NEW ORLEANS—Workers at the BP oil spill site in the Gulf of Mexico will begin a complicated operation this weekend that they hope will let them contain most of the oil gushing from the seafloor.
But for possibly a couple of days, oil will flow unimpeded into the sea.
National Incident Commander Thad Allen said Friday that undersea robots will begin removing a cap mounted over the jagged remnants of the well head Saturday.
They plan to put a new containment cap that will form a better seal to allow more of the oil to be collected and sent up to four ships on the surface for collection or burning.
The time from beginning the removal of the old cap to attaching the new cap will take about three to four days.
“Technically it’s pretty achievable,” Allen said. He said if the new cap can’t be placed on the well, the old cap will be put back and there are multiple backup caps available in case any one cap fails.
If all goes according to plan, the combination of the cap and the new vessel could collect all the leaking oil by Monday, stopping it from escaping into the Gulf of Mexico for the first time since April 20.
“I use the word ‘contained,’ ” Allen said. “ ‘Stop’ is when we put the plug in down below.”
Work continues on what officials hope will be the final plugging of the well — drilling on two relief wells through which mud and cement will be pumped to stop the leak once and for all. That’s expected to happen sometime in mid-August.
The new, tighter cap should be in place early Monday. Allen said the ship Helix Producer, which is to be hooked to a different part of the leaking well — lower than the new cap — will start collecting oil Sunday and be fully operational Tuesday. He has previously said that the full system should be able to collect 9.5 million litres to 12.7 million litres a day.
The schedule for both efforts has been accelerated to take advantage of what could be a rare window of good weather. The hookup of the Helix Producer was delayed this week by poor weather. But an unexpected break in weather patterns creating choppy seas provides a window of a week or so with waves of less than 60 centimetres.
“Everybody agrees we got the weather to do what we need,” he said.
Containing the leak is not the same as stopping the environmental catastrophe that began April 20 when the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded, killing 11 workers.
The relief wells remain the best option for a final plug to the leak, at which point cleanup and restoration become the main focus.
Though officials said the first relief well could be finished by the end of July, weeks ahead of schedule, they are quick to point out that such an optimistic timetable would require ideal conditions every step of the way.
That is something that has rarely happened since the leak began.
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