BP hopes for oil well "top kill" success
VENICE, Louisiana (Reuters) - BP Plc's planned attempt this week to shut off its blown Gulf of Mexico well has a 60-70 percent chance of success, a BP executive said on Monday, as efforts to reduce the gushing oil leak faltered.
"We need it to work," BP Chief Operating Officer Doug Suttles told CNN, referring to a so-called "top kill" operation -- the injection of heavy fluids and then cement into the seabed well to block oil flow.
The London-based energy giant, which has now lost about 25 percent of its market value -- almost $50 billion -- since the five-week-old spill began, has scheduled the attempted fix for Wednesday.
BP is facing growing pressure from the U.S. government to solve what President Barack Obama has called an unprecedented environmental disaster for the United States.
With heavy oil already washing into fragile marshlands and wildlife refuges in Louisiana, soiling birds and turtles, BP engineers are racing to line up technical options to try to contain or seal the leak as soon as they can.
Seeking to rate the chance of success of the "top kill" option on a scale of 1-10, Suttles said: "It's not a 10, it's not that certain, but it's above a 5 -- a 6 or a 7."
Members of Obama's Cabinet were to visit the fouled Gulf Coast on Monday.
The administration warned BP on Sunday it would be removed from efforts to seal the well if it was not seen as doing enough. But officials acknowledged only the company and the oil industry have the know-how to stop what threatens to become the worst U.S. oil spill.
BP shares fell around 2.5 percent in London on Monday, as investors reacted to the Obama administration's renewed pressure on the company to stop the leak.
Investors were increasingly concerned that BP's future in the U.S., where 40 percent of its assets are located, was at risk.
BHP Billiton Ltd/Plc, one of the biggest oil producers in the Gulf, warned that the oil spill may affect its forecasts of 10 percent production growth for the year ending June 10 and 8-10 percent production growth next year.
The diversion of two of its four drilling rigs in the Gulf to help contain the spill could lead to delays in its own drilling and production schedule, BHP said.
ALSO POSSIBLE: "TOP HAT" AND "JUNK SHOT"
BP executives have warned there is "no certainty" that the containment efforts will work because they have not been attempted ever before at the depths -- a mile down -- where the Macondo well is located.
They involve remote-controlled undersea robots working in the dark with lights and under intense depth pressure.
A previous control measure attempted by BP -- a long tube deployed down to the larger of two leaks from the well -- appeared to have had relatively little impact on the flow.
BP said the oil collected by the siphon tube was at times as low as 1,360 barrels of oil (57,120 gallons/216,200 liters) per day in the six days before May 23. On average, BP said, the oil captured during that period was 2,010 barrels per day. Last week the company said it had been siphoning as much as 5,000 barrels (210,000 gallons /795,000 liters) per day.
The company had estimated that about 5,000 barrels have been leaking every day, although some scientists have given much higher numbers for the size of the leak -- up to 70,000 and even 100,000 barrels per day.
BP said the spill, triggered by an April 20 explosion that sank the Deepwater Horizon rig and killed 11 workers, had cost it $760 million so far. It also pledged up to $500 million on Monday toward studying the impact of the spill.
Suttles said if the "top kill" operation did not work, the company would attempt to put a "top hat" containment device over the larger leak to try to capture most of the oil and pipe it up to a tanker on the surface.
Another option was a "junk shot" -- the injection of golf balls, pieces of rubber tire and other debris into the well's failed blowout preventer to try to shut it.
Acknowledging growing public frustration with the company's failure to cap the leak, Suttles said: "We're the biggest of the international companies. We have the biggest deepwater capability. We do more of this than anyone else."
"I don't actually believe anyone could do any better, unfortunately."
MARRED MARSHLANDS
Oil has been sloshing into Louisiana's fragile marshlands, and over 65 miles of shoreline have been tarred.
The marshes are nurseries for shrimp, oysters, crabs and fish that make Louisiana the top commercial seafood producer in the continental United States. Fishing is now banned in a large swath of the Gulf because of the spill.
Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, accompanied by a U.S. Senate delegation, were due to fly over the affected areas on Monday.
Salazar said on Sunday that Washington was angry that BP has missed "deadline after deadline" in its efforts to seal the well more than a month after an oil rig explosion.
"If we find they're not doing what they're supposed to be doing, we'll push them out of the way appropriately," he said after visiting BP's U.S. headquarters in Houston.
The spill has raised questions about Obama's earlier proposal to expand offshore drilling as part of a strategy to win Republican support for climate change legislation. Analysts say ecological and economic damage from the spill could become a political liability before November congressional elections.
Many scientists have warned the spreading oil could increasingly be caught in a powerful ocean current that could take it to the Florida Keys, Cuba and the U.S. East Coast.
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, a fierce critic of Washington, said on Sunday he had sent a team of oil experts to socialist ally Cuba to help it prepare for the possibility of oil from the spill coming ashore there.
(Additional reporting by Sarah Young in London, Susan Heavey in Washington; Pascal Fletcher in Miami, Tom Bergin in Houston; Writing by Pascal Fletcher and Ross Colvin; Editing by Paul Simao)
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