HOUSTON/VENICE, La., (Reuters) – Anger, skepticism and accusations of lying washed over energy giant BP Plc yesterday as it desperately pursued efforts to contain a month-old seabed well leak billowing crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico.
U.S. lawmakers and scientists have accused BP N> of trying to conceal what many believe is already the worst U.S. oil spill, eclipsing the 1989 Exxon Valdez accident in Alaska. It represents a potentially environmental and economic catastrophe for the U.S. Gulf coast.
The London-based energy giant, facing growing federal government and public frustration and allegations of a coverup, said its engineers were working with U.S. government scientists to determine the real size of the leak, even as they fought to control the still-gushing spill with uncertain solutions.
President Barack Obama’s administration was keeping up the pressure on BP to do everything possible to stop the leak.
“We are facing a disaster, the magnitude of which we likely have never seen before, in terms of a blowout in the Gulf of Mexico,” White House spokesman Robert Gibbs told reporters. “And we’re doing everything humanly possible and technologically possible to deal with that.”
BP’s next planned step is a “top kill” — pumping heavy fluids and then cement into the gushing well to plug it. That operation could start next week, perhaps on Tuesday, BP Chief Operating Officer Doug Suttles said.
Adding to the confusion, BP revised downward on Friday an estimate from Thursday that one of its containment solutions — a 1 mile (1.6 km)-long siphon tube inserted into the larger of two seabed leaks — was capturing 5,000 barrels (210,000 gallons/795,000 litres) of oil per day.
A BP spokesman said the amount of crude oil it sucked from the leak fell to 2,200 barrels (92,400 gallons/350,000 litres) a day in the 24-hour period ended at midnight on Thursday.
“The rate fluctuates quite widely on this tool,” Suttles told reporters at a briefing in Robert, Louisiana.
Many scientists dismiss an original 5,000 bpd estimate of the total leaking oil — often defended by BP executives — as ridiculously low and say it could be as high as 70,000 barrels (2.9 million gallons/11 million litres) per day or more.
“There’s a huge amount of uncertainty around that number and it could have a fairly wide range,” Suttles said. A federal panel will release its estimate of the actual flow rate as early as next week, a Coast Guard official said.
“HOT POTATO”
“It’s very clear that BP has not been telling the truth,” Massachusetts Democratic Representative Ed Markey told CNN.
BP denied any coverup and said some third-party estimates of the leak were inaccurate. The company’s shares fell more than 4 percent in London.
Michael Gordon, chief executive of Gordon Strategic Communications, a corporate and crisis public relations firm in New York, called BP’s handling of the spill “a case study in failed crisis communications.”
