BP Robots to Cut Damaged Pipe; Oil Dispersant Maker Says ‘We Have Nothing to Hide’; Oil Déjà Vu
by ilene - May 31st, 2010 1:44 am
BP Robots to Cut Damaged Pipe; Oil Dispersant Maker Says ‘We Have Nothing to Hide’; Oil Déjà Vu
Courtesy of Mish
With Top Kill officially dead, BP has moved on to an option involving underwater robots to cut the pipe, followed by another funneling scheme.
Please consider BP’s Robots to Begin Next Attempt to Curb Record Oil Spill
BP Plc will use undersea robots to begin cutting damaged pipe from its leaking oil well off Louisiana as early as today, risking temporarily increasing the flow as it makes another attempt to end the largest oil spill in U.S. history.
“BP and the government have no choice but to proceed,” Jason Kenney, an Edinburgh-based analyst for ING Commercial Banking, who rates the shares a “buy” and owns none, said yesterday in an interview. “This is war. As in all wars, it rarely goes smooth.”
Using remote-controlled vehicles at the mile-deep well, BP plans to shear away most of the damaged pipe that once rose from the well to the Deepwater Horizon. Then it will make a more precise cut with a diamond-toothed band saw, BP Managing Director Robert Dudley said in television interviews yesterday.
That will make a clean junction for a gasket-lined cap intended to catch most of the oil and route it to the surface through a pipe, Dudley said.
The new funnel may enable BP to capture as much as 90 percent of the oil and gas escaping from the well, Dudley said on “Face the Nation.” BP is also preparing a second blowout preventer that may be bolted on in place of the cap and used to try again to stop all leakage, he said.
The spill may cost BP $22 billion should it continue through early August, when the company expects to plug the leak with one of the relief wells, Kenney, the ING analyst, said yesterday. That compared with his estimate of $5.3 billion had the latest attempt to plug the well worked.
BP fell 5 percent to 494.8 pence in London trading on May 28 and has lost 25 percent of its market value since the blast.
Well Could Leak Until August
An aide to Obama says US Spill could last until August.
Oil could gush into the Gulf of Mexico from the BP BP.L. rig until August and the U.S. government is "preparing for