Gulf of Mexico oil spill collection effort incorporates second strategy

By Jaquetta White, The Times-Picayune
Published: Wednesday, June 16, 2010, 8:12 PM BP engineers added a second collection device Wednesday to the company’s system for containing the estimated 35,000 to 60,000 barrels of oil spilling into the Gulf of Mexico each day. Using the same tubes and pipes put in place last month to pump mud into the blown out Macondo well during the failed “top kill,” engineers now are sucking oil and natural gas out of the well and onto a ship, called the Q4000. The vessel is sucking oil through a hose attached to the choke line, a valve that once controlled pressure in the failed blowout preventer, and burning it off on site.
About 1,250 barrels of oil had been collected and burned using the Q4000 method through noon Wednesday. The process has the capacity to collect 5,000 to 10,000 barrels per day, increasing oil collection to as much as 28,000 barrels per day from the two systems currently in place, Coast Guard and BP officials have said. That amount is less than half of the government’s top estimate of the gusher’s daily flow rate. It is about 80 percent of the lower flow rate estimate. Oil has been flowing from the damaged Gulf of Mexico well since the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded and sank, killing 11 people, on April 20. … The addition of the Q4000 is the first step in a multiphased plan to ramp up oil collection capacity to 53,000 barrels of oil per day by the end of June and up to 80,000 barrels per day by mid-July. Later this month, a third ship will join the Q4000 and the Discoverer Enterprise at the spill site. That ship will suction oil through a permanent floating pipe from the kill line of the blowout preventer, a sister valve to the choke line. The addition will increase capacity to as much as 53,000 barrels of oil a day. …