BP today admitted that is capturing less oil from a ruptured well in the Gulf of Mexico than previously estimated, raising fresh questions over the success of its rescue operation.
The oil giant told the City this morning that the mile-long siphon tube inserted into the damaged well has been capturing an average of 2,010 barrels a day.
That is less than half the 5,000 barrels the company estimates is leaking into the sea every day following the Deepwater Horizon explosion. Last Thursday, BP told shareholders it was managing to siphon off around 3,000 barrels each day, while a BP spokesman in Houston told reporters that the siphon had actually been collecting 5,000 barrels of oil in a day.
The news comes after President Barack Obama warned that he would remove the company from efforts to seal the well if it does not act quickly enough to stop the leak, although he also acknowledged only BP and the oil industry know how to halt the spill.
Obama has now despatched two cabinet secretaries to the Gulf, keeping pressure on the company to plug the undersea oil leak which threatens to cause an environmental disaster. The oil has reached the delicate wetlands of Louisiana.
The spill, which has seen oil spewing into the ocean for more than a month after the rig explosion in April, has cost BP $760m (£526m) so far, up from the $625m estimate it issued on 18 May.
The US Coast Guard said more than 65 miles (110 km) of the Gulf coast has been hit by the oil spill, and less than half of it can be cleaned up quickly. The British oil giant said it continues to work on a "top kill" operation where heavy drilling fluids are injected into the well to stem the flow of oil and gas and ultimately kill the well.
"Most of the equipment is on site and preparations continue for this operation, with a view to deployment in a few days," BP said.
In today's statement, BP admitted that the oil captured by the "riser insertion tube tool", had fluctuated between 1,360 and 3,000 barrels of oil a day. It blamed the variable collection rate on "flow parameters and physical characteristics within the riser".
Shares in BP fell 1.6% this morning to 498p, their lowest level since last August. The company has now lost almost a quarter of its value since the Deepwater Horizon exploded.
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If they were claiming to be capturing 5,000 per day, and yet their live feed showed plenty of oil still billowing out, then obviously the leak was more significantly more than 5,000 barrels per day. By dropping the figure they are claiming to recapture, they can try to restore some credibility to that figure. Yet no independent estimates have put it below 20,000, with some as high as 100,000 barrels per day. Time to stop letting BP audit their own disaster.
If the City trusts a word that BP says, it's no wonder the economy is so screwed.
Like any large modern corporation(banks/oil companies) you have to take in the lie factor of a 100% into consideration which equivocates to them saying that their may be engine trouble when the whole thing has crashed. Their siphon is probably as effective as me going down to my local dump with a vaccum cleaner. I can safely assume that between 20,000 to a 100,000 barrels per day are seeping everyday in simple terms a MASSIVE NATURAL DISASTER(and I am not even the hug a tree type). Time to get BP off the job before I drive down to my local sea shore and just see a massive oil slick. Oh and BP investors sell, sell ,sell as this will most definetly bankrupt them when the trutch comes out...
"there may be", always get them mixed up
companies like BP lie for a living - many estimates are as high as 60-80`000 barrels (or roughly 9000 tonnes) of oil billowing from the gaping hole.
therefore, the sad truth is that whether BP is siphoning off 2000 or 3000 barrels of oil a day matters little!
all BP is doing is admitting to what can`t be hidden - whilst injecting toxic chemicals so that the oil sinks down to the ocean floor and remains hidden from site: this fact goes a long way towards explaining the miles-long, huge "blobs" of oil BELOW SEA LEVEL observed by the university of louisiana...
simply put, these lying multinational gangsters all belong in jail...and for god`s sake BOYCOTT BP!
It isn't fair to blame BP for the environmental problems on the American mainland. BP is a petrol company with expertise in petrochemical exploration, mining, distribution and retailing. They don't know anything about pelicans. Pelicans are the responsibility of the Obama administration. It is time for Obama to take responsibility for American wildlife and stop passing the buck back to BP every time a pelican makes a bad decision about where to nest and feed.
CheshireRed
I noticed that too, whereas the "slag off BP" stories are open for comment.
