Oil slick: '90 days before ultimate solution'
Updated on 02 May 2010
The US Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said it could be up three months before a relief well is in place to create the "ultimate solution" to stop for the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.
Salazar gave his 90 day figure on American TV today saying:
"You're looking at potentially 90 days before you ultimately get to what is the ultimate solution here and that's a relief well."
He also said it was the government's job to "keep the boot on the neck" of BP to ensure it carries out its duties to stop the spill.
The spill is threatening to become an economic and ecological catastrophe he said and there was "no doubt" that a mechanism that prevents oil from blowing out of the BP well was defective.
He outlined a worst case scenario in which 100,000 barrels or more of oil per day could leak out into the ocean.
The huge clean up costs could cost BP over £3bn it has been reported.
Officials in the US admitted that it is "inevitable" that oil leaking from the Deepwater Horizon well, that exploded last month, would hit their coastline.
"There's enough oil out there that it is logical to think it will hit the shoreline. It's just a question of where and when," said U.S. Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen.
"Mother Nature gets a vote in this."
President Barack Obama is due to visit the region soon, ramping up efforts to control what has the makings of an environmental disaster and deflect criticism that his administration could have been quicker in responding to the spill.
Julian Rush reports
With the winds forecast to shift to the south-east, oil engineers are in a race against time to prevent the growing oil slick from hitting the Louisiana shore near New Orleans.
At its closest, the slick is only 16 miles from the coast, and it is forecast to come ashore by Friday. The outflow of water from the huge river may push some of it back but no-one's pretending the environmental impact won't be immense - the fragile ecosystem of the Mississippi River delta is very delicate.
NASA satellite imagery shows the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.
Three weapons are being used in the operation to deal with the leaking oil.
First, in a bid to reduce the amount of oil floating on the surface so less comes ashore, they have set light to some of it. Oil that is at least several millimetres thick is corralled into a fire resistant boom, towed away from the spill, and then ignited, leading to what they call a "controlled burn" of several thousand gallons of oil lasting approximately one hour.
The burn can be stopped at any time by opening the boom and allowing the oil to spread too thin for combustion.
Second, the efforts continue to activate the 'blow out preventer' on the well head. It consists of huge steel shutters that slice through the pipe to stop the flow. They're meant to be fail-safe: normally they are held open by huge hydraulic rams; in the event of a failure they should slam shut.
When the rig blew, it seems there was no time to operate them and no-one knows why they didn't activate automatically. Remote operated vehicles are being used to try to operate them manually but with no success so far.
Finally there's the long term solution. A second drilling rig is now on site and will "spud" this weekend (start drilling). The aim is to drill down to meet the existing well in the seabed beneath the well head, to divert the flow and cap it again.
It's been done often enough before, but it's difficult - they have to drill down and sideways for several thousand feet to hit a target that is two feet wide, several hundred feet underground. And it will take at least a month.
