 percent.

He also announced that BP, the owner of the well, was sending an
additional ship to help process the oil being recovered through the cap.

But the big problem the Coast Guard is facing is the intricacy of
cleaning up oil that has broken into so many patches across the surface
of the sea and spreading out in so many different directions. That will
require many more vessels armed with skimmers and more booms to block
the oil from reaching the shore.

“We’re no longer dealing with a monolithic spill,” he said. “We’re
dealing with an aggregations of hundreds of thousands of patches of oil
and we have to adapt to meet that threat.”

At another point, he resorted to military metaphors to capture the
nature of his challenge.

“We’re adapting to an enemy that changes,” he said. “As the spill
changes we need to change.”

He was heartened, he said, by the fact that 1,500 vessels, most of them
private boats, have been recruited into the fight to clean up the spill
and many of those will be fitted with skimmers to sweep up the oil
before it reaches the delicate marshes on the shore.

The admiral spoke shortly before a meeting with President Obama and
cabinet members to review the latest containment and clean-up efforts
necessitated by what federal officials have called the worst
environmental disaster in American history.

The admiral said that a few years ago he led a training exercise on
dealing with a major spill of oil resulting from a blown out well. But
that exercise was held in far shallower waters and the simulation
prepared for an oil slick that was more compact in character.

“No one anticipated that this would spread out across such an area” and
involve “hundreds of thousands” of patches, he said. As a result, the
Coast Guard has had to recruit a flotilla of volunteers, hundreds of
boats that will be equipped with booms and skimming devices, to clean up
the scattered oil. But even skimming operations have to be adapted to
the depth of ocean and matched to the kinds of vessels available.

The operation, he said, was “taxing our resources.”

-.Adm. Thad W. Allen, the Coast Guard commander, said over the weekend
and on Monday that BP officials were continuing to try to secure the cap
over the wellhead and increase the amount of oil recovered. But he said
the only solution to the problem would be the successful completion of
relief wells to finally stop the flow from the bottom of the
18,000-foot-deep well, a job that will not be completed until August at
the earliest.

“The spill will not be contained until that happens,” Admiral Allen said
on the CBS program “Face the Nation” on Sunday. “But even after that,
there will be oil out there for months to come. This will be well into
the fall.”

He added: “This is a siege across the entire gulf. This spill is holding
everybody hostage, not only economically but physically. And it has to
be attacked on all fronts.”

Officials say it is not yet possible to gauge what fraction of the total
flow is being captured and what fraction is still escaping.

--After two days of trying to gradually close the four vents on the
capping device, engineers on Sunday decided to keep some open when they
realized that more oil was being captured than could be processed on a
drill ship floating in the gulf above. In a statement late Sunday, the
company said it “may leave some” of the valves open “to ensure system
stability.”

Engineers had feared that the volume and velocity of oil escaping might
create so much friction on the new pipe that it might force it entirely
off the cap. All day Saturday they worked to shut two of the vents, and
they spent the afternoon measuring the results, mindful that if they
closed the vents too quickly, water could rush in and form the kind of
icy hydrates that doomed a previous containment effort.

But while the cap remained snugly in place and there were no signs of
significant hydrate formation, by nightfall Saturday the engineers
suddenly were forced to deal with another problem: the Discoverer
Enterprise drill ship can only handle 15,000 barrels a day, and the
capping device was trapping almost that amount without the vents shut.

“We’re maxed out,” said the technician, who is working on the operation
and spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to
speak publicly. He said the capping device was capturing 10,000 to
15,000 barrels a day.

“There is no chance to close the vents when you are at maximum
production,” he said. “You wish desperately you could capture it all,
but it depends on the volume coming out of well. And you know how people
are arguing about that.”

The problem may be only a temporary one. The limitations of the
Discoverer Enterprise to handle oil are mainly due to the size and
capacity of the machines it has on board to separate the oil, gas and
water for storage. The ship has the capacity to store 139,000 barrels of
oil, a quantity that may be reached in a matter of days. Shuttle barges
carry oil from the ship to storage tanks on shore.

BP’s chief executive, Tony Hayward, in a British television interview
broadcast Sunday, said another containment device would be deployed by
next weekend. That device is a free-standing riser pipe that would
siphon oil through the manifold that was built during a failed operation
known as top kill. Another pipe will be also used to take oil from the
well to a second container ship, the Q4000.

Taken together, BP executives say, they should be able to eventually
contain a vast majority of the leaking oil. By early July, BP plans to
replace the new containment cap with another device called an “overshot
tool,” which is heavier and more tightly sealed. “That would capture
even more oil” than the current cap, said Toby Odone, a BP spokesman.

The struggle to fully deploy the new containment device has raised
renewed questions about just how much oil is spewing from the well.
Official government and BP estimates began at 1,000 barrels a day, then
increased to 5,000 barrels a day.

In recent days government scientists estimated the leak at 12,000 to
19,000 barrels, and Admiral Allen on Sunday put the upper end of the
range at 25,000 barrels. Some independent scientists say the number
could be far higher, and they question why BP has not made an active
effort to estimate the size of the leak.

Some questioned whether BP knew or even wanted to know how much oil was
escaping.

“BP still does not appear to know precisely how much oil is actually
escaping, which is discouraging,” Representative Edward J. Markey,
Democrat of Massachusetts, said in a letter he wrote to BP on Sunday.

Government officials and BP executives say the containment efforts
should help them come up with a more solid number.

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