Bill Nelson Grows Skeptical Of BP’s Top Hat
The New York Times reports this morning that government expert Ira Leifer has concluded that, rather than diminishing the rate of oil being leaked into the Gulf of Mexico, as BP has reported, the top hat operation has in fact made the Deepwater Horizon oil spill worse. The report brings into question BP’s honesty with the public about the oil spill. BP had claimed that only a thousand barrels per day was leaking from the Deepwater Disaster site. Now, BP claims that it’s capturing ten times that amount from its top hat funnel, while the waters around the device remain as filled with crude oil as much as ever.
Americans’ growing skepticism of BP’s assertions about its work to staunch the rupture of the crude oil reservoirs under the Gulf of Mexico has now reached the U.S. Senate. Yesterday, Senator Bill Nelson openly questioned BP’s statements about what’s going on with the spill. Nelson said,
“As the oil continues to gush, this problem is going to become more and more acute. It could become acute in a number of ways. We are being told–and I can certainly say this Senator has become a skeptic about what is correct information. Remember when we were told it was only 1,000 barrels of oil a day that was gushing into the gulf? A couple of weeks later, that was revised to 5,000 barrels of oil a day, and then that was revised to 12,000, but the report was omitted that said it could be as high as 25,000.
Now we are told that this attempt called the top hat; that is, an attempt to put a cap on the top of that blowout preventer where they cut off the riser pipe, and the oil is going up to the surface to a tanker–they are saying that is now 10,000 barrels a day, but look at the live video and see how much of it is still gushing outside of that top hat.
So how much is going into the gulf? Well, if it is 25,000 barrels a day, if that is the accurate figure, there is still 15,000 barrels of oil a day going into the gulf. And if it keeps going–and the Coast Guard admiral said yesterday it is going to go until September, until they can get the relief wells down and try to plug it with cement down near the oil reservoir, which is some 18,000 feet below the seabed. If it keeps gushing that amount all the way to September, it will be close to the largest oilspill there has ever been on planet Earth in the sea, which was the Ixtoc in the Bay of Campeche spill that spewed for 10 months. By the way, it was only in 150 feet of water, and they couldn’t get it stopped. This is in 5,000 feet of water.”
