GoM Oil Spill-The Seaward Catastrophe!

"THE WORST U.S OFF-SHORE OIL RIG SPILL IN DECADES"

MACONDO BLOWOUT

The oil spill due to the explosion and sinking of an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico (GoM) earlier this year is becoming more and more disastrous as the free flow of the massive quantity of oil continues at a fast pace and efforts at halting the flow of the leaking oil are being met with difficulties. This catastrophe has been following an operation that has been plagued with setbacks for more than two months.

The Explosion:

One of the nation's deadliest offshore drilling incidents of the past half-century started when on Tuesday, April 20, an explosion stumbled upon the Transocean's Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, 130 miles southeast of New Orleans. A total of 11 rig workers were initially considered missing. However, search efforts were called off after several days, and the missing crews are all assumed to have died in the fire.

Equipment Owning Companies:

Swiss-based Transocean owned the rig and the blowout-prevention safety device. The blowout preventer was made by Houston-based Cameron. Halliburton also did a cementing operation on the rig 20 hours before the incident. The over-all operation of off-shore drilling was, however, carried out by the British Supermajor. The US government quickly issued a temporary halt on "new" drilling and called for rig safety inspections to try to better gauge these concerns for other rigs in the GOM as it was concerned about safety on other drilling rigs in the Gulf.

DEEPWATER HORIZON RIG BEFORE THE EXPLOSION

The Escalating leakage of oil:

Operating alongside the U.S. Coast Guard and the Minerals Management Service, BP launched a comprehensive oil spill response plan. The company has dedicated millions of dollars per day to construction vessels, oil spill booms, ROVs, personnel, and three deepwater drilling rigs working to stop the flow of oil from the Macondo well.

The initial oil slick came from the oil that was already aboard the rig that sank. Officials are not certain how much of the estimated 700,000 gallons (approximately 16,700 barrels) on the rig burned up in the fire that raged before the rig sank. The oil slick has grown in size since the initial accident as the oil spreads across the surface of the ocean. The lighter the oil is, the faster it can spread — so gasoline would spread faster than thicker, black oils, such as the crude oil from the Deepwater Horizon. But even heavy oil can spread quickly in a major spill, spreading out as thin as a layer of paint on a wall in just a few hours.

Remedies and Solutions:

The planned permanent solution for the BP Macondo spill in the Gulf of Mexico is the killing of the well by drilling a relief well to intersect the blowout wellbore, enabling the placement of high density mud and eventually cement but given the risky and uncertain nature of the kill process and the long time lag in getting more wells drilled if the first two are unsuccessful, this process has its own array of drawbacks.

It was also thought that robots could the rescue in the Gulf of Mexico--or at least that's what British oil giant BP hoped to provide the trick of a savior process.

REMOTELY OPERATED VEHICLE (ROV) 

The agencies have deployed four remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) to the wellhead about 5,000 feet below the ocean surface.

They are monitoring the leak, which was discovered Saturday, as well as trying to activate the blowout preventer, a 50-foot-tall, 450-ton mass of valves that can cap the wellhead and stop the oil flow.

Two systems continue to collect oil and gas flowing from the Macondo well and transport them to vessels on the surface.

The first is the lower marine riser package (LMRP) containment cap located on top of the Deepwater Horizon’s failed blow-out preventer (BOP). This system, which was installed on June 3, takes oil and gas to the Discoverer Enterprise. A second system, which started on June 16, is connected directly to the BOP and carries oil and gas through a manifold and hoses to the Q4000 vessel on the surface. The Q4000 uses a specialised clean-burning system to flare both oil and gas captured by this second system. The total volume of oil recovered from both the LMRP containment cap system and the Q4000 since they became operational is approximately 249,500 barrels.

July. 
 

Relief Wells:

Work on the first relief well, which started May 2, continues and has currently reached a measured depth of 15,936 feet. The second relief well, which started May 16, is at a measured depth of 10,000 feet. Both wells are still estimated to take approximately three months to complete from commencement of drilling.

Claims:

To date, over 65,000 claims have been submitted and more than 32,000 payments have been made, totalling over $105 million.

BP Expenditure:
The cost of the response to date amounts to approximately $2.0 billion, including the cost of the spill response, containment, relief well drilling, grants to the Gulf states, claims paid, and federal costs. On June 16, BP announced an agreed package of measures, including the creation of a $20 billion fund to satisfy certain obligations arising from the oil and gas spill.

Environment Sustainability:

It is a well-known fact that how BP copes with the current crisis will affect the future of offshore oil exploration. As BP continues to scramble for a solution to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, analysts say the way the company conducts itself in the coming weeks will steer the future of US offshore drilling.  The long-term consequences to BP’s brand value in the US may come down to how much compassion the company offers those affected by the spill, while still guarding its brand against lawsuits. 

Larry Wall from the Louisiana Mid-Continent Oil and Gas Association does not expect a consumer revolt against BP, but mostly because the company’s brand is not especially high-profile. 

“After the Exxon spill in 1989 there was an Exxon station every four miles in the US. BP doesn’t have that many branded outlets in the US,” he says. “This time the issue is going to be if the investors stay with BP during this downturn, or if they bail.” 

The fallout from this spill is more likely to taint the reputation of the oil business as a whole, rather than just BP, because the industry’s main goal is to expand offshore drilling. That has been shut down for now by the US federal government. And the whole industry should be concerned about next year if there is movement on new legislation to apply an oil processing tax for offshore oil.