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• Cap placed on Deepwater Horizon wellhead
• Obama postpones trip to Australia and Indonesia to visit region

President Barack Obama on a visit to the Louisiana coast last month. He will be back in the region today. Photograph: Larry Downing/Reuters

BP has managed to place a cap on the shattered end of the deepwater wellhead in the Gulf of Mexico but it will be several hours until engineers will know how successful this latest attempt to halt the worst oil spill in US history has been.

The oil giant is hoping for some good news as president Barack Obamais due in the region later today on his third visit since the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded, having postponed his scheduled trip to Australiaand Indonesia for the second time in as many months.

News that BP engineers have successfully manoeuvred a cap into position comes as the oil giant’s embattled chief executive Tony Hayward prepares to update investors on the potential financial impact of the disaster this afternoon. He is expected to ignore calls from Washington to put the firm’s payments to shareholders on hold while the full cost of the oil spill is calculated and pledge to retain the company’s dividends payments, worth more than $10bn (£6.8bn).

Senators Charles Schumer and Ron Wyden sent a letter to Hayward earlier this week demanding that payments to investors be halted during the clean-up. The White House has already sent a preliminary bill for $69m to BP and “other responsible parties” but that is likely to be a very small fraction of the final cost.

Temporary fix

Overnight the US coastguard gave an update on moves to stem the flow of oil into the sea. “The placement of the containment cap is another positive development in BP’s most recent attempt to contain the leak, however, it will be some time before we can confirm that this method will work and to what extent it will mitigate the release of oil into the environment,” said Admiral Thad Allen. “Even if successful, this is only a temporary and partial fix and we must continue our aggressive response operations at the source, on the surface and along the Gulf’s precious coastline.”

The placement of the cap follows work on Thursday which saw BP’s robot submarines cut away the well pipe after two days of trying. BP hopes to be able to use the cap to siphon off some of the escaping oil and pump it into collection ships on the surface 1.6km above the shattered well. Oil experts have warned, though, that the cap will not be able to capture all the oil gushing from the shattered well.

Hayward said that the next 12 to 24 hours will determine whether the capping operation will succeed.

“It’s an important milestone,” he said at a briefing in Houston overnight. “This is simply the beginning.”

Speaking to US TV networks today, chief operating officer Doug Suttles said he hoped that the cap could capture at least 90% of the oil.

But BP does not expect to completely halt the escape of 19,000 barrels of oil a day until August, when it hopes to have completed two relief wells.

Shares in BP rose as much as 4% today to 450p, making it the biggest riser on the FTSE 100.

Obama telephoned Australia’s prime minister Kevin Rudd and Indonesia’s president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono to express his “deep regret” over the cancellation of his trip, during which he would have addressed a joint sitting of the Australian parliament. Obama first planned to visit the region in March, but had to cancel to help push his healthcare bill through Congress.

Obama says flow is ‘as enraging as it is heartbreaking’ after ‘top kill’ fails

Win McNamee / Getty Images

The Discoverer Enterprise drillship sits above the disaster site on Saturday. BP’s strategies for trying to stop the Gulf spill are being deployed from the ship.

ROBERT, La. – The most ambitious bid yet to stop the worst oil spill in U.S. history ended in failure Saturday after BP was unable to overwhelm the gusher of crude with heavy fluids and junk. President Obama called the setback “as enraging as it is heartbreaking.”

The oil giant immediately began readying its next attempted fix, using robot submarines to cut the pipe that’s gushing the oil and cap it with funnel-like device, but the only guaranteed solution remains more than two months away.

The company determined the “top kill” had failed after it spent three days pumping heavy drilling mud into the crippled well 5,000 feet underwater. It’s the latest in a series of failures to stop the crude that’s fouling marshland and beaches, as estimates of how much oil is leaking grow more dire

The spill is the worst in U.S. history — exceeding even the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster — and has dumped between 18 million and 40 million gallons into the Gulf, according to government estimates.

“This scares everybody, the fact that we can’t make this well stop flowing, the fact that we haven’t succeeded so far,” BP PLC Chief Operating Officer Doug Suttles said Saturday. “Many of the things we’re trying have been done on the surface before, but have never been tried at 5,000 feet.”

