BP Will Start Preparing Blowout Preventer on Macondo Well for Replacement
Admiral Thad Allen
Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg
Admiral Thad Allen, U.S. Coast Guard National Incident Commander.
Admiral Thad Allen, U.S. Coast Guard National Incident Commander. Photographer: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg
BP Plc will start the process of removing a key piece of safety equipment from its Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico today, National Incident Commander Thad Allen said.
BP may replace the blowout preventer as early as Aug. 31, Allen said during a conference call with reporters today. The company, based in London, was unable to fish out pieces of pipe stuck in the device yesterday, an effort that had delayed replacement of the blowout preventer.
“We’ve come to the conclusion that any more attempts at fishing are probably not going to result in success,” Allen said. “This is due to the apparent fragility of the pipe. It keeps breaking and falling off to the side.”
The U.S. Justice Department wants to examine the blowout preventer, a five-story stack of valves that is the last line of defense against a pressure surge of oil and natural gas, to look for clues to the cause of an April 20 rig explosion that killed 11 workers and resulted in the biggest U.S. offshore oil spill. The rig was leased to BP by Geneva-based Transocean Ltd.
The capping stack, which stopped the oil from flowing out of the well on July 15, may be removed on Aug. 30, Allen said. BP injected a 5,000 foot (1,524 meter) cement plug into the well earlier this month.
Ships to collect oil will be standing by in case of a problem, Allen said. “We don’t anticipate that, but we have them standing by in an abundance of caution,” he said.
Relief Well
The government is requiring BP to switch blowout preventers before it can proceed with a plan to use a relief well to permanently plug Macondo by injecting mud and cement from the bottom. Officials plan to resume drilling the relief well on Sept. 7 and it will take four days to intercept and cement Macondo, Allen said.
The process of lifting the blowout preventer from the seafloor could be delayed by bad weather or complications with its removal from the top of the well, Allen said. A portion of a 3,000-foot drill pipe was inside the blowout preventer when BP injected cement into the top of the well earlier this month, Allen said.
BP and U.S. officials want to avoid damaging cement seals inside the well by removing the blowout preventer and the pipe, which may be cemented to the well. They will first try to gently tug the blowout preventer free, Allen said. If it doesn’t come easily, they will open the valves that hold it down and lift it off the cemented pipe, which will be cut later.
Lifting the blowout preventer off the cemented drill pipe may risk damaging the safety device, Satish Nagarajaiah, a professor of mechanical and civil engineering at Rice University in Houston, said in an interview.
“They want to be cautious,” he said. “It is one of those things that is related to forensics now.”
To contact the reporters on this story: Mark Chediak in San Francisco at mchediak@bloomberg.net; Allison Bennett in New York at abennett23@bloomberg.net.
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