BP hopes to seal well as tide turns in battle against oil

BP PUMPED cement into its blown-out oil well in the Gulf of Mexico yesterday, hoping to start sealing it for good a day after it forced a slow torrent of heavy mud down the broken wellhead and pushed the crude back to its underground source.

This next step in the so-called “static kill” was another bright spot as the tide appeared to be turning in the months-long battle to contain the oil, with a federal report this week indicating that only about a quarter of the spilled crude remains in the Gulf and is degrading quickly.

Even so, Joey Yerkes, a 43-year-old fisherman in Destin, Florida, said he and other boaters, swimmers and scuba divers continue to find oil and tar balls in areas that have been declared clear.

“The end to the leak is good news, but the damage has been done,” Yerkes said.

It could take hours to pump enough fresh cement to fill the well and hours more for it to dry, engineers said. But BP said it decided to begin after testing concluded it would not do more damage to the ruptured well.

If the mud plug in the blown-out well is successfully augmented with the cement, the next step involves an 18,000-foot relief well that intersects with the old well just above the vast undersea reservoir that had been losing oil freely since the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded off Louisiana on April 20, killing 11 workers.

The hope has been to pump mud and possibly cement down the relief well after its completion later this month, supplementing the work in this week’s so-called “static kill” and stopping up the blown-out well from the bottom.

Despite the progress on the static kill, BP executives and federal officials won’t declare the threat dashed until they use the relief well — though lately they haven’t been able to publicly agree on its role.

Federal officials including spill response commander Thad Allen, a retired Coast Guard admiral have insisted that crews will shove mud and cement through the 18,000-foot relief well, which should be completed within weeks. Crews can’t be sure the area between the inner piping and outer casing has been plugged until the relief well is complete, he said.

But for reasons unclear, BP officials have refused to commit to pumping cement down the relief well, saying only that it will be used in some fashion.

“We have always said that we will move forward with the relief well. That will be the ultimate solution,” BP Senior Vice President Kent Wells said on Wednesday. “We need to take each step at a time. Clearly we need to pump cement. If we do it from the top, we might alter what we do with the relief well, but the relief well is still a part of the solution.”

Whether the well is considered sealed yet or not, there’s still oil in the Gulf or on its shores — nearly 53 million gallons of it, according to the report released on Wednesday by the Interior Department and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. That’s still nearly five times the size of the Exxon Valdez spill, which wreaked environmental havoc in Alaska in 1989.