Video footage shows that oil is still pouring out of BP's wellhead. Credit: BP.

BP claims to be sucking crude straight off its stricken mile-deep wellhead and pouring it into the drillship Enterprise at a rate of 11,000 barrels per day, thanks to a cap and tube installed on Friday. And, yet, video feeds from ROVs present a plume of oil and gas gushing out into the depths that looks as angry as ever--more black goop destined for dispersal into the Gulf of Mexico's already beleaguered ecosystems.

"Clearly alot of people are looking at it and trying to understand what does this mean," acknowledged BP senior vp/exploration Kent Wells of the top-rated video images during in a media briefing yesterday.

Wells couldn't say how much oil is escaping but he took pains to remind viewers that the leak is now pouring around their 4-foot-wide steel LMRP cap, making the plume appear wider. "It's easy to forget that there's a big vessel inside that," says Wells. And it's certainly true that his engineers might be capturing the bulk of the flow, according to the federal flow estimates released last month. The two independent federal models of the flow both said the flow could as low as 12,000 barrels per day (bpd).

Unfortunately the federal models also provided plenty of headroom, saying the flow could be as high as 19,000 bpd in one case, and 25,000 bpd in the other. And the modelers predicted the flow might accelerate as much as 20% when BP cut away the riser from the sunken Deepwater Horizon platform, as required to install the cap. In other words BP's cap could be capturing barely one-third of the flow.

A better cap is to be installed by the end of June, according to Wells. Whereas the existing cap simply pushing a rubber grommet down on to flange on the BOP, he says BP engineers and government scientists are working on three new designs that could reach around and hook onto the flange.

But Wells admitted that optimization of the oil containment effort today could give way to new disasters later this summer with the arrival of hurricane season, which usually begins menacing the Gulf in August. If a storm blows across the leak site BP will have to disconnect the drill ships collecting oil, keeping the ships and their crews safe but throwing the Gulf ecosystem back to the dogs.

Wells says the new cap they plan to install later this month is part of a system that will allow quicker disconnects and reconnects, minimizing the time without containment. But he's not prepared to say that the cap could actually seal off the flow until the storm had passed "I wouldn't want to say yet that we'd have the ability to close it off when we disconnect," says Wells. "We're just not there yet."

An image from BP's spillcam. Credit: BP

BP is capturing oil at a rate of 1,000 barrels-per-day via its latest containment scheme--a cap and new riser installed on its gushing Gulf spill last night, according to federal response coordinator and Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen. But video feeds confirm that far more crude is still spilling into the sea from under the cap--at least 11,000 barrels per day if one subtracts 1,000 bpd from the minimum flow estimate of the Deepwater Horizon spill released by a federal task force last week.

BP Americas chief operating officer Doug Suttles said in a media briefing this morning that the cap (BP containment scheme #4 by Carbon-Nation's count) could ultimately capture over 90% of the leak. But Suttles and his company have proved unreasonably optimistic before, and could be once again.

That's because effective capture requires a solid seal between the cap and the leaking riser from the Deepwater Horizon rig, whose destruction in April set off the spill. Unfortunately, a preparatory operation yesterday to cut away most of the leaking riser just above the Deepwater Horizon's blowout preventer (BOP) left a jagged edge that could be tough to seal on. Allen told reporters that it may take 48 hours to optimize the system, and downgraded Suttles' hopeful projection to a "goal."

In a separate media briefing this morning BP senior vp for exploration Kent Wells said BP will ramp up suction slowly to avoid pulling in water that could combine with natural gas to form frozen hydrates and clog the pipe. To ward off hydrates they are also pumping hot water down around the new riser pipe, and methanol into the pipe.

BP's official update this morning on its Lower Marine Riser Package repeated its now mantra-like disclaimer about the challenge of engineering on the fly in mile-deep waters:

Systems such as the LMRP containment cap never before have been deployed at these depths and conditions. The containment system's efficiency, continued operation, and ability to contain the oil and gas cannot be assured.

