Most spilt oil no longer in the Gulf

WASHINGTON, Wednesday

About three quarters of the oil spilled from the ruptured BP well in the Gulf of Mexico has already disappeared, the New York Times reported on Wednesday, citing a new government report.

The Times said the report, released on Wednesday, found that about 26 per cent of the oil was still in the water but federal scientists believe it is rapidly breaking up. The rest has evaporated, dispersed, been captured or otherwise eliminated, the report said, according to the Times.

An estimated 4.9 million barrels of oil leaked into the Gulf of Mexico over a period of 87 days after an explosion on a BP-leased offshore rig on April 20. The leak was capped on July 15, and on Wednesday BP said it succeeded in controlling the pressure in the runaway well through a procedure called a “static kill.”

The Times said that fears that a huge underwater glob of oil would surface at some point to tar Gulf beaches looks increasingly unlikely. “There’s absolutely no evidence that there’s any significant concentration of oil that’s out there that we haven’t accounted for,” Jane Lubchenco, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the lead agency in producing the new report, was quoted as saying.

The world’s worst accidental marine oil spill has caused an environmental disaster and cost chief executive Tony Hayward his job. He and his heir apparent, Bob Dudley, were due on Wednesday to visit Russia, home to a quarter of BP’s output and a country Dudley fled in 2008 after a dispute with partners there.

The next step in the process is to pump in cement behind the mud as a seal, but BP said further monitoring was required to see if more mud would need to be pumped in first. The “static kill” would take 33 to 61 hours to complete, officials said. The operation is part of a two-pronged strategy that seeks to finally seal the ruptured Macondo well later in August through a relief well.

The spill is the world’s largest accidental maritime release of oil, surpassing the 1979 Ixtoc well blowout in Mexico’s Bay of Campeche that gushed almost 3 million barrels. Retired Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen, oversees the US oil spill response.