Less than a month before the Macondo well blew out and the Deepwater Horizon exploded and sank killing 11 workers, BP plc (NYSE:BP) had filed a document with federal regulators claiming that the company could skim and remove more than 490,00 barrels/day of oil in the Gulf if the need should arise.

When the need arose shortly afterwards, BP has been able to skim an average of just 900 b/d, according to The Washington Post. The leaking well has pumped some 2 million barrels into the Gulf, of which just over 67,000 barrels have been recovered by skimming. BP has burned off about 238,000 barrels and captured about 632,000 barrels directly at the site of the leak.

The company’s plan for recovering spilled oil depended on deploying two companies that BP said had the trained staff and equipment to deal with spills: The Marine Spill Response Corp., a non-profit company, and the National Response Corp., a for-profit. The Post reports that Marine Spill was never asked if it could meet BP’s plan, and National Response has refused to comment.

BP’s optimistic estimate of its ability to clean up a major spill is consistent with its equally optimistic estimates of how much oil was leaking into the Gulf. Originally the company estimated that only 1,000 barrels a day were being pumped into the water. By late May that number had jumped to as much as 25,000 barrels/day and now stands at 35,000-60,000 barrels/day.

BP now plans to increase its containment procedures by attaching a floating riser containment system to the wellhead. In order to do that, the company must first remove the cap that is in place and replace it with another that uses four risers, each connected to a different surface vessel. While the cap is being changed, more oil will flow unimpeded into the Gulf.

The company and the US Coast Guard are also banking on the relief well to completely stop the flow of oil. The drilling on the first relief well is about a week ahead of schedule, but the really hard part is only about to start. Sensors inside the drill pipe will have to align the relief well with the original well bore, a target less than 10-inches in diameter.

Although the Coast Guard and BP are confident that the relief well scheme will work, they are preparing other contingencies in the event that it does not. One would involve a tie-back to a nearby platform, essentially installing a pipe from the Macondo well and feeding the crude oil to a platform several miles away.

Another contingency plan calls for laying pipelines to other nearby production platforms and pumping the oil from the Macondo well back into the reservoirs that have been depleted. A third option would simply allow the Macondo well to keep producing as long as the containment cap captures 100% of the flow of oil and gas from the well.

Because nothing like this disaster has ever happened before, neither BP nor the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement (the new disguise for the Minerals Management Service) is as confident as they sound. How could they be? Virtually everything they have said has been contradicted by events.

That’s not to say they’re lying. They don’t know, and they’ve never known, precisely what’s going on or how to make it stop. They’ve made the most fundamental public relations mistake there is, and they’ve made it over and over. The company and the feds have over-promised and under-delivered.

Only the federal government’s culpability in this disaster is likely to save BP from extinction.

Paul Ausick

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