Page 149 - Crystals News Today

Leaking out every single day. our david mattingly tells us workers are willing to give it another try. >> reporter: bp is trying to find a way to make this dome work. they say theyre going to take a couple of days to step back and figure out how to overcome this problem they encountered as they were attempting to lower it into place a day or so ago. what they encountered was something called hydrates, crystals formed by gas combining with water under the hard -- the deep pressure and under the c...

Side and now theyre looking at using a smaller dome. theyre connected to a pipe that will be able to push these crystals out of the way, and land that smaller dome in the exact same spot they were aiming for before. and theyre hoping that that eventually will be able to solve this problem with the larger leak. and theyre putting that in place, they hope, by the middle of this week. >> david, can i ask you something? i havent heard much recently about a plan for a second platform, drilling down a...

High pressure and the low temperatures down below. it was forming on the inside of the dome, clogging it up, making it really useless and what they plan to do to siphon the oil up to the surface and into a waiting containment vessel. what they have to do now, theyre taking the next couple days to set the dome aside, figure out what they need to do to prevent these crystals from forming on the inside. they knew hydrates would be forming down there. they did not believe it would be this big of a p...

Yesterday a significant setback in the battle to contain the oil in the gulf. homeland security secretary janet napolitano had been hopeful about bps latest effort. >> we should know by the end of the weekend whether it is successful or not. >> thursday night workers began lowering a concrete and steel box from the deck of the supply boat joe griffin. bp describes this as lowering a four-story building a mile down and setting it on the head of a pin. that in fact was fished friday night. the pla...

David, what is he talking about. what are hydrates and exactly what went wrong? >> reporter: these hydrates are crystals, sort of like ice crystals, that form when gas is under pressure at the bottom of the ocean and old water mix together. they create sort of a slush. they were expecting this to be a problem when they connected the big tube to this containment vessel, which they havent been able to do yet. but instead these things started accumulating on the inside of that dome and they clogged...

Leaking oil well in the gulf right now. cnns brooke baldwin joining us from biloxi, mississippi. we hoped this dome was going to get this thing stopped. they are calling it not necessarily a success yesterday. >> reporter: that didnt quite happen. i thought i would be standing here this morning, the big day, sunday, i could tell you that this dome was officially placed over this massive leak. that didnt happen. we heard from bps coo saying what they attempted to do didnt quite work. the dome is ...

To stop the leak. well, it didnt work. it failed yesterday because of something called hydrates. these are ice like crystals that develop when the gas mixes with the water. caused this thing to float a little bit. they couldnt get it over there. all the oil is still gushing. brooke baldwin is live in biloxi for us. this was very disappointing news. so much optimism, still skepticism as well. now we have the word, in fact, it did not work. >> reporter: good morning, t.j. i thought for sure i woul...

Hydrates. lets try to explain what that is. ice like crystals that ended up forming inside the four-story dome that engineers were hoping would put an end to all this. hydrates are lighter than water, so that means that the dome is floating, makes it very difficult to maneuver. talking 210 thousand gallons a day fixing that problem could take at least two days before they could proceed with anything else, a bp official talked about the problem. >> a large volume of hydrates required us to move t...

Were live in louisiana. david, what are the other measures theyre looking at using now? >> don, bp is still trying to find a way to make this dome work. they say theyre going to take a couple of days to step back and figure out how to overcome the problem they encountered as they were attempting to lower into place a day or so ago. they encountered something called hydrates. these are crystals combining with water under the deep pressure and under the cold temperatures down at the bottom of the ...

As well. how do you move forward in terms of using the dome? do you still think it can possibly work? >> right. like i said, the dome was one of the things in the arsenal of tools against this to fight against this. we havent given up on it. the idea now is figure out a way to melt the crystals. one of the options is to have a closed loop system where we circulate methanol, and that can melt that or use another heating element to help melt the dome and get rid of the ice crystals. >> reporter: w...