After about 4.9 million barrels of oil, 136 days, over 2 million gallons of chemical dispersants, over 10 million feet of shoreline boom, 411 controlled surface burns, over 4,000 vessels and nearly 30,000 people mobilized, BP’s blown well has been effectively neutralized. Yesterday BP successfully removed the Macondo well’s original blowout preventer (BOP)—the piece of machinery that failed to stop the blowout—and replaced it with a new one. Though there will be further pressure tests to ensure that the new BOP is working correctly, BP should be able to complete the final stages of its relief well over the next few days, and finally kill the well within the week. As of now, though, the well is stopped up— and not with the jury-rigged capping stack that has held back the oil since mid-July. “The well does not constitute a threat to the Gulf of Mexico as of this point,” retired Coast Guard Admiral Thad W. Allen told reporters in a briefing this afternoon. “We basically have secured this well.”
The original BOP—now on board the Q4000 drilling platform—will be taken into custody by federal officials as a key piece of evidence in the ongoing investigation into the Deepwater Horizon disaster. Down at the well site, BP will be able to once again pump drilling fluid and concrete into the bottom of the well, finishing the bottom kill process that had been paused last month over concerns about the integrity of the original well. Effectively what BP will be doing in this final stage is what’s known as “plugging and abandonment,” the usual procedure carried out when an underwater well has been effectively emptied. Once that’s finished, BP’s Macondo well will look no different from the thousands of other exhausted wells that now dot the floor of the Gulf of Mexico like divots on a golf course. “It’s been a good day,” Allen admitted.
Indeed—though it’s a day that has been a long time coming, weeks later than the initial target dates of mid-August. And as the explosion Sept. 2 on a shallow-water oil rig off the coast of Louisiana shows, the debate over the safety of offshore oil and gas drilling is far from finished. The moratorium on new deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico—put into place by the White House after the Deepwater Horizon explosion—is still in place, and still hotly debated. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement—formerly known as the Minerals Management Service—has put into place new rules designed to limits conflicts of interest for drilling regulators, but it’s still unclear just what will be needed to ensure that deepwater drilling can be done safely, or whether it can really be done at all. That’s a debate that will continue long after BP’s Macondo well really, truly, absolutely is killed.