OIL SPILL - Update, New Potential Problem?

"BP Hopes to Keep Well Closed, but Seep Is Detected" by HENRY FOUNTAIN, New York Times 7/18/2010

Excerpt

After three days of encouraging pressure tests, a senior BP official said Sunday that the company’s recently capped well in the Gulf of Mexico was holding up and that BP now hoped to keep the well closed until it could be permanently plugged. But government officials were more skeptical and cited a new potential problem.

That BP plan differs sharply from the one the company and the federal government had suggested only a day earlier, to eventually allow the flow of oil to resume temporarily, collecting it through pipes to surface ships.

If BP succeeds in keeping the cap atop the well closed until a relief well is finished, that would mean the gusher would effectively be over, three months — and tens of millions of gallons of oil — after it began. It would be a major turnaround after weeks of failure for the oil giant, which had been harshly criticized as being unprepared for such a disaster.

“We’re hopeful,” Doug Suttles, the company’s chief operating officer for exploration and production, said in a conference call with reporters Sunday morning.

“Right now we do not have a target to return the well to flow,” he said.

The federal government was more cautious, saying only that the test could be extended 24 hours at a time after scientific reviews.

Late Sunday, the government ordered BP to step up monitoring of the well after “undetermined anomalies” were discovered on the seafloor nearby.

In a letter to the company, Thad W. Allen, the retired Coast Guard admiral who commands the response to the oil spill, also noted that tests had detected a seep — usually a flow of hydrocarbons from the seafloor — “a distance from the well.”

And while the letter said the federal government would allow the test to continue for now, the discovery of a seep and the unspecified anomalies suggest that the well could be damaged and that it may have to be reopened soon to avoid making the situation worse.

We all need to remember that this situation is, and was always, risky. Also, we humans are prone to make mistakes, which is why we should ALWAYS try to improve.