Asia-Pacific

No good solutions to US Gulf oil spill yet

(Xinhua)
Updated: 2010-05-05 14:18

WASHINGTON - British Petroleum (BP) executives admitted on Tuesday that good solutions are still being sought to tackle the Gulf of Mexico oil spill while US officials are weighing a new method to clean up the mess with dispersant chemicals injected underwater.

NO GOOD SOLUTIONS YET

The original estimate was that the leak, caused by an explosion of a BP oil rig in the Gulf on April 20, was gushing oil at a rate of 5,000 barrels a day. But if things go badly, BP executives told US lawmakers in a closed-door meeting here in Washington on Tuesday, the figure could grow to 60,000 barrels a day, or 2.5 million gallons.

If the leak continues at that rate for four days, it will exceed the amount of oil spilled by tanker Exxon Valdez when it ran aground in Alaska on March 24, 1989, the worst oil spill incident in US history.

The US government is holding BP accountable for the massive spill and pressing it to clean up the mess and make due compensations for economic and environmental damages caused by the incident.

White House officials said Tuesday that they supported raising the cap on oil company spill liability to $10 billion as part of a comprehensive energy bill.

"BP is responsible for -- and will be held accountable for -- all of the very significant cleanup and containment costs. They will pay for the mess they've made," White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer said.

"The bottom line is that the administration will aggressively pursue compensation from BP for any damages from this spill," he added.

But US lawmakers appeared to be unimpressed and unsatisfied when leaving the meeting with BP executives. They later told US press that the company is "attempting to solve a problem which they have never had to solve before at this depth. What we heard was worst-case scenario, with no good solutions."

The dim prospect came on a day when calm winds and wave allowed more boats to attack the spill and slowed the progress of the plume, which extends in a ragged pattern from the coast of Louisiana to offshore Pensacola, Fla.

The entire US Gulf Coast is making preparations for the spill's landfall.

Coast Guard officers in Louisiana said the best scenario was that the slick remained at least 32 km off the coast and the oil would not come ashore for three more days. But others doubted that optimism and some witnesses said a band of oil has already been circling the Chandeleur Island about only 40 meters from the Louisiana beach.

Dan Turner, spokesman for Mississippi governor Haley Barbour, said the state is "facing a hovering menace out there that keeps changing shape and size by the hour".

The rippling effect of the oil spill tragedy even reached Carlifornia which is located hundreds of kilometers away.

It has prompted governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to call off a plan to expand oil drilling off the Santa Barbara coast which could bring in 100 million dollars in revenues annually.

"If I have a choice between 100 million dollars and what I see in the Gulf of Mexico, I'd rather just figure how to make up for that 100 million dollars," the governor said on Monday.

NEW METHOD

In Washington, US authorities are weighing the pros and cons of a new BP method to break up the spill with dispersant chemicals injected underwater in addition to the traditional method of using dispersants on the surface.

In fact, BP has already attempted to inject the chemicals near the source of the leak deep underwater.

Oil has been gushing out of the seabed since at least April 22, when the Deepwater Horizon rig sank two days after an explosion and fire.

Charlie Henry, an official at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said Tuesday that the government is evaluating the pros and cons of the new method, trying to determine what method makes the biggest mitigation to the pollution threat.

"This is a unique idea to insert dispersants near the seafloor. But there are a lot of unknowns associated with this," he said.

Henry said the dispersants being used in the Gulf show "fairly low toxicity." However, toxicologists and environmental scientists said while the dispersants are unlikely to cause immediate harm to people, they can have a big impact on marine organisms that are directly exposed.

OIL PRICE HIKE UNLIKELY

Despite its huge environmental and political fallout, experts say the incident is unlikely to push up gas prices in the United States.

Many offshore oil rigs in the Gulf appear to be operating normally while the refineries in the region, which account for 40 percent of the nation's refining capacity, continue to make and ship gasoline, they say.

The oil market has so far shrugged off the spill, even as the government scrambles to contain it.

Tom Kloza, an oil analyst, said the spill is a huge environmental and political story, but "definitely should not be an economic story with the price of oil in the next few months."

The Gulf region accounts for roughly 30 percent of the US domestic oil production. But the oil travels to shore via undersea pipelines and won't be affected by a spill, said Ken Medlock, an energy research fellow at Rice University.

Oil traders are more focused on the global economy than on the spill. The price of oil futures traded on the New York Mercantile Exchange fell 3.45 dollars Tuesday, closing at 82.74 dollars per barrel.