Offshore staff
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Relief well drilling at the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is progressing, said Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen, national incident commander for the event. The Development Driller III was at 8,700 ft yesterday morning and the Development Driller II had reached 3,400 ft, according to Allen.
Looking ahead, Allen said plans are under way for installation of a permanent riser mooring to produce the well into a floating production facility to replace the Discover Enterprise drillship which now serves as a production facility.
The federal on-scene coordinator, Admiral Jim Watson, has sent a notice to BP asking that better redundancies be planned into any long-term containment system to insure integrity of operations.
In an earlier press conference, Allen said there were more than 2,600 vessels of opportunity local to the region enrolled in the project to help with booming and skimming.
Also at that conference, NOAA’s Jane Lubchenco said that findings from NOAA’s analysis of water samples confirms the presence of “very low concentrations of subsurface oil at sampling depths ranging from the surface to 3,300 ft at locations 40 and 42 nautical miles northeast of the well, and another sampling station at 142 nautical miles southeast of the wellhead.
“Notably, our analysis of the presence of subsurface oil determined that the concentrations of oil are in the range of less than 0.5 parts per million,” she added. Also, “hydrocarbons found in the samples 142 nautical miles southeast of the wellhead at 330 ft and 1,000 ft were not consistent with the BP oil spill.”
06/10/2010
