2nd UPDATE: US Govt: Preparations To Kill Gulf Oil Leak Resume

25th Jul 2010 00:16

(Updates with comments from the federal government's onsite response coordinator.) By Mark Long Of DOW JONES NEWSWIRES Preparations to finally kill the Deepwater Horizon oil leak are resuming as rigs and other vessels returned to the scene after fleeing ahead a tropical storm, the top U.S. official overseeing recovery efforts said Sunday. Work on a relief well and a separate operation to plug BP PLC's (BP, BP.LN) broken Macondo well was set back by at least a week by the evacuation ahead of Tropical Storm Bonnie, which disintegrated as it passed over the Gulf and approached shore, Ret. Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen said during a teleconference. Allen said Transocean Ltd.'s (RIG) Development Driller III rig, which arrived back at the site on Saturday, is expected to be relatched onto the relief well a mile below the sea's surface by midnight. In coming days, crews will resume running liner into the well bore, which will then be cemented in place. At the same time, preparations will be completed to allow another vessel, the Q4000, to begin pumping heavy drilling mud down to plug the broken well, an operation called a "static kill." "Generally the next week will be preps, making sure everything's ready to go and getting the liner run, and then the week of the first of August is when we'll attempt to do the static kill...," Allen said, adding the "bottom kill," whereby the breached well will be permanently plugged via the relief well, will be finished after that. While the relief well and the static-kill operation are the top priorities, Allen said crews on other vessels will resume work on a second, back-up relief well, and on completing a containment system that could bring up to 80,000 barrels of oil a day to ships on the surface. "We need to have backups for all these systems." Allen spoke amid a flurry of media reports saying BP's board could approve the departure of the British oil giant's embattled chief executive, Tony Hayward, on Monday. People familiar with the matter told The Wall Street Journal that managing director Bob Dudley, an American who's overseeing the company's spill-recovery effort, is set to be named as Hayward's successor. "I've got no knowledge of the inner workings of BP," Allen said. "I have no knowledge of any personnel changes that are going on," he said, adding he was concentrating on his role coordinating the response to the spill. Coast Guard Rear Adm. Paul Zunkunft, the federal government's onsite response coordinator, said late Sunday afternoon that he'd spent six hours flying over a broad expanse of the spill zone and saw very little heavy oil on the surface. "What I've seen is very light concentrations of oil," Zunkunft said during a teleconference. He added there was no observable oil in Lake Pontchartrain, Lake Borgne, around the Chandeleur Islands or anywhere in that area just to the east and northeast of the Mississippi River Delta. The only patch of heavier oil he observed was about 90 miles from the Macondo well site, 12 miles south of Grand Isle, La. Zunkunft said the dissipation of the oil had more to do with the natural breakdown of the light crude that gushed from the well than any effect from Bonnie, which didn't generate very high seas or strong winds. He added that clean-up and recovery efforts would all be back up and running by Monday. "There was some concern that with this approaching storm, we were standing down but wouldn't stand back up those resources," he said. "I just want to make it perfectly clear, we're back to 100% tomorrow." Oil companies proceeded to restore oil and gas production shut in as a precaution ahead of the storm. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement said Sunday that about 46.65%, or 746,338 barrels a day of oil production in the Gulf remained shut in, down from more than 50% on Saturday. About 22% of the natural gas usually produced in the Gulf, or 1.41 bcf, remained shut in, down from 23.53% on Saturday. -By Mark Long, Dow Jones Newswires; 212-416-2145; [email protected] (Angel Gonzalez in Houston contributed to this article.) (END) Dow Jones Newswires July 25, 2010 19:16 ET (23:16 GMT)