Monday, May 24, 2010
U.S. Government Keeps 'Boot on Neck' of BP Over Spill
Reuters
U.S. Government Keeps 'Boot on Neck' of BP Over Spill
Reuters
GALLIANO, La.--The U.S. government piled pressure on BP Plc Monday to clean up a "massive environmental mess" in the Gulf of Mexico amid growing anger at the oil giant's failure to contain a five-week-old oil spill.
The company insisted it was doing all it could to try to shut off a blown-out oil well spewing hundreds of thousands of gallons (liters) of oil into the Gulf every day. It threatens to become the worst U.S. oil spill in history.
London-based BP, which has now lost about 25 percent of its market value -- almost $50 billion -- since the spill began, said it would make another attempt to plug the leak on Wednesday, but gave it only a 60-70 percent chance of success.
With heavy oil already washing into fragile marshlands and wildlife refuges in Louisiana, the U.S. government is pushing BP to try to contain or seal the leak as soon as possible.
"We will keep our boot on their neck until the job gets done," U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar told reporters after touring affected areas of the Gulf coast with Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and a group of U.S. senators.
President Barack Obama has called it an unprecedented environmental disaster for the United States.
Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal said some 70 miles of his state's coastline had been affected by the oil spill. He renewed a plea for federal authorities to send more equipment, especially booms, to help stop the oil from making landfall.
More than 1,100 vessels, 24,000 personnel and 2 million feet of boom have been deployed to deal with the spill, the largest such effort in history, U.S. officials said.
"This is a BP mess, it is a horrible mess and it is a massive environmental mess," Salazar said. He added BP was legally responsible for halting the spreading spill, cleaning up its effects and paying for resulting economic damages.
Salazar said an ongoing investigation by U.S. authorities would hold the company accountable "both civilly and in whatever way is necessary," appearing to leave open the possibility of a criminal inquiry.
The oil spill is a political hot potato for the Obama administration ahead of a November election that is widely expected to erode Democrats' control of the U.S. Congress. Analysts warn that voters may punish Democrats regardless of who is ultimately deemed responsible for the mess.
The White House has repeatedly said it is the energy giant's responsibility to clean up the spill, but with public anger over BP's handling of the crisis intensifying, there have been calls for the Obama administration to take charge.
"TOP KILL" PLANNED FOR WEDNESDAY
The administration warned BP Sunday it would be removed from efforts to seal the well if it was not seen as doing enough. But it acknowledged only the company and the oil industry have the know-how to stop the spill.
BP plans to inject heavy fluids and then cement into the seabed well to block oil flow in a so-called "top kill" operation Wednesday.
"We need it to work," BP Chief Operating Officer Doug Suttles told CNN.
BP shares fell nearly 3 percent in London on Monday as investors reacted to the Obama administration's renewed pressure and waited to see whether BP's latest attempt to stop the leak would work.
BP executives have warned there is "no certainty" that the containment efforts will be successful because they have not been attempted ever before at the depths -- a mile (1.6 km) down -- where the Macondo well is located.
They involve remote-controlled undersea robots working in the dark with lights and under intense depth pressure.
A previous control measure attempted by BP -- a long tube deployed down to the larger of two leaks from the well -- appeared to have had relatively little impact on the flow.
BP said the oil collected by the siphon tube was at times as low as 1,360 barrels of oil (57,120 gallons/) per day in the six days before May 23. On average, BP said, the oil captured during that period was 2,010 barrels per day. Last week the company said it had been siphoning as much as 5,000 barrels (210,000 gallons / per day.
The company had estimated that about 5,000 barrels have been leaking every day, although some scientists have given much higher numbers for the size of the leak -- up to 70,000 and even 100,000 barrels per day.
BP said the spill, triggered by an April 20 explosion that sank the Deepwater Horizon rig and killed 11 workers, had cost it $760 million so far. It also pledged up to $500 million Monday toward studying the impact of the spill.
Suttles said if the "top kill" operation did not work, the company would attempt to put a "top hat" containment device over the larger leak to try to capture most of the oil and pipe it up to a tanker on the surface.
Another option was a "junk shot" -- the injection of golf balls, pieces of rubber tire and other debris into the well's failed blowout preventer to try to shut it.
MARRED MARSHLANDS
Oil has been sloshing into Louisiana's fragile marshlands, and over 65 miles of shoreline have been tarred.
The marshes are nurseries for shrimp, oysters, crabs and fish that make Louisiana the top commercial seafood producer in the continental United States. Fishing is now banned in a large swath of the Gulf because of the spill.
The spill has raised questions about Obama's earlier proposal to expand offshore drilling as part of a strategy to win Republican support for climate change legislation.
Many scientists have warned the spreading oil could increasingly be caught in a powerful ocean current that could take it to the Florida Keys, Cuba and the U.S. East Coast.
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, a fierce critic of Washington, said on Sunday he had sent a team of oil experts to socialist ally Cuba to help it prepare for the possibility of oil from the spill coming ashore there.
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