New Delay for BP Spill: Drilling of Relief Well Halted

(July 14) -- Fearing an undersea explosion, BP has announced two setbacks in the effort to stop its catastrophic oil spill, saying it has temporarily halted work on one relief well and delayed pressure tests on a tighter-fitting cap it hopes will stop the flow.

Work on the relief well has been suspended at nearly 16,000 feet down while the company does "further analysis" before it conducts integrity and pressure tests on the new containment cap installed over the weekend. The pressure tests have been delayed for up to two days. Work on the other relief well continues.

BP calls the relief wells, which are supposed to plug the leak with mud and cement, "the sole means to permanently seal and isolate the well."

Drilling on the first relief well began on May 4 and nearly two weeks later for the second. They were to be finished in August, but BP recently moved up its timeline to the end of July, although that was before the latest delay.

The pressure tests involve slowly shutting three giant valves on the cap, an 18-foot high, 150,000-pound stack of metal pipes and machinery lowered into place Monday. Pressure readings would then help engineers gauge how severely damaged the blown-out well is, and whether it is leaking in more than one place. They could also give the most precise estimate so far of how much oil is spewing from the seafloor.

But there are dangers. When all the valves are shut, engineers are expecting a spike in pressure that could potentially risk rupturing the whole well.

"Simply shutting the well in and hoping that pressure doesn't rise too much is like playing Russian roulette with five bullets in the gun," the Houston Chronicle quoted analysts with Tudor, Pickering, Holt & Co. Securities, who were speaking to investors.

BP said that the well's steel casing is probably strong enough to withstand the pressure, but that engineers will be at the ready to abort the tests immediately and open the valves if it looks as if they could explode.

"The test has been carefully designed to make sure we don't create a bad situation," BP Senior Vice President Kent Wells said in a telephone briefing with reporters Tuesday afternoon.

The delays come as crude continues to spew into the gulf, with 90.4 million to 178.6 million gallons already in the water by Tuesday night, according to federal estimates reported by several news agencies.

BP did not specify the exact reason for Tuesday's delay on the tests but said on its website that "additional analysis of the well testing procedure should be performed before starting the well integrity test." That analysis was taking place overnight and into today, it said. The decision to hold off on Tuesday's tests was made after a meeting with U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu and his team of scientific and industry experts, BP said.

The Obama administration has been careful to hold BP to task on safety measures and believes that lax safety standards in offshore drilling may have contributed to the April 20 explosion aboard the BP-leased Deepwater Horizon rig that unleashed the spill and killed 11 workers. To that end, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar issued a revised moratorium Monday on such drilling, after a federal judge overturned a previous ban.

The new ban was a topic of discussion Tuesday in the second day of talks by a presidential commission meeting in New Orleans to investigate the spill. Commission Co-Chairman William Reilly initially supported the moratorium but has now changed his mind after touring the region and talking with locals and oil company executives and workers. Reilly said Tuesday that he's now prepared to press President Barack Obama and Salazar to adopt new safety and environmental measures but lift the ban, The New York Times reported. The other co-chairman, Bob Graham, also said he thought the moratorium is a burden for the gulf region's economy.

In Louisiana alone, the offshore oil and natural gas drilling business generates $3 billion a year. Across the Gulf of Mexico, the industry provides tens of thousands of jobs.

Before Tuesday's delay of the well tests, BP engineers ran a seismic survey to map the seafloor, searching for underground pockets of gas or other geographical features that could affect pressure inside the well. But it's unclear what the results were, and whether they were the reason BP decided to postpone the tests.

"It's an incredibly big concern," Don Van Nieuwenhuise, director of Professional Geoscience Programs at the University of Houston, told The Associated Press. "They need to get a scan of where things are. That way, when they do pressure testing, they know to look out for ruptures or changes."

It's a painstaking technical process, for which many Gulf Coast residents have little patience.

"I don't know what's taking them so long. I just hope they take care of it," Lanette Eder, a school nutritionist on vacation in Florida, told the AP.