Gulf Oil Spill: Hurricane Alex to the West, 24,000 Barrels of Oil, or Less Than Half of Flow, Recovered Daily

Speaking before the media on the ongoing spill recovery efforts, the Coast Guard's Thad Allen reports that less than half of daily flow of oil has been recovered in the past 24 hours.

The relief well meanwhile, not slated to seal the spill until August, is now nearly three miles below the gulf's surface. A number of technical issues need to be completed before the relief well can go into operation.

A transcript of a portion of Allen's press conference with print and tv reporters follows.

Allen: Regarding our production in the last 24 hours, ending at midnight last night, we were able to produce 24,455 barrels with a combination of the Discoverer Enterprise and the Q4000. Regarding the relief well operations, the Development Driller III, which is a relief well driller, is down to 11,286 feet below the mud line.

The relief well driller is beginning its third ranging exercise. That is the exercise where they lower an electrical cord and, after they withdraw the drill pipe, lower the electric cord down and search for the electromagnetic field surrounding the wellbore and slowly start to close in.

This will be happening for the next several weeks as we try and refine the distance to the wellbore to the point where we can actually intercept and drill the relief well in, inject the mud into the cement plug, which will effectively bottom kill the well.

The current plan is for Development Driller III to go low enough, just above the reservoir area, where we will intercept this at the optimal point to let us drill - or insert mud into the wellbore, including going up. There have been some concerns in the past about the condition of the wellbore further up, but this is well below that.

As a risk mitigator, we have started Development Driller II, which is drilling the second relief well. We're also exploring the potential, and we are not at closure yet, on whether or not we could use pipelines to actually transfer the oil from the wellhead to other facilities nearby. And that's still under conceptual review, both at BP and in the - and in the government right now.

We've talked about an intermediate system where we could do a combination of barges, pilings and booms that would allow us to be able to stop the oil, but also allow the free flow of the (a lot of these) to come and go to maintain the ecosystem. I think we came up with a mutually agreeable plan. It's a matter of executing, and it is a combination of barges and other equipment, including booms and pilings.

The current speed and direction and wind strength of Alex does not indicate that we should do anything regarding evacuation. The only impact we're seeing right now is an increase in sea state that's going to inhibit potentially the preparations we need to bring the third production vessel online. We have a set of criteria by which if we thought we're going to get gale force winds in 120 hours, we would start to redeploy that equipment, but those criteria are not met in this current storm.