New Leak Feeds Growing Louisiana Oil Spill

BATON ROUGE, La. (April 29) -- With oil heading toward the fragile shoreline, an oil company executive said today it could take 90 days to plug the leaks spewing up to 5,000 barrels of crude a day from the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico.

The latest estimate for the leak is five times worse than previously thought, and came after the discovery of a new fissure from a pipe once sealed to a rig that exploded and sank last week, leaving 11 workers dead.

"Like everybody, what we want to do is get this oil leak stopped as quick as we can," Doug Suttles, a BP chief operating officer, said on NBC's "Today" this morning. "If we have to use the most significant technique, which is drill a relief well, which we'll actually start -- the rig's on site now -- that could take 90 days. So it's somewhere between today and 90 days. I can tell you we'll do everything, absolutely everything, to make that happen as soon as possible."

On Wednesday, Coast Guard Rear Adm. Mary Landry announced that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration now estimates that 5,000 barrels of oil, or 210,000 gallons, could be flowing from the pipe daily -- up from the previous estimate of 1,000 barrels per day, or 42,000 gallons.

Both Landry and Suttles, whose company operated the drilling on the rig, stressed that it's difficult to estimate how much oil is leaking from the well, which emanates from the seabed nearly a mile below the surface of the gulf.

Suttles said he believed the leak was newly formed, not simply a new discovery. He did not elaborate on how a new leak would have formed.

"I'm very confident that this is a new leak, something that was not there earlier this afternoon," he told reporters late Wednesday.

Landry said President Barack Obama has been briefed on the new development.

She urged BP to work with the Department of Defense, "to use technologies that may surpass those of the private sector." She added that BP also needs to increase its efforts to contain the spill -- which has a circumference of 600 miles -- and fix the leaking pipe.

Suttles said BP has been spending $6 million per day on the cleanup and efforts to plug the leaking pipe, which was damaged in the April 20 explosion of a giant drilling platform.

He welcomed an offer of help from the Pentagon. "We'll take help from anyone," he told NBC today. "We're working with the experts across the industry. Just yesterday, we got a new idea from another oil and gas company. We're applying absolutely the best science we know."

The Coast Guard began burning a portion of the spill Wednesday in an attempt to stop it from reaching sensitive environmental areas and the Louisiana shoreline. The slick was about 16 miles from Venice, La.

The test burn began about 5 p.m. CDT and Landry said it was successful.

The "controlled burn" is designed to "minimize environmental risks by removing large quantities of oil" on the surface of the gulf, without affecting populated areas on shore, a Coast Guard statement said.

Louisiana state officials have ordered containment booms to be situated along coastal island refuges to collect oil in case the spill continues heading toward land.

Wind and ocean current forecasts say the spill will not hit land before Friday, said Charlie Henry, an environmental scientist with NOAA. Louisiana barrier islands around the mouth of the Mississippi River are the areas most at risk of getting hit by the oil slick, Henry said.

Henry said a controlled burn of the spill could burn up to 99 percent of oil in selected areas, while producing a "black plume" of smoke that would not be visible from shore. He said a burn is an effective method that has been used to control previous oil spills in marshy areas of south Louisiana, though never offshore.

The spill put scores of wildlife species at risk, including the gulf's valuable stocks of shrimp, crabs, oysters and other seafood, plus shorebirds including pelicans, terns and sandpipers. Commercial fishing in Louisiana is a $2.6 billion-a-year industry that supplies up to 25 percent of the seafood to states outside Alaska and Hawaii.

Eric Smith, associate director of Tulane University's Energy Institute, said a controlled burn is a normal response to such a spill, though he wondered if the oil on the water was too diluted to be burned off in sufficient quantity.

"I guess the biggest issue would be whether the material has enough hydrocarbons to burn," Smith told AOL News. "When you burn oil or gas, you have to get the right mixture of oil and air to get combustion."

In a burn, a portion of the oil will be moved into a fire-resistant boom about 500 feet long, the Coast Guard said. The oil will then be towed to a more remote area, ignited and burned in a controlled manner.

"Small, controlled burns of several thousand gallons of oil will last about an hour each," the Coast Guard statement said. The burning is expected to constitute a small part of the cleanup; most of the efforts are focused on skimming off the surface and dispersing oil with chemicals, the Coast Guard said.

Both Congress and the Obama administration have launched investigations of the explosion. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar say they will devote every available resource to the inquiry.

And members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee asked BP and Transocean Ltd., the ruined rig's owner, for documents about what the companies knew about the risks of drilling at the site and the adequacy of their response plans, The Associated Press reported.

BP is continuing efforts to patch the pipe on the seafloor, using robotic submarines -- an effort that has failed over the past three days, Suttles said. The relief well would burrow 18,000 feet into the earth and intersect with the leaking well and divert the oil to containers aboard a platform on the water's surface.

Suttles said BP has finished construction of a large container designed to be lowered over the leaking pipe, then used to funnel the oil to a vessel on the water's surface. That vessel, which has arrived at the site of the leak, has the capacity to collect 20,000 barrels of oil per day, he said. Suttles said that operation will begin in two weeks at the earliest.