Those caveats ring true given BP's string of tech failures as Deepwater Horizon's botched well has pumped over 20 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico:

• BP's new riser cap must seal on a jagged edge because a cleaner-cutting diamond-tipped saw blade jammed in the leaking riser. BP used a massive pair of shears instead.
• Gushing oil and gas blew back mud and junk that BP pumped into the Deepwater Horizon's BOP, defeating last week's much-vaunted Top Kill operation.
• BP's pre-Top Kill riser insertion tube (BP containment scheme #3) never caught more than one fifth of the total flow.
• Frozen hydrates of water and natural gas instantly clogged the coffer dam (BP containment scheme #2) that BP lowered over the BOP early last month.
• The BOP's rams ignored instructions to close off the leak in the first two weeks after the accident (BP containment scheme #1), not to mention during the accident itself.

As always, BP has a menu of new tech options in the wings. Six other riser cap fittings can be tried for size in case the one now in place can't seal. BP will also try to suck oil and gas out of the BOP via its choke and kill lines (through which it pumped drilling mud and junk during the Top Kill). And the troubled oil and gas giant says drilling of two relief wells to intersect and cement the leaking well at its deepest point--the only proven means of definitive offshore blowout control--remains on course for August.

However, based on the drubbing BP's tech team has taken so far and the firm's repeated caveats about operating at a mile under, it is increasingly tough for any oil and gas driller to deny the following conclusion: technology is not equal to the challenge of blowout control in deepwater conditions--at least not yet.

Peter Fairley, an independent journalist and editor of the Web journal Carbon-Nation, tracks energy innovation around the globe, from the solar-powered villages of Bolivia's Cordillera to China's mechanizing coalfields.

NASA Administrator, Charles Bolden, speaks at ISDC. Credit: Jeff Foust

Since the White House announced in February its new plan for NASA, canceling the Constellation program and putting a new emphasis on technology development and commercial providers, the future of the agency has been a subject of hot debate in the space community. NASA's top two officials came to a major conference last week to defend--and debate--the agency's new direction.

"I personally believe the president's fiscal year 2011 budget and the request that goes with it is good for NASA, because it sets the agency on a sustainable path that's tightly linked to our nation's interests," NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said in a dinner speech in Chicago at the International Space Development Conference (ISDC), the annual conference of the National Space Society (NSS). Bolden went on to say that the plan is "is the most authentically visionary policy for real human space exploration" since President John F. Kennedy announced a goal in 1961 of landing humans on the Moon by the end of the decade.

NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver, who served as executive director of NSS for several years in the 1990s, also defended the president's plan in a luncheon speech at ISDC. "People have made a lot of rhetorical statements that this plan kills human spaceflight; in fact, it does the opposite," she said, noting that Constellation was suffering from cost and schedule problems identified last year by the Augustine Committee.

Others at ISDC, though, were skeptical of some elements of the plan, including the decision to cancel the Ares I rocket that would have been used to launch the Orion crewed spacecraft. Scott Pace, a former NASA official who is now director of the Space Policy Institute of George Washington University, said at the conference it would be wise to retain Ares I as both a backup for proposed commercial crew providers as well as an investment in future heavy-lift rockets. Garver, engaging in an impromptu debate with Pace, disagreed, noting that the funding in the budget proposal for commercial crew programs "is not nearly enough" to complete Constellation if spent there instead.

Another critic of NASA's new direction at ISDC was Robert Zubrin, president of the advocacy organization The Mars Society. While President Obama set a goal of a human mission to orbit Mars by the mid-2030s, that goal is too far in the future for Zubrin. "It basically means that they don't have to start working on it while they're in office," he said.

At the end of her luncheon speech, Garver said she hoped that ISDC attendees, including members of the organization she once ran, would help advocate for the plan as Congress takes up the NASA budget in the coming months. "The space community should hopefully see that this our time," she said.