Gulf oil leak may be bigger than BP says

June 9, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

Associated Press

NEW ORLEANS

Though BP is capturing more oil from its blown-out well with every passing day, scientists on a team analyzing the flow said Tuesday the amount of crude still escaping into the Gulf of Mexico may be considerably greater than what the government and the company have claimed.

Their assertions — combined with BP’s rush to build a bigger cap and its apparent difficulty in immediately processing all the oil being collected — have added to the impression that BP and the government still are floundering in dealing with the catastrophe and may be misleading the public.

The cap that was put on the ruptured well last week collected about 620,000 gallons of oil Monday and an additional 330,000 by noon Tuesday funneled it to a ship at the surface, said Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, the government’s point man on the crisis. That would mean the cap is capturing better than half of the oil, based on the government’s estimate that around 600,000 to 1.2 million gallons a day are leaking from the bottom of the sea.

The undersea efforts came as BP Chief Operating Officer Doug Suttles struck an upbeat tone about the anticipated progress of the oil containment, saying that the spill “should be down to a relative trickle by Monday or Tuesday.”

Suttles told The Associated Press in a stop in Alabama that the arrival of a second vessel in the coming days to help pump the oil from the deepwater gusher will allow engineers to make significant progress, even as others involved in the disaster were much less optimistic and continued to criticize BP over its litany of failures to control the spill.

A team of researchers and government officials assembled by the Coast Guard and run by the director of the U.S. Geological Survey is studying the flow rate and hopes to present its latest findings in the coming days on what is already the biggest oil spill in U.S. history.