June 3, 2010
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704025304575284264222132380.html
U.S. NEWS JUNE 3, 2010, 8:56 A.M. ET
BP Says It Was Unprepared for Gulf Spill
Associated Press
PENSACOLA, Fla.BP PLC’s top executive acknowledged Thursday the global oil giant was unprepared to fight a catastrophic deepwater oil spill as engineers were forced yet again to reconfigure plans for executing their latest gambit to control the Gulf of Mexico gusher.
BP planned to use giant shears to cut a pipe a mile below the sea after a diamond-tipped saw became stuck halfway through the job, another frustrating delay in six weeks of failed efforts to stop or at least curtail the worst oil spill in U.S. history. The government’s point man for the disaster, Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, said on the NBC “Today” show the cut would be made later Thursday.
Once the riser pipe is cut, BP hopes to cap it and start pumping some crude to a surface tanker, which would reduce but not end the spill. The next chance for stopping the flow won’t come until two relief wells meant to plug the reservoir for good are finished in August, after an effort to staunch the gusher with heavy mud failed Saturday.
BP Chief Executive Tony Hayward told the Financial Times it was “an entirely fair criticism” to say the company had not been fully prepared for a deepwater oil leak. Mr. Hayward called it “low-probability, high-impact” accident.
“What is undoubtedly true is that we did not have the tools you would want in your tool-kit,” Mr. Hayward said in an interview published in Thursday’s edition of the London-based newspaper.
The latest attempt to control the spill, the so-called cut-and-cap method, is considered risky because slicing away a section of the 20-inch-wide riser could remove kinks in the pipe and temporarily increase the flow of oil by as much as 20%.
Oil drifted perilously close to the Florida Panhandle’s popular sugar-white beaches, and crews on the mainland were doing everything possible to limit the catastrophe.
The Coast Guard’s Adm. Allen directed BP to pay for five additional sand barrier projects in Louisiana. BP said Thursday the project will cost it about $360 million, on top of about $990 million it had spent as of its latest expense update Tuesday on response and clean up, grants to four Gulf coast states and claims from people and companies hurt by the spill.
As the edge of the slick drifted within seven miles of Pensacola’s beaches, emergency workers rushed to link the last in a miles-long chain of booms designed to fend off the oil. They were slowed by thunderstorms and wind before the weather cleared in the afternoon.
Forecasters said the oil would probably wash up by Friday, threatening a delicate network of islands, bays and white-sand beaches that are a haven for wildlife and a major tourist destination dubbed the Redneck Riviera.
“We are doing what we can do, but we cannot change what has happened,” said John Dosh, emergency director for Escambia County, which includes Pensacola.
The effect on wildlife has grown, too.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service reported 522 dead birdsat least 38 of them oiledalong the Gulf coast states, and more than 80 oiled birds have been rescued. It’s not clear exactly how many of the deaths can be attributed to the spill.
Dead birds and animals found during spills are kept as evidence in locked freezers until investigations and damage assessments are complete, according to Teri Frady, a spokeswoman for the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration.
“This includes strict chain-of-custody procedures and long-term locked storage until the investigative and damage assessment phases of the spill are complete,” she wrote in an email.
As the oil drifted closer to Florida, beachgoers in Pensacola waded into the gentle waves, cast fishing lines and sunbathed, even as a two-man crew took water samples. One of the men said they were hired by BP to collect samples to be analyzed for tar and other pollutants.
Officials said the slick sighted offshore consisted in part of “tar mats” about 500 feet by 2,000 feet in size.
County officials set up the booms to block oil from reaching inland waterways but planned to leave beaches unprotected because they are too difficult to defend against the action of the waves and because they are easier to clean up.
“It’s inevitable that we will see it on the beaches,” said Keith Wilkins, deputy chief of neighborhood and community services for Escambia County.
Florida’s beaches play a crucial role in the state’s tourism industry. At least 60% of vacation spending in the state during 2008 was in beachfront cities. Worried that reports of oil would scare tourists away, state officials are promoting interactive Web maps and Twitter feeds to show travelersparticularly those from overseashow large the state is and how distant their destinations may be from the spill.
____________
Alaska Dispatch
June 3, 2010
BP plans to move ahead with offshore oil drilling in Arctic
Jill Burke | Jun 2, 2010
This fall, BP hopes to pull off a record-setting feat: Using a high-tech drill from a gravel island in the Beaufort Sea, it plans to reach two miles deep, turn and bore another six to eight miles horizontally to tap an oil reservoir in federal waters.
