New Orleans, May 01: BP began late Friday applying an underwater dispersant to the Gulf of Mexico oil spill in a bid to slow the gushing oil from the well source, said a company spokesman.
“We’ve started the undersea application of dispersant,” BP spokesman Bill Salvin told AFP, adding that the company is “hoping this will substantially reduce the amount of oil reaching the surface.”
The dispersant is “being applied to the leak that’s closest to the blowout preventer,” he said, referring to one of the three leaks at the site of the sunken oil rig.
“It is the exact same chemical that we’ve been using from airplanes to help break up the oil,” said Salvin, a spokesman for the Deepwater Horizon response team that has been working around the clock to stem the flow before an environmental calamity hits the southeastern US shoreline.
There are only a few manufacturers in the world that make this dispersant, “and one is making it just for us,” he said, identifying West Virginia-based chemical company Nalco as the provider.
The dispersant “breaks up the oil and the particles fall to the seafloor or come to the surface (making it easier to clean up),” Salvin said of the chemical’s effects in the effort to minimize impact to the shoreline.
Oil under the Deepwater Horizon rig that blew up on April 20, killing 11 workers, is believed to be gushing into the Gulf of Mexico at a rate of 5,000 barrels a day, raising fears that the spill could rival the catastrophic 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster.
–Agencies