Ice crystals in containment chamber force delay
Leak unlikely to hurt state economy — for now
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Ice crystals that formed in a giant concrete and steel containment chamber lowered into the Gulf of Mexico to trap and transport leaking oil to the surface, clogged up the hole at the top Friday night, halting the main operation underway, a BP official said Saturday.
Although it’s easy to remove the slush-like crystals that clogged up the hole at the top of the chamber, BP officials have stopped the operation to figure out how to prevent the crystals from forming again, Chief Operating Officer Doug Suttles said at a news conference.
When asked if the almost 100-ton containment chamber option had failed, Suttles said he wouldn’t put it that way.
“I wouldn’t say it failed yet. What I would say is what we tried last night didn’t work,” Suttles said.
BP and federal officials are trying to contain a Gulf of Mexico oil leak that is spewing about 210,000 gallons of oil a day from a BP-leased well 5,000 feet below the surface.
The oil is pouring from the damaged riser pipe that was connected to the Transocean Deepwater Horizon oil rig, which exploded April 20, killing 11 workers. The rig sank two days later.
When the rig toppled, the 5,000-foot riser broke away from the rig and is now on the ocean floor. BP has said about 85 percent of the oil is coming from that leak.
Suttles said it will take about 48 hours to solve the ice crystal problem before chamber operations can resume sometime early next week.
Suttles said officials may have to transfer some kind of heat or possibly methanol to the chamber to prevent the crystals from reforming.
Today, the chamber is sitting on the sea floor about 220 yards to the side of the site of the leak, Suttles said. The chamber was placed over the site Friday night but had to be moved after detection of the ice crystals.
Under the chamber plan, BP is building riser pipe that will connect to the top of the chamber to a tanker on the Gulf surface. The oil, along with seawater and natural gas, will flow up the pipe to the tanker ship.
Suttles said the mixture of oil, natural gas, pressure and cold water is what forms the ice crystals.
Suttles said officials thought the crystals would have formed later, during the piping process and not in the early stages of the plan. [more]
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