The moratorium imposed on new deep-water drilling and drilling in Arctic waters, imposed in the aftermath of the Gulf spill and BP’s inability to contain the leak, imploded Royal Dutch Shell’s plans to begin exploratory drilling in Alaska this summer. But BP still has hope of seeing its latest Alaska venture succeed.
Wednesday, the U.S. government confirmed the drilling “pause” does not apply to BP’s new project, called Liberty.
“The deep-water moratorium does not apply to this particular project, which is based from a man-made island and would potentially be drilling directionally into formations under shallow water. If drilling permit applications are submitted for the project, the Department of the Interior will review them at the appropriate time and determine, based on safety and other considerations, whether the project should move forward with drilling under federal waters,” said Kendra Barkoff, a spokesperson for the U.S. Department of the Interior.
Before it drills, BP will need state and federal drilling permits — permits for which it has not yet applied, according to the Alaska Oil and Gas Commission, the state permitting agency, and Barkoff, speaking on behalf of the U.S. Minerals Management Service, the federal permitting agency.
Operators typically apply for a permit about one month in advance of the intended drilling date, according to AOGCC commissioner Cathy Forester, adding that Liberty, which launches from state waters to reach a federal reservoir, is an unusually complex project.
“If they want to start in September I’d hope they get us something pretty soon,” she said.
Asked to clarify Liberty’s development timeline, BP spokesman Steve Rinehart said the company, which plans to begin its first development well this fall, “will apply for permits in line with that schedule.”
Guy Schwartz, a senior petroleum engineer with AOGCC who handles BP’s permitting requests, said he hasn’t seen anything yet from the company.
“It appears their timetable is slipping a bit for getting a well spudded with the new rig,” Schwartz said.
In prior interviews BP has said it plans to start producing oil from Liberty next year.
Forester expects AOGCC to take a hard look at the entire project, including segments of the drilling operation that travel outside the state’s jurisdiction, because “if something goes wrong it’s going to affect state land or state water.”
“If we see something that they’re doing outside of state waters that we don’t think is safe, we’re not going to approve the permit,” she said.
While all permitting requests are thoroughly evaluated, with the shadow of the Gulf spill still looming, BP can expect heightened scrutiny with Liberty, according to AOGCC. Gone are the days when regulators, which send inspectors to the sites and check out the drill plans, assume everything has been done top notch, Forester said. Questions will be asked twice, and reviews will be conducted with “a different mindset” — looking for what might be wrong instead of expecting to find that an operator — in this case BP — has done everything right, she said.
“I think everybody trusts BP a little bit less than they did six weeks ago,” Forester said.
Contact Jill Burke at jill@alaskadispatch.com
_____________
Anchorage Daily News
June 3, 2010
http://www.adn.com/2010/06/02/1304923/as-bps-spill-efforts-stall-oil.html
As BP’s spill efforts stall, oil creeps toward other states
By CAROL ROSENBERG and RENEE SCHOOF / McClatchy Newspapers
Published: June 2nd, 2010 10:33 PM
Last Modified: June 3rd, 2010 04:24 AM
WASHINGTON As BP’s latest attempt to capture leaking oil from its crippled rig in the Gulf of Mexico stalled Wednesday, Alabama, Florida and Mississippi braced for what officials said could be the first crude oil to hit their beaches.
With Florida’s Panhandle near Pensacola on track as the spill’s first landfall outside Louisiana, officials put another 20,000 feet of booms in place to protect precious wetlands there. In Mississippi, fishermen dumped their catch after oil washed ashore on Petit Bois Island off the coast and the state closed portions of its coastal fishing areas.
As the oil inched closer, comments by officials in Florida and Mississippi reflected a sense of urgency.
Florida Gov. Charlie Crist told CNN that the arrival of the oil was “imminent.” At a mid-afternoon visit to the state’s Emergency Operations Center in Tallahassee, Crist said: “We need to respond. We need to protect our state.”
After Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour toured Petit Bois Island, he promised to marshal all the resources needed to fight the pollution. Before Wednesday, Barbour’s more common response to the Gulf spill had been to encourage tourism, telling visitors that there was “nothing to worry about here folks.” Now he’s calling the oil on the barrier island “a wakeup call.”
At a Wednesday morning briefing, Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen said BP’s latest effort to stop the gush of oil from a leaking well in the Gulf had to be suspended Wednesday because a diamond saw blade got stuck in the pipe on the ocean floor it was trying to cut. The blade was later freed, and sawing was to resume as a prelude to installing a tight-fitting cap to capture the escaping oil and pump it to a barge on the surface.
