BP Cutting Pipes to Contain Gulf Oil Leak
Last Updated 6:24 p.m. ET
Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen said that BP is in the middle of its first major pipe cut in the company's latest bid to contain the oil spewing into the Gulf of Mexico.
Allen, the national incident commander, said Tuesday that it could be as many as three days before oil can be contained and siphoned to the surface. BP has another major cut to do before a cap can be lowered onto the leak.
A saw blade mounted onto underwater robots could be seen going into a pipe in video from under the Gulf Tuesday.
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It's the company's latest attempt to contain the leak. The "top kill" procedure to plug the spill failed over the weekend, and the best chance to stop the gusher is now at least two months away.
BP's latest plan: Cut off the broken, leaking riser pipe; cap it; then siphon off the oil to containment ships.
BP said they have learned from the failures of their past efforts to halt the oil leak at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, and that this latest method could contain a majority of the oil - but it also risks releasing an even greater amount of crude into the Gulf's waters.
According to government estimates, the spill from the site of the destroyed Deepwater Horizon offshore rig has so far leaked between 20 million and 44 million gallons of oil.
Attorney General Eric Holder said Tuesday that federal authorities have opened criminal and civil investigations into the nation's worst oil spill, and BP lost billions in market value when shares dropped in the first trading day since the company failed yet again to plug the gusher.
The announcement came after Holder met in New Orleans with state and federal prosecutors to see if BP should face charges.
Late Tuesday afternoon, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour said oil is hitting the state for the first time.
Barbour said Tuesday that a two-mile long, three-feet wide strand of caramel-colored oil has been found on Petit Bois Island, a barrier island near the Mississippi-Alabama border. The discovery means Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi have all been hit by oil.
Also Tuesday, red-brown oil washed up on the east end of Alabama's Dauphin Island, according to Donald Williamson, the director of the state Department of Public Health. The appearance of oil prompted officials to close some state waters to fishing and post warnings urging beachgoers to stay out of the water.
And officials estimate tar balls and oil from a massive oil slick could hit Florida's pristine white beaches as early as Saturday.
Eric Smith, an associate director of the Tulane Energy Institute, said the new strategy had about a 50 to 70 percent chance to succeed. He likened it to trying to place a tiny cap on a fire hydrant.
"Will they have enough weight to overcome the force of the flow?" he said. "It could create a lot of turbulence, but I do think they'll have enough weight."
BP Chief Operating Officer Doug Suttles said there was no guarantee the cut-and-cap effort would work. He did say the company has learned from past efforts to contain the leak, which gives them a better shot at success.
"I'm very hopeful," Suttles said. "I think we'll find out over the next couple of days."
A previous attempt to use a containment dome failed when hydrates formed ice-like crystals inside, rendering it unusable at the depth of 5,000 feet.
"We learned a lot from the first time with the formation of these hydrates," Dudley told CBS' "Early Show" co-anchor Harry Smith. "This time it's a pipe within a pipe. We're going to pump warm sea water down the sides of it with a little methanol injected into it. We think we can overcome those hydrate problems."
Dudley said there was a greater chance of success with this operation than with the "top kill" procedure that was tried last week.
"This is a better chance, definitely better. We're not working with those high pressures and pumping that we weren't sure we were able to even connect up. The guys that are running the robots, this is something that they know how to do. The cutting is probably the critical piece. We may have to try a couple of blades to do it. But from an engineering sense, this is much more straightforward.
"And this is only the first step. Within a couple of weeks, we're going to take the same small city of pipes down there that we used to pump the heavy mud, connect it also to the well, reverse the flow out to create a second channel of oil and gas for the surface."
But a potential problem exists if the dome doesn't work: A clean cut on the riser pipe would mean even more oil coming out than before.
"Well, there will be a little bit more oil, somewhere between zero and 20 percent more," said Dudley.
"Well, 20 percent is not insignificant, if thousands and thousands of barrels of oil are pouring out of there," said Smith.
"I think you will see that these containment domes will work. We have four of them on the site, depending on how the cut is, to be able to lift it down by the end of the week," Dudley said."
The oil company also announced plans Monday to try attaching another pipe to a separate opening on the blowout preventer with some of the same equipment used to pump in mud during the top kill. The company also wants to build a new freestanding riser to carry oil toward the surface, which would give it more flexibility to disconnect and then reconnect containment pipes if a hurricane passed through.
Neither of those plans would start before mid-June and would supplement the cut-and-cap effort.
For the relief well to succeed, the bore hole must precisely intersect the damaged well, which experts have compared to hitting a target the size of a dinner plate more than two miles into the earth. If it misses, BP will have to back up its drill, plug the hole it just created, and try again.
"The probability of them hitting it on the very first shot is virtually nil," said David Rensink, incoming president of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, who spent most of his 39 years in the oil industry in offshore exploration. "If they get it on the first three or four shots they'd be very lucky."
The trial-and-error process could take weeks, but it will eventually work, scientists and BP said. Then engineers will then pump mud and cement through pipes to ultimately seal the well.
On the slim chance the relief well doesn't work, scientists weren't sure exactly how much - or how long - the oil would flow. The gusher would continue until the well bore hole collapsed or pressure in the reservoir dropped to a point where oil was no longer pushed to the surface, said Tad Patzek, chair of the Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering Department at the University of Texas-Austin.
The cleanup, relief wells and temporary fixes were being watched closely by President Barack Obama's administration.
After meeting Tuesday with the co-chairmen of an independent commission investigating the spill, Mr. Obama said that America "will bring those responsible to justice" if crimes were committed that led to the oil leak in the Gulf.
President Obama's energy czar, Carol Browner, said she doesn't want to guess the prospects for success on BP's containment cap.
Interviewed Tuesday on ABC's "Good Morning America," Browner said, "I don't want to put odds on it. ... We want to get this thing contained."
The failure of the "Top Kill" procedure sent BP PLC shares plunging Tuesday, losing 15 percent in early afternoon trading on the London Stock Exchange. , wiping some $63 billion off BP's value, since the explosion at the Deepwater Horizon oil rig six weeks ago.
At a National Guard staging area in southern Plaquemines Parish, a steady line of helicopters swept across the sky Tuesday to scoop up massive sand bags being used to fill gaps in offshore barrier islands. Soldiers on the ground fastened the bags to cables hanging from the hovering aircraft.
The operation, designed to keep oil from the Deepwater Horizon from making its way past the islands and into marshes, is expected to continue for several days, said Guard spokesman Col. Mike DeVille.
Filling the gaps in the islands "creates, much like booming, another layer of protection for the marshes," Deville said.
State, local and federal officials were to meet later Tuesday on a plan to dredge sand for protective berms along the coast.
