Admiral: Oil leaks few, not a worry

Seepage traced to different well

Department of the Interior Secretary Ken Salazar is sworn in during a House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations and the Subcommittee on Energy and Environment joint hearing on the role of the Interior Department in the Deepwater Horizon disaster on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, July 20, 2010.
Department of the Interior Secretary Ken Salazar is sworn in during a House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations and the Subcommittee on Energy and Environment joint hearing on the role of the Interior Department in the Deepwater Horizon disaster on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, July 20, 2010.

— The federal government’s oilspill chief said Tuesday that seepage two miles from BP’s oil cap is coming from another well, tamping down fears that leaks mean the ruptured well is unstable.

Retired Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen also said five leaks in and around BP’s well are more like “drips” and aren’t yet reason to worry.

The leaks and seepage had raised concerns that the mechanical cap choking off the flow of oil was displacing pressure and forcing oil out deep underground. That could make the seafloor unstable and make the 3-month-old environmental disaster even worse and harder to fix.

Allen said the well appears to be stable, and he extended testing of the experimental cap by another day, which means the oil will remain shut in.

The cap is buying time until a permanent plug is in place. Crews are drilling into the side of the ruptured well from deep underground, and by next week, they could start blasting in mud and cement to block off the well for good, sources say.

Allen also said he’s considering whether to pump mud and cement through the well cap, smashing the oil in from two directions. The idea is similar to the failed top-kill plan that couldn’t overcome the pressure of the geyser pushing up.

BP and Allen said it could work now because there’s less oil to fight against.

The seepage was detected over the weekend and was the first sign of possible trouble after the cap was closed Thursday.

But Allen said Tuesday that the leaking oil is from a different well.

“In fact, it’s closer to that facility than” the one that blew out, Allen said. “The combination of those factors and the fact that it’s not unusual to have seepage around the old wells led us to believe that we could exclude that as a potential source of leakage from the particular well bore.”

There are two wells within two miles of BP’s blowout, one that has been abandoned and another that is not in production. About 27,000 abandoned wells in the Gulf aren’t checked for leaks, an Associated Press investigation showed this month.

Allen said he’d accompany Vice President Joe Biden on a trip to the Gulf on Thursday. The White House says Biden will visit Theodore, Ala., to assess the government’s and BP’s efforts to respond to the disaster and to meet with affected residents.

Biden made his first trip to the region in late June.

Between 2.2 million and 4.4 million barrels of oil have gushed into the Gulf since the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded April 20, killing 11 workers. A barrel equals 42 gallons.

A BP employee told government investigators Tuesday that weeks before the explosion, he reported a leak of hydraulic fluid in a critical safety device that could have prevented the disaster.

Ronald Sepulvado, a BP well-site leader, told a panel of government investigators in suburban New Orleans that he didn’t know if federal regulators were notified of the leak, as required.

A federal regulation requires drilling operations to be suspended if a blowout preventer pod isn’t fully functional, but BP didn’t stop drilling. Sepulvado said the safety device passed the last pressure test performed 11 days before the explosion.

FALSE SENSE OF SAFETY

Two former Interior secretaries told Congress on Tuesday that they did not anticipate an accident as large as the BP oil spill in the Gulf.


INTERACTIVE

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But Gale Norton and Dirk Kempthorne say no one else did either, including members of Congress who are now blaming the Bush administration for failing to prevent the tragedy.

Kempthorne, who served as Interior secretary from 2006 to January 2009, while George W. Bush was president, said he did not recall being asked at his confirmation hearing or in later congressional testimony about major oil spills.

In fact, Kempthorne said, the opposite occurred. In testimony before the House Energy and Commerce Committee, he recalled being pointedly asked why the Department of the Interior wasn’t doing more to expand offshore energy development, not less. Those concerns were driven by $4-per-gallon gas prices, Kempthorne said.

Norton, who served from 2001-06, also under Bush, said the industry had a remarkable safety record, including during Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005.

Before the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded, “there was a 40-year record of environmental protection in offshore drilling,” Kempthorne said. Since the 1969 oil spill near Santa Barbara, Calif., natural cracks in the seafloor had caused oil seeps larger than oil spilled because of offshore drilling, he said.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, who took office in January 2009, acknowledged that long safety record and said he and other members of the Obama administration “were lulled into a sense of safety” that proved to be false.

“Prior administrations and this administration have not done as much as we could have done relative to making sure that there was safer production in the Outer Continental Shelf,” Salazar said, referring to coastal areas where offshore drilling occurs.

In the wake of the Gulf oil spill, Salazar has imposed a six-month ban on deepwater drilling.

Regulators during Bush’s presidency failed to protect safety and the environment, and actions by President Barack Obama’s Interior Department were “more cosmetic than substantive,” Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Mich., said at the hearing.

Decisions dating to the start of Bush’s administration played a role in the BP spill, Stupak said. Congressional investigators said the Interior Department under Bush offered incentives for drillers without imposing safety standards.

WAIVED REQUIREMENTS

Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., said a 2001 report from an energy task force created by Vice President Dick Cheney warned that regulations were delaying drilling projects. The report prompted the Bush administration to waive a requirement that companies plan for the type of blowout that occurred at the BP well, Markey said.

In implementing Bush’s goal to expedite production, Norton failed to resolve questions about the adequacy of blowout preventers to contain spills, investigators said in a memorandum to the committee. The blowout preventer at BP’s well failed to shut off the flow of oil after the rig exploded.

“There was a deregulatory ticking time bomb that was set while you were secretary that has now exploded,” Markey said to Norton. “Was it wrong?”

“It was reasonable to take into account what the history had been,” Norton said. “There were very few largespills.”

Rep. Henry Waxman, DCalif., chairman of the committee, said he is concerned that the Cheney task-force report gave no consideration to “improving drilling safety while we encourage more exploration.”

No rton sa id tougher rules on blowout preventers are “something that can be looked at in the future.” Norton joined Royal Dutch Shell as a general counsel 10 months after leaving government employment.

Kempthorne, Interior secretary when BP won the right to drill the Macondo well that ruptured in April, said plans to explore in the Outer Continental Shelf are developed in consultation with Congress and environmental groups.

“We received comments from more than 100,000 interested citizens,” Kempthorne said. “Seventy-five percent of the comments received from the public supported some level of increased” drilling.

Information for this article was contributed by Frederic J. Frommer, Colleen Long, David Dishneau, Michael Kunzelman, Phuong Le and Matthew Daly of The Associated Press and by Jim Efstathiou Jr. of Bloomberg News.

Front Section, Pages 1 on 07/21/2010

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