‘Enraging as it is heartbreaking’
Frustration has grown as drifting oil closes beaches and washes up in sensitive marshland. The damage is underscored by images of pelicans and their eggs coated in oil. Below the surface, oyster beds and shrimp nurseries face certain death. Fishermen complain there’s no end in sight to the catastrophe that’s keeping their boats idle.

News that the top kill fell short drew a sharply worded response from President Barack Obama, a day after he visited the Gulf Coast to see the damage firsthand.

“It is as enraging as it is heartbreaking, and we will not relent until this leak is contained, until the waters and shores are cleaned up, and until the people unjustly victimized by this manmade disaster are made whole,” Obama said Saturday.

In the days after the spill, BP was unable to use robot submarines to close valves on the massive blowout preventer atop the damaged well, then two weeks later ice-like crystals clogged a 100-ton box the company tried placing over the leak. Earlier this week, engineers removed a mile-long siphon tube after it sucked up a disappointing 900,000 gallons of oil from the gusher.

In the latest try, BP engineers pumped more than 1.2 million gallons of heavy drilling mud into the well and also shot in assorted junk, including metal pieces and rubber balls.

The hope was that the mud force-fed into the well would overwhelm the upward flow of oil and natural gas. But Suttles said most of the mud escaped out of the damaged pipe that’s leaking the oil, called a riser.

‘Can’t guarantee success’
Suttles said BP is already preparing for the next attempt to stop the leak that began after the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded in April, killing 11 people.

The company plans to use robot submarines to cut off the damaged riser, and then try to cap it with a containment valve. The effort is expected to take between four and seven days

“We’re confident the job will work but obviously we can’t guarantee success,” Suttles said of the new plan, declining to handicap the likelihood it will work.

He said that cutting off the damaged riser isn’t expected to cause the flow rate of leaking oil to increase significantly.

The permanent solution to the leak, a relief well currently being drilled, won’t be ready until August, BP says.

Experts have said that a bend in the damaged riser likely was restricting the flow of oil somewhat, so slicing it off and installing a new containment valve is risky.

“If they can’t get that valve on, things will get much worse,” said Philip W. Johnson, an engineering professor at the University of Alabama.

Johnson said he thinks BP can succeed with the valve, but added: “It’s a scary proposition.”

News photographers and TV camera crews are claiming that they are being prevented from reporting on the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

They complain that US federal and local officials, including coast guards, are blocking access to beaches where the effects of the spill are most visible.

A CBS TV crew was threatened with arrest when attempting to film an oil-covered beach last week. On Saturday, reporter Mac McClellandwas blocked by police from visiting an island in Louisiana.

On Tuesday, a photographer with the New Orleans Times-Picayunewas prevented from flying over the ocean after the plane company was issued with a temporary flight restriction after BP officials learned that a member of the press would be on board.

The US coast guard insists that its staff and BP have gone to great lengths to accommodate journalists. A coast guard spokesman said: “Roughly 400 members of the media have been given tours of the spill on either BP-contracted aircraft or coast guard helicopters.”

He defended flight restrictions as “a necessary safety precaution”. Private aircraft must get permission from BP’s command center to fly over a huge portion of the gulf.

Reporters and photographers view BP’s influence as unhelpful. They are escorted by BP officials on BP-contracted boats and aircraft. So the company is able to determine what reporters see and when they see it.

Associated Press photographer Gerald Herbert says access has been hit or miss, and that there have been instances when it’s obvious members of the press are being targeted.

Desperate times call for desperate measures. In the case of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, that means hair bombs and junk shots.

San Francisco-based non-profit organisation Matter of Trust has led an effort to stuff pet fur and human hair clippings into nylon stockings to help mop up the mess.

Meanwhile, BP – the company ultimately responsible for the mess – is injecting scraps of rubber tyres, golf balls and other debris into valves on the sea floor that have thus far failed to cap the gusher. Though company officials claim otherwise, the plan smacks of a last-ditch act of desperation by oilmen who failed to prepare for the worst-case scenario.

