NEW ORLEANS – The cap on the blown-out well in the Gulf of Mexico is capturing a half-million gallons a day, or anywhere from one-third to three-quarters of the oil spewing from the bottom of the sea, officials said Monday. But the hopeful report was offset by a warning that the far-flung slick has broken up into hundreds and even thousands of patches of oil that may inflict damage that could persist for years.
Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, the government’s point man for the crisis, said the breakup has complicated the cleanup.
“Dealing with the oil spill on the surface is going to go on for a couple of months,” he said at a briefing in Washington. “(But) long-term issues of restoring the environment and the habitats and stuff will be years.”
Allen said the containment cap that was installed late last week is now collecting about 460,000 gallons of oil a day out of the approximately 600,000 to 1.2 million gallons believed to be spewing from the well nearly a mile underwater. In a tweet, BP said it collected 316,722 gallons from midnight to noon Monday.
The amount of oil captured is being slowly ramped up as more vents on the cap are closed. Crews are moving carefully to avoid a dangerous pressure buildup and to prevent the formation of the icy crystals that thwarted a previous effort to contain the leak. The captured oil is being pumped to a ship on the surface.
“I think it’s going fairly well,” Allen said.
BP said it plans to replace the cap, perhaps later this month or early next month, with a slightly bigger one that will provide a tighter fit and thus collect more oil.
It will also be designed to allow the company to suspend the cleanup and then resume it quickly if a hurricane threatens the Gulf later this season. The new cap is still being designed.
“It gives us much better containment than we’ve got (with the existing cap),” said Kent Wells, a BP senior vice president.
BP and government officials acknowledged it is difficult to say exactly how much oil is spewing from the well and, thus, how much is still flowing into the water. BP spokesman Robert Wine said the figures being discussed are estimates, some of which have been provided by the government.
Ed Overton, a Louisiana State University professor of environmental sciences, suggested it is too early for anyone to claim victory. The spill, estimated at anywhere from 23 million gallons to 50 million, is already the biggest in U.S. history, dwarfing the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster in Alaska.
“We’re hopeful the thing is going to work, but hoping and actually working are two different things,” Overton said. “They may have turned the corner, they may not have. We just don’t know right now.”
He said he doesn’t believe BP will have turned the corner until it sees a significant flow from the well stopped. “And it is not entirely obvious to me that that is happening,” Overton said.
“I do worry we are not removing as much oil as we ought to be getting,” he added.
The “spillcam” video of the leak continued to show a big brown billowing cloud of oil and gas 5,000 feet below the surface.
In Washington, President Barack Obama said he has been talking closely to Gulf Coast fishermen and various experts on BP’s catastrophic oil spill not for lofty academic reasons but “so I know whose ass to kick.”
The salty words, part of Obama’s recent efforts to telegraph to Americans his engagement with the crisis, came in an interview in Michigan with NBC’s “Today” show.
He strongly defended his role in dealing with the crisis that began with the April 20 explosion on a BP-leased oil rig in the Gulf, killing 11 workers.
“I was down there a month ago before most of these talking heads were even paying attention to the Gulf,” Obama told NBC’s Matt Lauer. “I was meeting with fishermen in the rain talking about what a potential crisis this could be.”
As for restoration efforts in the Gulf, Allen indicated that cleaning up the mess could prove to be more complex than previously thought.
“Because what’s happened over the last several weeks, this spill has disaggregated itself,” Allen said. “We’re no longer dealing with a large, monolithic spill. We’re dealing with an aggregation of hundreds or thousands of patches of oil that are going a lot of different directions.”
When finished, the new cap would be connected to a riser pipe floating about 300 feet below the surface. Engineers say the riser would be deep enough to avoid damage from hurricanes that can roar over the Gulf but shallow enough to allow drill ships to quickly reconnect to the flow.
Meanwhile, crews worked to skim, scour and chemically disperse the substance from the water.
Tony Wood, director of the National Spill Control School at Texas A&M; University in Corpus Christi, said BP’s success at containing some of the leaking oil will not dramatically reduce the amount of time it will take to clean up the Gulf.
“We have a large volume still escaping,” he said. “Cleanup levels up to twice as large as we have right now will go on for at least a year.”
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