The cap is now keeping up to 462,000 gallons of oil a day from leaking into the Gulf, Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen said Monday in Washington. That’s up from about 441,000 gallons on Saturday and about 250,000 on Friday. Federal authorities have estimated the ruptured pipe is leaking between 500,000 gallons and 1 million gallons a day [appx. 10,000-20,000 barrels/day]…
1:00 PM EST on June 7, 2010
[looks like a lion jumping through a hoop]
Dispersal of Oil Means Cleanup to Take Years, Official Says
New York Times
By JOSEPH BERGER, BRIAN KNOWLTON and CLIFFORD KRAUSS
June 7, 2010“It’s the breadth and complexity of the disaggregation of the oil” that is now posing the greatest clean-up challenge, the commander, Adm. 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…
The assessment was among Admiral Allen’s gloomier reports on the spill that began 47 days ago. But he also reported some signs of progress. The amount of oil being collected as a result of a containment cap placed on the ruptured well last week has increased, 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 barrels 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…
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…
“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…In a statement on its Web site, BP said one of four vents on its containment cap had been closed. When the cap was first lowered last week, the company said it hoped to close all four vents gradually to increase the collection rate. But a technician involved in the effort said Monday that it was unlikely that the other three vents would be closed — both because the surface ship, the Discoverer Enterprise, was near the 15,000-barrel limit of the amount of oil it could process, and because of concern that closing more vents would create more pressure that would force the cap off…
A second system is being prepared that would use the pipes and other equipment installed for the failed “top kill” effort two weeks ago to collect oil from the well. That oil would be siphoned up to a rig, the Q4000, that is at the site. The Q4000 is not equipped to separate gas and oil, however, so crews are hurriedly modifying it to do so. BP officials have said the system using the Q4000 could be ready by next weekend.
Then, 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…
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