Allen also said that tar balls has been found on Alabama’s Dauphin Island, and the White House approved five berm projects in Louisiana to protect delicate marshlands where oil already has begun landing.
The federal government Wednesday also expanded the closed fishing zone to include more than 31 percent of gulf waters, nearly 76,000 square miles, that ran from the western tip of the Florida panhandle southward toward Cuban waters.
Meantime, bad weather made it difficult to determine when the Deepwater Horizon’s oil spill would reach the shores, said Escambia County, Fla., spokeswoman Sonya Daniel, who reported that aerial tracking on Tuesday had detected an oil sheen 9.5 miles off the county’s coastline.
“At this point, we still don’t have any oil on our shores,” she added. “We have done our local booming strategy.”
At midday Wednesday, Crist’s office reported that a “concentration of tar balls” had been detected about 10 miles off the Escambia County coast, but still predicted “no large impacts” to the state before the weekend.
The primary oil plume from the Gulf of Mexico oil spill was 35 miles from Pensacola, according to the “oil plume model” from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The Food and Drug Administration, it said, was developing a “broad-scaled seafood sampling plan” to test seafood from the docks to the markets to the gulf waters themselves.
In Tallahassee, Crist said that skimmers had been deployed near Pensacola to remove “that oil from near-shore waters” and minimize any impact on the state.
The state’s noon advisory noted that forecasts of increased winds and seas this week across the north-central Gulf of Mexico gave a 50 percent chance or better of showers and thunderstorms through Friday, which could hamper surface oil recovery operations.
In Pittsburgh, President Barack Obama said that regardless of the cause of the Deepwater Horizon accident on April 20, deepwater drilling was always risky.
“The catastrophe unfolding in the Gulf right now may prove to be a result of human error or corporations taking dangerous short-cuts that compromised safety,” he said in a speech at Carnegie Mellon University.
“But we have to acknowledge that there are inherent risks to drilling four miles beneath the surface of the Earth risks that are bound to increase the harder oil extraction becomes.”
In Mississippi, coastal residents clearly were frustrated when they left a BP oil spill forum Thursday with unanswered questions.
Representatives of several federal and state agencies assured residents that tests have found that shrimp and fish are untainted, dissolved oxygen levels in the water are near normal for this time of year, air samples test normal and the government will stay on the job until the Deepwater Horizon gusher is plugged and the environment is cleaned up.
Representatives of the Environmental Protection Agency and NOAA also acknowledged that long-term environmental consequences are inevitable.
“I do think it’s fair to say that the BP oil spill is one of the greatest environmental challenges of our time,” A. Stanley Meiburg, the EPA’s deputy regional administrator, told 140 coast residents who attended a forum sponsored by the Mississippi-Alabama Sea Grant Consortium.
Barbara Medlock of Keith Huber Inc. in Gulfport wanted to know how much oil has been captured at sea and what is being done with it. She said her company, which manufactures mobile vacuum equipment used to suck up oil, has been unable to find those answers. She didn’t come away from the forum with any.
Her boss, Keith Huber president Suzanne Huber, said company representatives are upset because dozens of vacuum trucks sit unused in a BP staging area. Huber thinks those trucks could be put to work sucking up oil from barges at sea so it doesn’t reach shore.
The Deepwater Horizon response website indicates that 13.8 million gallons have been sucked up so far. A disaster response spokesman, who’d identify himself only as “Will” with the Coast Guard, told the Sun Herald of Biloxi, Miss., that oil mixed with saltwater is being stored in barges at various locations so the oil can be extracted and reused. He didn’t know for what.
Patrick Sullivan, a recreational boater who signed up and trained to help with the cleanup through Vessels of Opportunity, wonders why he’s never received a call to work.
Don Abrams of Ocean Springs, Miss., said he stayed up until 3 a.m. Wednesday researching the oil spill. He was concerned that a Texas laboratory with connections to BP is analyzing environmental samples. He believes the company may have a bias, but he was assured that government agencies are doing their own testing.
Abrams also has been reading about the continuing fallout from the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989. He said Alaska residents in the area suffer from immune, respiratory and nerve problems,
Abrams loves to fish and said his seafood is a staple of his family’s diet.
“I’m not eating any fresh fish,” he said. “I still have fish in my freezer.”
(Rosenberg, of the Miami Herald, reported from Miami. Schoof reported from Washington. Geoff Pender and Anita Lee of the Sun Herald in Biloxi, Miss., contributed to this article.)
Special thanks to Richard Charter
