The effort to place a containment dome over a gushing wellhead was dealt a setback when a large volume of hydrates — crystals formed when gas combines with water — accumulated inside of the vessel, BP’s chief operating officer said Saturday.

CNN’s wire story just ran.  The new is bad, though not entirely unexpected, since nothing like this has ever been tried before.

UPDATE:  I would note that if BP or any other major thought 1) this type of disaster was conceivable and/or that this dome strategy was  particularly plausible, then they would have pre-built and pre-positioned one in the Gulf years ago (see BP calls blowout disaster ‘inconceivable,’ ‘unprecedented,’ and unforeseeable).

BP has not given up on the dome:

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The Wonk Room has completed its live blogging from the Gulf Coast.

Efforts to contain the Deepwater Horizon oil gusher with a 100-ton, four-story concrete-and-steel box have failed, BP officials announced. The giant box, known as a cofferdam, was lowered onto the leaking wellhead yesterday, with the intent of pumping the leaking oil up a pipe to the sea surface a mile above. However, BP Chief Operating Officer Doug Suttles announced in a press briefing this afternoon that the dome effort failed. After the cofferdam was lowered onto the leak site, a slurry of methane crystals formed on the inside of the dome’s surface, making it bouyant and clogging the outtake at the dome’s roof.

The giant box has been moved 200 meters from the disaster site, and is sitting on the sea bed. BP had anticipated that methane hydrates could form within the pipework from the dome to the surface, but not within the dome itself, especially at such a rapid rate.

Suttles, clearly chastened by this setback, had a much less confident tone about containing the leak than he had at previous press conferences, such as the one attended on Tuesday by the Wonk Room when he announced the cofferdam was being shipped out to the disaster site. “It’s very difficult to say whether solutions will work,” he admitted.

The methane hydrates — natural gas that under the extreme pressure and low temperatures of the ocean floor is in a semi-frozen state — have also been implicated in the oil rig explosion, according to rig worker testimony acquired by the Associated Press. The liberal blog FireDogLake was the first media source to discuss the role of hydrates, noting a presentation from November, 2009 by Halliburton, who was responsible for cementing the Deepwater Horizon well, that warned of blowouts caused by hydrate destabilization:

Destabilization of hydrates during cementing and production in deepwater environments is a challenge to the safety and economics.

Suttles also admitted that David Rainey, BP’s VP for Gulf of Mexico exploration, was on the rig celebrating its safety record when it blew up. Although 11 workers were killed, Rainey and the other BP employees on the rig safely escaped the inferno.

Also during the briefing, Coast Guard Rear Admiral Mary Landry was unusually optimistic about the preparations being made for the oil that is just now reaching the shores of Louisiana, but looms closer to the entire Gulf Coast as each day passes: “We’re ready for it.”

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“The anomaly was the largest of any of the 520 months on record.”

Where did all the snow go?

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The Nobel-Prize-winning former VP has an article in The New Republic, “The Crisis Comes Ashore:  Why the oil spill could change everything.”  Here are some excerpts:

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But oil unlikely to enter Loop Current anytime soon

The oil slick from the April 20 explosion and blowout of the offshore oil rig Deepwater Horizon is moving little, thanks to the light winds of 10 knots or less that have affected the northern Gulf of Mexico over the past few days….

On Sunday, the winds will begin increasing and shifting to the southeast. The latest run of the GFS model shows that this will be a week-long period of southeast winds, with wind speeds at times reaching 20 – 25 knots. These winds will threaten to bring oil to a large portion of the Louisiana coast, including regions of the central Louisiana coast west of the mouth of the Mississippi River. The Mississippi and Alabama coasts will also be at risk next week, but the risk to the Florida Panhandle is lower.

The Gulf’s run of good weather appears to be coming to an end, according to meteorologist Jeff Masters writing on his WunderBlog.  But early reports that the spill would soon be entrained in the Loop Current (part of the Gulf Stream) and hit the Keys appear to be untrue:

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In a Fox News interview with Karl Rove Thursday, host Jane Skinner noted that many in the media (and on the right) claim that the oil rig explosion in the Gulf is President Obama’s “Katrina.” Rove said he “wouldn’t compare this to Katrina,” but he then ran through a timeline of the events as if to accuse the White House of having a delayed response to the disaster. However, Skinner didn’t buy it, noting that the White House was involved from the beginning:

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Rep. Capps and Rep. Markey call for independent commission to investigate BP oil disaster to “prevent future tragedies.”

Yesterday, Rep. Lois Capps (D-CA) and Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) announced plans to introduce legislation to create an independent commission to investigate causes of the oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.  Susan Lyon of CAP’s energy team has the story.

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