HOUSTON, (Reuters) – BP Plc said an ambitious deep-sea operation to choke off a gushing oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico was proceeding as planned yesterday, while President Barack Obama cautioned Americans there was no guarantee it would work.
BP is under intense pressure from Obama to bring a swift end to the five-week-old leak that threatens an environmental catastrophe and a blow to Obama’s crisis-manager image.
Undersea robots were helping to inject heavy fluids and ultimately cement pumped down about a mile (1.6 km) to the sea-bed well, while BP chief executive Tony Hayward and U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu monitored operations together in Houston.
“The operation is proceeding as we planned it,” Hayward said in a media briefing four hours after launching the “top kill” strategy to stanch the leak.
“It will be another 24 hours before we know whether or not this has been successful,” he added.
The embattled CEO stood by BP’s 60-70 percent odds of success. But top kill, a routine procedure on the surface, has never been attempted at such depths, prompting one industry expert to put the odds of success at less than 50 percent.
“You have got some of the smartest guys in the business trying to figure this out, but it has never been done before,” David Pursell, partner at Houston investment bank Tudor, Pickering, Holt & Co, told Reuters Insider.
“I think the odds have to be 50 percent or less,” he added.
Obama said that if successful, BP’s plan to cap the well should greatly reduce or eliminate the flow of hundreds of thousands of gallons (liters) of crude billowing into the Gulf.
If it fails, “there are other approaches that may be viable,” he said on a trip to California.
Obama, who has told aides to “plug the damn hole,” will head to Louisiana tomorrow for the second time since the April 20 rig blast that killed 11 and unleashed the oil.
BP says the next approach would be to install a containment device over the broken blowout preventer, a structure at the top of the well on the ocean floor, to try to stop the oil flow. It would attempt this in the next three or four days.
It is still unclear how much oil is flowing from the well, but it is already shaping up to be the worst oil spill in U.S. history and a long-term threat to a rich ecosystem.
