NEW ORLEANS — BP vessels that evacuated ahead of Tropical Storm Bonnie headed back to the Deepwater Horizon well site Saturday in the Gulf of Mexico to resume work on permanently capping the damaged well.
The goal is to seal the damaged well permanently before another storm forms during this hurricane season, which starts in early August and lasts throughNovember and which meteorologists predict will be busier than normal.
“We’re going to be playing a cat-and-mouse game for the remainder of the hurricane season,” retired Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, the government’s point man on the oil spill, said Saturday. Another disturbance already is brewing in the Caribbean, although forecasters said it isn’t likely to strengthen into a tropical storm.
In the past 10 years, an average of five named storms have hit the Gulf each hurricane season. This year, two have struck already: Bonnie and Hurricane Alex at the end of June, which delayed cleanup of BP’s oil spill for a week even though it didn’t get closer than 500 miles to the well.
“Usually you don’t see the first hurricane statistically until Aug. 10,” said Dennis Feltgen, a spokesman for the National Hurricane Center in Miami. “The 2010 hurricane season is running just ahead of a typical pace.”
Bonnie fell apart Saturday before it reached the Louisiana coast, but the storm still forced the evacuation Wednesday of 10-15 ships and the disassembly of a portion of the relief tunnel being drilled to kill the well, delaying the work by three days.
That means a seven- to nine-day delay in completing the ultimate fix, said Allen, a veteran of the Coast Guard’s rescue mission after Hurricane Katrina.
Pumping mud into the top of the well to help permanently stop the oil flow, known as “static kill,” may begin in three to five days, he added.
The cap installed on the gusher on July 15 to temporarily stop the leak remained in place as the vessels evacuated, and pressure tests indicate that the well isn’t damaged, increasing the chances of successfully plugging it permanently, Allen said.
Tests showed that pressure within the well increased to 6,890 pounds per square inch Saturday, from about 6,700 pounds per square inch July 16, according to BP’s website.
Data gathered from the wellhead will help estimate the rate at which the well was spewing after the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded April 20 and sank, Allen said. The latest government estimate set the flow at between 35,000 barrels and 60,000 barrels a day before the well was closed this month. As much as 5 million barrels escaped before the well was plugged, Allen said.
A barrel of oil equals 42 gallons.
“This weather delay was not as long as it might have been,” BP spokesman Steve Rinehart said Saturday. “But it has set us back a few days.”
BP had expected to complete the first of two relief wells, which would be used to flood the well with mudand cement, by the end of this month.
Completion now looks possible by mid-August, but Allen said he wouldn’t hesitate to order another evacuation if faced with forecasts similar to the ones for stormBonnie.
“We have no choice but to start well ahead of time if we think the storm track is going to bring gale-force winds, which are 39 mph or above, anywhere close to well site,” Allen said.
Storms are closely watched in the Gulf, partly because they can topple oil production platforms and rupture pipelines.
The Gulf is home to about 31 percent of U.S. oil output and about 10 percent of gas production, according to the Energy Department.
By Saturday afternoon, Bonnie had degenerated toa “disorganized area of low pressure” near the Gulf Coast, hours after the National Hurricane Center lifted tropical storm warnings for the northern Gulf of Mexico, the center said.
Remnants of the weather system slowed to about 14 mph as of 4 p.m. CDT as it moved to the west-northwest, the center said. It was centered near latitude 28.5 north, longitude 87.6 west, and was expected to produce rainfall totals of 1 to 2 inches oversouthern parts of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, and the far-western part of the Florida panhandle. Some areas might record as much as 3 inches, the agency said.
Jane Lubchenco, the administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said the storm’s wave action of up to 8 feet in the northern Gulf should churn the oil, spreading what’s left of the surface oil slicks and breaking tar balls up into smaller parts that will biodegrade more quickly.
The storm was too weak to churn up any oil deep under the sea, Lubchenco said.
However, the tropical depression, with sustained winds of about 30 mph, could drive some oil into marshes and bayous and onto beaches. Its counterclockwise rotation also could move some oil away from the coastlines.
“The bottom line: It’s better than it might have been,” Lubchenco said of Bonnie, which packed far less punch than originally forecast.
No oil leaked from theDeepwater Horizon well during the storm, Allen said.
Still, the rough weather hurt the operation to kill the well. Work on the relief tunnel stopped Wednesday and will take time to restart.
The rig drilling the relief tunnel started steaming back toward the well 40 miles off the Louisiana coast Saturday morning.
Workers who spent Thursday and Friday pulling nearly a mile of segmented steel pipe out of the water and stacking the 40- to 50-foot sections ondeck will now have to reverse the process. It will likely be Monday before BP can resume drilling.
By Wednesday, workers should finish installing steel casing to fortify the relief shaft, Allen said, and by Friday, crews plan to start blasting in heavy mud and cement through the mechanical cap, the first phase of a two-step process to seal the well for good. BP will then finish drilling the relief tunnel, which could take up to a week, to pump in more mud and cement.
The clear weather may not hold for long, said Joe Bastardi, Accuweather’s chief meteorologist of State College, Pa.
“From what I’m seeing in the tropics, it’s like a pot boiling and the lid’s going to blow off,” Bastardi said.
Information for this article was contributed by David Dishneau, Harry R. Weber, Tamara Lush and Mary Foster of The Associated Press; by Katarzyna Klimasinska, Dan Hart, Rachel Graham and Brian K. Sullivan of Bloomberg News; and by Cammy Clark of McClatchy Newspapers.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 07/25/2010