Well cap captures more oil, but outlook gloomy

The cap on the blown-out BP well in the Gulf of Mexico is capturing half a million gallons a day – anywhere from a third to three quarters of the oil spewing from the bottom of the sea, officials said today.

But the hopeful report was offset by a warning that the far-flung slick had broken up into hundreds or even thousands of patches of oil that may inflict damage that could persist for years.

US Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen, the government’s point man for the crisis, said the break-up had complicated the clean-up.

“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”.

Admiral Allen said the containment cap installed late last week was 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 a mile underwater.

In a tweet, BP said it collected 316,722 gallons from midnight to noon yesterday.

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 build-up 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,” Adm Allen said.

BP says 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 clean-up 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 BP senior vice president Kent Wells.

BP and US 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 were estimates, some of which had been provided by the government.

Ed Overton, a Louisiana State University professor of environmental sciences, suggested it was too early for anyone to claim victory. The spill, estimated at anywhere from 23 million gallons to 50 million gallons, is already the biggest in US 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,” Prof Overton said. “They may have turned the corner, they may not have. We just don’t know right now.”

He said he did not believe BP would have turned the corner until it saw a significant flow from the well stopped. “And it is not entirely obvious to me that that is happening,” he said.

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, US president Barack Obama sought to reassure Americans that “we will get through this crisis”.

“This will be contained,” he said. “It may take some time, and it’s going to take a whole lot of effort. There is going to be damage done to the Gulf Coast, and there is going to be economic damages that we’ve got to make sure BP is responsible for and compensates people for.”

But in a forecast that was by turns hopeful and gloomy, Adm 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,” he 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 a riser pipe floating about 300ft below the surface. Engineers say the riser would be deep enough to avoid damage from hurricanes that can roar over the Gulf of the Mexico, but shallow enough to allow returning drill ships to quickly reconnect to the flow.

The oil – brick red in places, chocolate brown in others – has washed up on the shores of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and the Florida Panhandle.

Some of the most enduring images of the disaster are of pelicans and other wildlife drenched in oil.

In a sweltering metal building in Fort Jackson, Louisiana, workers in biohazard suits were cleaning oiled brown pelicans and releasing them back into the wild.

After getting 192 in the last six weeks, 86 were delivered on Sunday, the biggest rescue since the BP rig exploded on April 20, spewing oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

At Barataria Bay, Louisiana, just west of the mouth of the Mississippi River, large patches of oil the consistency of pancake batter floated in the still waters. A dead sea turtle caked in brownish-red oil lay splayed out with dragonflies buzzing by.