Ugh:
NEW ORLEANS — The federal government Monday allowed BP to keep the cap shut tight on its ruptured Gulf of Mexico oil well for another day despite news the well is leaking at the top and something is seeping from the sea floor nearby.
The Obama administration's point man for the spill, retired Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, said early Monday that the company promised to watch closely for signs of new leaks around the mile-deep well, which has stopped gushing oil into the water since the experimental cap was closed Thursday.
Late Sunday, Allen said something was detected seeping near the broken oil well and demanded in a sharply worded letter that BP step up monitoring of the ocean floor. Allen didn't say what was seeping. White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said Monday afternoon the seepage was about two miles from the well head. He also said the well head is leaking.
On the face of it, it seems that priority number one here should be to get the well connected back up to containment vessels so the oil can be siphoned to the surface. The purpose of the cap is not to permanently seal the well -- it's to keep oil from flooding the Gulf of Mexico. If the cap is damaging the well, creating new leaks that could ultimately become more difficult to contain than the current leak, then the cap is defeating its own purpose.
It's especially troubling that BP appears to be taking a confrontational attitude towards government officials. AP reports:
With the newly installed cap keeping oil from BP's fractured well out of the Gulf during a trial run, this weekend offered a chance for the oil company and government to gloat over their shared success — the first real victory in fighting the spill. Instead, the two sides have spent the past two days disagreeing over what to with the undersea machinery holding back the gusher.
The apparent disagreement began to sprout Saturday when Allen said the cap would eventually be hooked up to a mile-long pipe to pump the crude to ships on the surface. But early the next day, BP chief operating officer Doug Suttles said the cap should stay clamped shut to keep in the oil until a permanent fix.
As always, it's possible this report doesn't capture the complete picture. But that caveat aside, there is absolutely no way on Earth that BP should be given leeway to make decisions that Thad Allen (and other officials, like Steven Chu) aren't completely comfortable with. It's crucial that Allen explain what's going on -- including an explanation of the disagreement, and how it was resolved.
Probably the most troubling aspect of this is that BP has a different set of incentives here than the general public. From the standpoint of the general interest, it doesn't really matter whether the well is capped or the oil is captured -- the only thing that matters is that it isn't flowing into the Gulf. Therefore, if your goal is satisfying the public interest, it makes the most sense to deploy the less risky technique.
BP, however, would much rather see the well capped than to have the oil be captured. There are three big reasons for this: (1) If the full flow of oil is captured, we'll know precisely how much oil has been leaking, and given that the fines could run to $4,300 per barrel, BP has hundreds of millions if not billions riding on not knowing the answer; (2) Every barrel of oil brought to the surface and burned is money that BP will never be able to get back; and (3) Even if it's captured, BP's lawyers may be concerned that because the oil was leaked from a well, that they will be fined for the amount of oil captured from the well.
One question that this raises is whether BP is concerned that the flow rate is so great that it can't actually capture all the oil. BP has enough capacity to capture about 80,000 barrels per day. If they are worried that the flow rate is actually higher than that, the image of them capturing 80,000 barrels per day, yet still having oil leaking into the Gulf would be absolutely devastating.
Whatever the case, it's crucial that the government reassert its authority here. There should be no tolerance for BP's cowboy antics -- there's no reason to give them, the benefit of the doubt, and if something goes wrong, BP and Republicans will just blame the Obama administration anyway.