Robots Activate Crucial Process to Seal BP Oil Spill

Submitted by eigenlance on Sat, 07/10/2010 - 4:58pm

The sensitive process of replacing a cap that’s currently mitigating the flow of oil with a new one has just begun. With oil gushing freely once again, the question is, how soon will the robots be able to put the new cap in place?

Last Saturday (July 10, 2010), BP robots managed to remove the cap that’s been partially preventing oil from gushing out of the wellhead. The objective is to replace it with a better one that can substantially minimize the amount oil that still manages to leak out of the old cap.

This is not your regular cap-replacement process. Not only are the robots handling over a hundred tons of hardware, they’re also doing so at a depth of 5,000 feet below the ocean surface. That exposes them to extreme pressures in addition to the torrent of oil that’s gushing from the wellhead.

The good news is that these robots are built precisely for such depths. For comparison, there have been deep sea robots that have tagged ocean floors as far as 10,000 ft to even (in extreme cases) 36,000 ft.

Another good news is that the weather is expected to be calmer in the next few days. This is going to enable the BP engineers and their robots to perform their duties under less harsh working conditions. As a matter of fact, the calm weather is precisely one of the main reasons why they’re proceeding with the process now.

After a number of failed processes that were supposed to seal the leak, there’s no guarantee that this one will work. Even if it does, it’s not the permanent seal that everyone has been waiting for. And until the new and improved cap is successfully put in place, oil will continue to gush out unimpeded. This can last for 2 days to 1 week - again, that’s even granting all things go as planned.

Note: The image shown is not the actual BP robot, but they’re quite similar.

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