Last ditch? Not quite. There have been far more extreme responses to human-made and natural disasters in the past.

1. Nuke it To cap oil well blowouts, the Soviet Union several times resorted to using nuclear weapons. The USSR carried out at least five controlled nuclear blasts between 1966 and 1981 to extinguish well fires and bury the leaks in a gigantic pile of rubble. The first blast, a 30-kiloton bomb detonated 6 kilometres underground in southern Uzbekistan, was roughly one-and-a-half times the size of the atomic bomb exploded over Hiroshima, Japan, in world war

 2. Of the five known blasts, all but one succeeded in capping the uncontrolled well. 2. Burn, bomb, napalm When one of the first supertankers, the Torrey Canyon, ran aground off Cornwall, UK, in 1967, government officials set the ship ablaze as a method of containment. The Royal Navy then dropped 42 bombs on the ship. When that failed to sink it, the Royal Air Force dropped cans of aviation fuel on the wreck. High tides soon put out the blaze, so the armed forces followed up with a napalm attack before the ship eventually sank.

3. Plug it Indonesia’s National Mudflow Mitigation Team dropped thousands of concrete balls into a mud volcano’s steaming vent near Sidoarjo on the island of Java in early 2007 in an attempt to stop mud flows that had displaced thousands of people. There is an ongoing debate over whether the mud flows were triggered by an earthquake or by drilling for a gas exploration well. The concrete balls failed to stop the flow and the approach was abandoned after several months.

 4. Re-route it When lava threatens to take out a town, governments have tried all sorts of diversionary tactics. Hawaii, Italy, Iceland and Japan have built barriers, dug dykes and poured cold water on the pyroclastic flows. In most cases the diversions offer only a brief reprieve before the lava continues on its original path. A notable success was achieved, however, when Italian authorities blasted mount Etna’s flow with TNT in the early 1990s. The explosion destroyed a hardened lava tube and redirected the flow, saving the town of Zafferana.

5. Move it Lanzhou, a Chinese industrial city in a valley surrounded by mountains, routinely ranks as one of the world’s most polluted cities. Government officials recently tried to clear the air by removing a mountain on the east side of the town. It wasn’t until they had already carted away the top half of the mountain that the group realised their efforts would have little effect on the city’s air quality.

Article by Phil MacKenna, courtesy of New Scientist

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18915-oil-spills-what-to-do-when-all-else-fails.html

A POTENTIAL “catastrophe” for wildlife looms after the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, experts warned yesterday, as more than 300 birds were found dead on US beaches.

The disaster threatens to eclipse the Exxon Valdez spillage in Alaska in 1982, which killed thousands of birds, fish and mammals.

Six million gallons of oil have already gushed from a BP rig into the sea in the latest disaster and the slicks have now reached sensitive marshlands.

Environmentalists have collected 316 seabirds from the coast in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida and picked up 10 others which later died or were put down.

More than 200 turtles and 19 dolphins have also died since the Deepwater Horizon rig blew up and collapsed more than a month ago.

Jay Holcomb, who directs a wildlife rescue centre in Louisiana, said: “The potential for this being catastrophic is right there because there’s a massive amount of oil in the water, and it’s still pouring out.

“There’s a lot of nesting birds and a lot of birds using the coast.”

In the past five weeks, just 31 birds have been found alive after coming into contact with the slick, with diving birds such as pelicans suffering most.

The oil smothers their feathers, leaving them unable to fly.

Songbirds and other land species were also at risk as the slick spread ashore and into sensitive marshlands. The blown-out rig has been pumping 5,000 barrels into the sea every day since the explosion on April 20, which killed 11 workers.

Transocean, which owns the rig, paid tribute to them at a memorial service yesterday

Oil giant BP, which owns the drilling licence, was today due to launch a fresh bid to stem the flow of oil after all other attempts, including an underwater robot, failed to stop it.

The new technique, called “top kill”, has never been tested 5,000ft underwater. It involves using heavy mud and cement to fill in the well.BP’s chief executive Tony Hayward gave the method a 60 to 70 per cent chance of success but said engineers were working on other solutions, including clogging up the well with assorted rubbish.

