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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