White House official accuses BP of ‘vested interest’ in minimizing spill

A top White House official and a senior Democrat on Sunday attacked BP for downplaying the amount of oil flowing into the Gulf of Mexico, accusing the oil giant of protecting its financial interests in low-balling the gusher’s size.

The tough line with the company comes a day after BP and federal officials abandoned the “top kill” effort to block the damaged well.

{mosads}“It is important to understand that BP has a financial interest in what those flow rates are. They will ultimately pay a fine based on those rates,” said Carol Browner, the White House climate and energy adviser, on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

“It is important for people to understand [that] BP has a vested financial interest in downplaying the size of this,” Browner later added. “We are on top of it. We have the best minds looking at it.”

A team of federal scientists and independent experts last week estimated that 12,000 to 19,000 barrels of oil are flowing from the blown-out well daily, which would mean the spill has eclipsed the Exxon Valdez as the worst in U.S. history.

Those figures are far above initial federal and BP estimates after the April 20 explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig.

Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), a senior member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, on Sunday said he had an internal BP document that showed the company knew in the first week of the disaster that the amount flowing was between 1,000 and 14,000 barrels per day.

The company initially cited the low end of that range, while federal officials later used a 5,000 barrel-per-day estimate that has since been increased.

“Their focus was not completely on the livability of the Gulf. It was also on the liability of BP, and as a result they had a stake in lowballing the number right from the very beginning,” Markey said on the CBS program.

“I think they [BP] were either lying or they were incompetent,” Markey added.

But Robert Dudley, BP’s managing director, rejected accusations that BP downplayed the amount of oil gushing into the Gulf.

“The estimates of the well rates have never been BP estimates. They’ve always been through the Unified Command Center. The best way to measure those early rates or estimate those early rates were from satellite data, not BP data,” he said on the same program.

Browner, however, said, “The very, very first estimates came from BP.”

“They had the footage of the plume,” she said. “The government then did satellite imagery and we realized that those estimates were not accurate.”

The back-and-forth comes a day after BP’s “top kill” effort to cap the gushing well was abandoned.

The company had for days sought to end the flow by pumping thousands of barrels of heavy drilling mud into the ruptured well, but was not able to overcome the tremendous upward pressure from the hydrocarbons.

Now that the “top kill” has failed, BP plans to attempt a new technique aimed at containing rather than capping the well that’s gushing a mile below the surface.

The company plans to remotely sever the damaged riser pipe atop the well’s failed blowout preventer, then place a containment cap on the structure that will funnel the oil into a ship.

BP estimates this will take in the range of 4-7 days. Dudley said Sunday morning that the hopes the system will contain the “majority” of the oil.

Dudley, appearing on CNN’s “State of the Union,” acknowledged the containment effort is “not certain at these depths.” But he also said on CBS that “there is more probability of success with this than the top kill, which was highly complex.”

In a separate interview on “Fox News Sunday,” Dudley downplayed concerns that severing the riser pipe could worsen the oil flow if it goes awry.

“The amount of oil will not change,” he said. “That is not going to change the flow.” But Browner, however, said that cutting the riser pipe could temporarily increase the flow by as much as 20 percent until the containment cap is lowered into place.

Another option the company may try is placing a second blowout preventer atop the frst device – which is supposed to be a failsafe mechanism – that did not deploy properly in the April 20 accident at the Deepwater Horizon rig.

The only measure that is believed to have an extremely high chance of success is the relief wells that BP is drilling, but that is a months-long process forecast to last until August.

“The American people need to know that it is possible
we will have oil leaking from this well until August when the relief wells will
be finished,” Browner said.

Dudley – in his multiple interviews Sunday – also pushed back against a New York Times report that, citing internal documents, shows that BP had for months been concerned about the stability of the well casing and used the riskier of two options.

“I would not call it cutting corners in any way,” he said on ABC’s “This Week.”

But Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) criticized the company. “It certainly seems BP made enormous mistakes and probably cut corners,” he said on CNN.

“It is unprecedented. Horrible things went wrong and there were horrible decisions that led to the initial event,” he added.

Dudley said BP CEO Tony Hayward should not be forced out –
he said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that Hayward is doing a “fantastic job,” and emphasized
in the various interviews that the company is dealing with unprecedented
circumstances.

The failure of the blowout preventer “hasn’t happened before” and it was “more than just one fail-safe system that didn’t work,” which is why the accident is so significant, Dudley said on CNN. “Everyone has to step back look and look at this piece of equipment. Everyone thought it was failsafe and we need to figure out what happened and make sure it doesn’t happen anywhere, anytime in the world again.”

The new containment effort is unfolding as a host of top federal officials – including Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson – prepare to return to the Gulf to oversee the spill response, which is increasingly become a political problem for the Obama administration.

President Barack Obama on Friday made his second trip to the Gulf since the April 20 rig explosion that touched off the ongoing spill. “I am here to tell you that you’re not alone,” Obama pledged to Gulf Coast residents. “You will not be abandoned. You will not be left behind.”

But while administration officials have repeatedly said at every opportunity that they have been fully engaged “since Day One,” critics of the White House nonetheless have faulted the federal response efforts.

“I think there could have been a greater sense of urgency,” said Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) in an interview on ABC’s “This Week.” He used the interview to press for both more resources and more localized decision-making authority on the response effort.