People interested in what is actually going on at Deepwater, rather than just shouting slogans, would be well-served by reading the Economist article this past week about it: http://www.economist.com/science-technology/displaystory.cfm?story_id=16160853&source=features_box_main
Did BP actually "blame" anyone/anything for it?
Or did they rather attempt to explain the cause of the variability, which this writer then chose to express as blame?
I don't think the MSM are doing a great job here, if this post (itself primarily a link to monkeyfister) at Naked Capitalism is to be believed:
nakedcapitalism
And to monkeyfister:
monkeyfister
Apparently there have been eruptions in the night from 23rd to 24th May, resulting in a collapse of the seabed near the riser:
"
The live cam which allowed people to witness the eruptions as they happened is now on a loop, and no longer live:
bp live cam
I've been trying to find confirmation of this but found none. I'd certainly be interested to hear from anybody who has good information on these alleged events.
My impression is that BP have too tight a grip on the information flow, and that the American government and MSM are too compliant. For BP this is more about image than ecology. We can only hope that their earnest desire to minimize damage to their image results in them performing better from now on than they have so far.
BP threatens reporters with arrest.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eb4JWgUuSEE&playnext_from=TL&videos=u7o2W4vfIHg&feature=sub
How do we know the relief wells will solve the problem and what is plan B?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eb4JWgUuSEE&playnext_from=TL&videos=u7o2W4vfIHg&feature=sub
BP has repeatedly made promises of implementing solutions and each time nothing has happened.. They´ve extended their own deadlines time after time.. Meanwhile nothing has been solved.. they are just polluting the ocean more and more, not only with the oil but additionally with chemicals nobody can see, which just hides the oil off the surface. This all has extremely far reaching consequences the likes of which we may not have any idea of right now.
When the hurricane season comes along and whips all these chemicals and dispersants and oils up into the air and sends them flying across the world dumping them on land via rainfall, the consequences are unthinkable.
If anyone had ever wanted to DELIBERATELY engineer a global catastrophe that looked accidental, in order to pollute the food chain and poison our ecological resources, perhaps in a sick attempt at population control, they probably couldn´t think up a better 'accident'!
It certainly seems NO 'accident' that nothing has been done to stop it in all this time!
this is an egregious crime against humanity.
seriously, its about time we started prosecuting these evil, greedy people whose actions amount to deathly incontinence.
To wombatmobile: it's not only pelicans, but also shrimpers, fishermen, coastal resort managers, and people who live near the Gulf. All of them should be held responsible for their choices. After all, they are intruding into the sacred oil drilling territory called "The Gulf of Mexico", and they need to pay the consequences of their transgression.
Even though most of those people were in this area before BP and others showed up, the holy claims of the petroleum industry go backwards in time (actually, they also go forwards in time, and in all directions in all time-and-space-related dimensions), and those living and working in the Gulf region all should have known that they and their descendants were going to be trespassers in the future. Therefore, these people and their parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, great-great-granparents, etc., cannot be absolved from their responsiblity to clean up this mess.
BP, along with other oil companies, successfully lobbied Congress to prevent passage of a proposal to compel more effective and reliable blowout prevention devices. If that proposal had passed Congress the Deepwater Horizon oil and gas spill (aka, massive leak, aka huge finacial loss) into the Gulf waters would not have happened and BP would have lost little if any of its stock value.
I bet BP has a lot of angry stockholders right now. Nevertheless given BP's just reported $5 billion earnings, the maximum imaginable loss does not warrant a cummulative 25% reduction in the company's worth since the Horizon drilling platform blew up. Insurance has already reimbursed the owner, Transocean for the drilling platform. Even if BP's entire loss is completely uninsured, which is unlikely, it has finite ultimate liability.
The BP brand has been damaged, but its oil and oil products don't need to be sold through BP owned fuel stations to be profitable, so in the absolute worst case BP can simply sell oil to refiners. Stock investors are acted like idiots and they deserve to lose money, while those who keep their BP shares will come out ahead I predict. Unless world oil prices collapse BP will continue to manufacture money even if it sometimes loses it.
