VENICE, La/PENSACOLA BEACH, Fla (Reuters) – The latest effort to siphon oil and gas gushing from a ruptured deep-sea wellhead in the Gulf of Mexico is working well so far, US officials said yesterday, as President Barack Obama defended his handling of the environmental crisis.
British energy giant BP Plc said it collected 6,077 barrels (255,000 gallons/966,000 liters) of oil per day from the well on Friday, and that “improvement in oil collection is expected over the next several days.”
After soiling wetland wildlife refuges in Louisiana and barrier islands in Mississippi and Alabama, the black tide of pollution has reached some of the famous white beaches of Florida.
The toll of dead and injured birds and marine animals, including sea turtles and dolphins, is also climbing.
But 47 days into the crisis and after several unsuccessful attempts at containment by BP, a partial solution finally appears at hand.
The containment cap that BP clamped over the leak earlier this week was siphoning oil to a waiting drill-ship at a faster rate than initially estimated, US Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen said at a briefing in Theodore, Alabama.
Bob Fryar, senior vice president with BP, later told a meeting of local mayors in Alabama that the latest undersea containment effort had gone “extremely well” so far.
The collection rate is still only about one-third of one day’s flow from the oil geyser, which has been estimated by the government at about 19,000 barrels (800,000 gallons/3 million litres) per day.
But it could mark a turning point in the drama that has riveted the world and forced the Obama administration to reconsider plans to expand offshore oil drilling, which was seen as a way to reduce US dependence on foreign oil.
Allen said the full capacity of BP’s containment device was about 15,000 bpd, the “upper limit” of the current leak control effort. BP does not expect to fully halt the oil flow until August, when two relief wells are due to be completed.
He said that winds continue to push parts of the vast oil slick closer to the coastline across a wide area — roughly from the Mississippi-Alabama border to Port St. Joe in the Florida Panhandle, or more than 200 miles (320 kilometers).
Florida’s fishermen got a glimmer of good news late on Friday when the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reopened about 16,000 square miles (41,400 sq km) that had been closed to fishing on June 2 as a precaution.
