Category: BP
efforts to stop leak fail, meanwhile the slick spreads…
On Saturday, 29 May, BP conceded that their effort to stanch the flow of oil from the wreckage of the Deepwater Horizon using drilling mud, golf balls and other debris had failed. BP and the United States Coast Gaurd have also released their revised estimate of the volume of escaping oil to be somewhere between 500,000 and 1,000,000 gallons per day. This figure comes closer to the estimates that independent scientists have been suggesting since 27 April, when SkyTruth and Dr. Ian MacDonald of Florida State University, first announced an estimate of at least 1.1 million gallons and very possibly much more. Currently the drilling of relief wells, the only proven method of stopping an offshore blowout, begun in early May and not expected to be completed until August, is reported to be 6,000 feet into the rock.
Today is the 40th day of this crisis. Every day another million gallons, at least, erupts into the Gulf. By the latest satellite imagery, the slick appears to be well ‘entrained’ in the warm ocean current that flows out of the Gulf of Mexico and becomes the Gulf stream, moving up the East coast of the North America and eventually across the Atlantic to northern Europe.
so far so good… efforts to stop spewing well working…
It was reported this morning that the efforts of BP to stop the flow of oil and gas, estimated as high as 4 million gallons per day, into the Gulf of Mexico at the site of the wreck of the Deepwater Horizon are temporarily successful. The flow has been stopped while a permanent seal of cement is being readied.
“If this is true, all our troubles are over.” – William D’Arcy 1908
As coincidence would have it, 26 May could become a pair of bookend dates for BP (formerly British Petroleum, formerly the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC), formerly the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC), formerly the dream of William Knox D’Arcy, extraordinarily wealthy gold mine owner in England who managed to obtain exclusive oil exploration rights to most of Persia)
Tomorrow, 26 May 2010, BP engineers and technicians and laborers and shareholders will try to stop the oil that has been flowing for more than month from a blown out a well a mile beneath the sea.
The plan is to shoot a cementing mud down into the well (- a maneuver that BP is calling Top Kill. There doesn’t appear to be any reason for anyone else to call it that, although many do.) If BP’s CEO Tony Hayward, receives a phone call saying they’ve managed to stop the million or perhaps millions of gallons that currently gush daily, he might well say, “If this is true, all our troubles are over.”
Which would be ironic. For those were the words the above mentioned founder of APOC, Mr D’Arcy, said upon receiving a telegram from Persia, announcing that “oil spewed into the dawn sky,” on this date in 1908.
the information in this post is taken from the History of BP available at BP.com.
more BP history to come – highlights from between the bookends.