The real question people should be asking is: "How much more spill from this accident will the American people accept before starting to look at BP as an agent of the British government attacking America? It doesn't have to be true to be bad for all trade between Great Britain and the USA.. The government of Great Britain should have done a better job in regulating BP behavior in general. Instead BP gave us the same kind of accident as the Mexican government's state owned PEMEX oil company did in 1979 when a similar blowout in deep water with the Ixtoc well took 8 to 9 months and relieve wells to shut down, during which time the oil spoiled Texas beaches. An industrial nation's company's should be able to do better, but I haven't seen BP do better beyond a bigger bore hole with more potential for damage due to improved drills.
Also, all this makes me think about the recent statements made by Rand Paul (for those of you who don't know, he's a vocal Republican candidate for the Senate here on the left side of the pond, and he has strong Libertarian/"Tea Party" leanings). His take on this disaster is this:
"What I don't like from the president's administration is this sort of, 'I'll put my boot heel on the throat of BP' ... I think that sounds really un-American in his criticism of business."
He also said, "And I think it's part of this sort of blame-game society in the sense that it's always got to be somebody's fault instead of the fact that maybe sometimes accidents happen".
And he added, "We had a mining accident that was very tragic. ... Then we come in and it's always someone's fault. Maybe sometimes accidents happen."
The Republican Party in the U.S. is courting "Tea Party" supporters of candidates like Rand Paul, and this makes me wonder how much we are going to hear the "sometimes accidents happen" mantra among the opposition to President Obama's administration in the coming weeks.
mrgardon
The Economist link that I posted above provides more details of what they are trying to do, fall-back plans (yes, they do have them),...
re: the youtube "expose".
Although CBS reporters were involved (along with the Coast Guard), the CBS news website seems to carry absolutely no story about this. In fact, the only story about it seems to be on so-called "alternative sources".
(I emphasise the "seems", perhaps I missed something)
is this a sign that
(1) CBS ("big media", some here might call it) are suppressing information from the public, even when it involves their own employees
or
(2) it's just plain not newsworthy, even to the news outlet in question?
This is Extreme Unction.
@SeniorPerson
Do you really think Mexico is not an industrialised country?
Why should British Polluters do a better job than Pemex?
In the end it doesn't matter who runs the Oil business:
Oil is a very dirty substance, hence very difficult to clean.
May be people from Arizona should clean up the oil.
NMB:
"(2) it's just plain not newsworthy, even to the news outlet in question?"
You were talking about CBS, but I find it odd that the only Guardian reference to this event on the main page today is the Video item shown above. Where is the detailed analysis as evidenced by the Economist article. Under the Environment heading today we have a "chatter" piece on vegetarianism for cats and dogs, which is hardly at the same level of seriousness as the British Petroleum oil spill. Especially since BP's record for "accidents" in the US is pretty abysmal.
It would be nice if this finished BP, if for no other reason than to send a warning to other oil companies that if you try to cut safety corners to reduce cost, it could be the end of you if something goes really wrong as a result.
Alaska still has not fully recovered from the valdez spill, while exxonmobile is making record profits. I suspect the case will be the same with BP, who has a track record of avoidable mishaps, with little to no consequences.
Oh yeah and its probably not lost on other Americans here that if this had been an American company and it was the British coast that was being devastated, the reaction of British commenters wouldnt be quite so subdued, to put it mildly.
"
Well, that's already happened to a small extent. The "British" in BP is somewhat emotive, unfortunately.
No, the government of the United States should have done a better job in regulating the petroleum industry that it licensed to drill in our waters.
Maybe not.
Indeed. Though it wouldn't need to be the British coast that was being devastated; it could be anywhere. Anywhere but the US, that is. And so it goes...
I believe that bp is going to make everything to try to reconecter the flight(leak), to fetch billion who(which) will be lost , obama should take the problem in hand and to give the bill to bp ,,,I really believe that to block avoids(flees) her(it) for voucher and the worst of option for pb because besides billion who(which) will be lost in cleaning of the million in profit will be lost