The only certain permanent solution is a pair of relief wells which crews have already started drilling – but the task could take at least two months. The company has so far spent more than £500million trying to contain and halt the spill.

US authorities have warned BP it faces heavy fines for the “massive environmental mess”.

The disaster has wiped around 25 per cent – almost £35billion – off the BP share price.

And legal experts in the US have warned that a criminal investigation could be launched just as it was after the Exxon Valdez spill.

Mr Hayward said: “We are going to do everything in our power to prevent any more oil from coming ashore, and we will clean every last drop up.”

He blamed the rig disaster on “a complex accident, caused by an unprecedented combination of failures.” He said: “A number of companies are involved, including BP, and it is simply too early and not up to us to say who is at fault.”

Singapore was also facing a clean-up operation yesterday after a tanker spilt 18,000 barrels of crude oil into the sea following a collision.

By Greg Bluestein and Matthew Brown

Associated Press

BARATARIA BAY, La. – As officials approached a coastal marsh Sunday to survey damage caused by the oil spill, some brown pelicans couldn’t fly away. All they could do was hobble.

Several pelicans were coated in oil on Barataria Bay off Louisiana, their usually brown and white feathers now jet black. Pelican eggs were glazed with rust-colored gunk. New hatchlings and nests were also coated with crude.

It is unclear if the area can even be cleaned, or if the birds can be saved. It is also unknown how much of the Gulf Coast will end up looking the same way because of a well that has spewed untold millions of gallons of oil since an offshore rig exploded more than a month ago.

“As we talk, a total of more than 65 miles of our shoreline now has been oiled,” said Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, who announced new efforts to keep the spill from spreading.

A mile-long tube operating for about a week has siphoned off more than half a million gallons, but it began sucking up oil at a slower rate over the weekend. Even at its best, the effort did not capture all the oil leaking, and the next attempt to stanch the flow will not be put into action until Tuesday at the earliest.

With oil pushing at least 12 miles into Louisiana’s marshes and two major pelican rookeries now coated in crude, Jindal said the state had begun work on a chain of berms, reinforced with containment booms, that would skirt the coastline.

Jindal, who visited one of the affected nesting grounds Sunday, said the berms would close the door on oil still pouring from a mile-deep gusher about 50 miles out. The berms would be made with sandbags and sand hauled in; the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers also is considering a broader plan that would use dredging to build sand berms across more of the barrier islands.

At least six million gallons of crude have spewed into the gulf, though some scientists have said they believe the spill already surpasses the 11-million-gallon 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill off Alaska as the worst in U.S. history.

Obama administration officials continued defending their response while criticizing that of BP P.L.C., which leased the rig and is responsible for the cleanup. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said he was “not completely” confident that BP knows what it is doing.

“If we find they’re not doing what they’re supposed to be doing, we’ll push them out of the way appropriately,” Salazar said. But federal officials have acknowledged BP has expertise that they lack.

In Barataria Bay, orange oil had made its way a good 6 inches onto the shore, coating grasses and the nests of brown pelicans in mangrove trees. Just six months ago, the birds had been removed from the federal endangered- species list.

The pelicans struggled to clean the crude from their bodies, splashing in the water and preening themselves. One stood at the edge of the island with its wings lifted slightly, its head drooping – so encrusted it could not fly.

Wildlife officials tried to rescue oil-soaked pelicans Sunday, but suspended their efforts after spooking the birds. They were not sure whether they would try again. U.S. Fish and Wildlife spokeswoman Stacy Shelton said it was sometimes better to leave the animals alone.

Pelicans are especially vulnerable to oil. Not only could they eat tainted fish and feed it to their young, but they could die of hypothermia or drowning if they are soaked.

The spill’s effect now stretches across 150 miles, from Dauphin Island, Ala., to Grand Isle, La.

Each day the spill grows, so does anger with the government and BP. Federal Environmental Protection Agency chief Lisa P. Jackson was headed Sunday to Louisiana, where she planned to visit with frustrated residents.

Salazar and Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano were to lead a Senate delegation to the region Monday to fly over affected areas and keep an eye on the response