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BP Struggles to Control Damaged Well in Alaskan Arctic

A drilling rig on Alaska’s North Slope in 2007.Credit...Al Grillo/Associated Press

The British oil giant BP worked through the weekend to control a damaged oil well on Alaska’s remote North Slope that had started spewing natural gas vapors on Friday morning, the company and Alaska officials said.

There have been no injuries or reports of damage to wildlife, but crews trying to secure the well have failed amid frigid winds gusting to 38 miles an hour.

Alaskan and federal officials have identified two leaks venting methane gas, a powerful greenhouse gas linked to climate change. While some crude has sprayed out of the well with the gas, BP said infrared cameras on a flight over the site appeared to confirm that the oil released was contained on the gravel pad surrounding the well head and did not reach the tundra.

By Sunday afternoon, crews had shut down one leak with a surface safety valve, but the second leak, although reduced, was still spouting gas, federal and state officials said. Specialists from Boots and Coots, a well control company, were arriving in the area on Sunday to assist in closing down the well.

The damaged well is on state land several miles outside Deadhorse, a remote town.

“Crews are on the scene and are developing plans to bring the well under control,” said Brett Clanton, a BP spokesman, “and safety will remain our top priority as we move through this process.”

He said that it was unknown how much gas had leaked and that the company would investigate the causes of the accident after repairs were made.

Oil workers operating near the well were evacuated because of the possibility of an explosion.

There are large quantities of gas in the northern Alaskan fields around Prudhoe Bay in part because, without enough pipelines to bring it to market, oil companies have been pumping excess gas back into the ground for decades.

“The cause of the discharge is unknown at this time,” federal and state officials said in a statement late on Saturday. The statement said that an effort to secure the well on Friday night “was unsuccessful due to safety concerns and damage to a well pressure gauge.”

BP has struggled to repair its reputation since the disastrous Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 that killed 11 rig workers. The new leak in an established production well, however, has little in common with the blowout of the ill-fated well in the Gulf of Mexico. That well was drilled for exploration purposes, and the accident was caused by a series of errors by BP and its service companies.

Nevertheless, environmentalists were critical of BP.

“Anytime you have an uncontrolled well, that is bad performance,” said Lois Epstein, the Arctic program director for the Wilderness Society, a conservation organization. “Deepwater Horizon was visible to everybody. The North Slope is far away and out of sight, out of mind to the public, and that’s why you and I are having a hard time getting the details.”

This was just the latest in a series of leaks from petroleum operations that have plagued Alaska in recent months, although leaks have been rare on the North Slope. Last week, divers placed a clamp over a gash in an underwater Hilcorp Alaska pipeline in Cook Inlet, halting the flow of millions of cubic feet of natural gas.

Alaskan oil production has been in a sharp decline in recent years as output from shale fields in Texas and North Dakota has come to dominate the industry. But the state may be poised for an oil renaissance, even after several companies have moved away from exploration offshore.

ConocoPhillips, Repsol of Spain and Caelus Energy of Dallas have announced giant discoveries in recent months that could raise the state’s production considerably, especially if oil prices rise in the years to come.

Some environmentalists seized on the new accident to campaign against all Arctic drilling. “This underscores the hazard and harm of drilling for oil in the Arctic and shows, yet again, that we have no business exposing more of this irreplaceable habitat to the peril of these inherently dangerous industrial operations,” said Bob Deans, a spokesman for the Natural Resources Defense Council.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section B, Page 2 of the New York edition with the headline: BP Struggles to Control a Damaged Well in Alaska. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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