10/06/2010

Katie Howell, E&E reporter
A new staff report from the president’s commission investigating the Gulf of Mexico spill blasts the Obama administration for low flow-rate estimates and for assertions that much of the oil was “gone” after the leaking well was capped.

The draft staff working paper from the presidential commission says the Obama administration’s underestimation of how much oil was spilling into the Gulf of Mexico this summer and later remained there undermined public confidence in the government’s ability to handle the disaster.

The paper, one of four released today, details the government’s progress in shaping the flow-rate estimate throughout the summer. Government estimates initially pegged 1,000 barrels a day as the most accurate estimate for the leaking BP PLC well, but that number was quickly revised upward to 5,000 barrels a day, a figure that remained the go-to estimate for a month despite challenges from independent scientists. An interagency team of federal scientists later revised the number several times upward, finally settling on a peak flow rate of 62,200 barrels a day in early August.

“Federal government responders may be correct in stating that low flow-rate estimates did not negatively affect their operations. Even if responders are correct, however, loss of the public’s trust during a disaster is not an incidental public relations problem,” the report says.

“The absence of trust fuels public fears, and those fears in turn can cause major harm, whether because the public loses confidence in the federal government’s assurances that beaches or seafood are safe, or because the government’s lack of credibility makes it harder to build relationships with state and local officials, as well as community leaders, that are necessary for effective response actions,” it says.

Government officials, including senior White House aides and Cabinet officials, have acknowledged that the initial estimates were gross miscalculations and relied primarily on data from BP PLC. But the officials said their response efforts were always based on worst-case estimates, like the figure of 162,000 barrels a day that BP used in its drilling permit application.

While the commission’s staff is still evaluating those assertions, the report suggests the government should have disclosed those worst-case figures.

“Because the worst-case figures that emerged within days of the spill, although imprecise, ended up being roughly equivalent to the actual flow rate, we cannot at this point conclude that inaccurate official estimates adversely impacted the response and clean-up operations,” the report says. “It may, however, have been better practice for the government to disclose the estimates that drove the Unified Command operational plan — that is, the operational worst-case discharge figures.”

But federal officials say they were up front with the public about what the worst-case flow rate could be. In early May, retired Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said the worst-case scenario could be more than 100,000 barrels a day, Office of Management and Budget acting Director Jeffrey Zients and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Director Jane Lubchenco said today. They also defended the response effort.

“The federal government response was full force and immediate, and the response focused on state and local plans and evolved when needed,” Zients and Lubchenco said in a statement. “As directed by the President, the response was based on science, even when that pitted us against BP or state and local officials, and the response pushed BP every step of the way.”

Marcia McNutt, director of the U.S. Geological Survey and leader of the team that calculated the government estimates of the flow rate throughout the summer, told a joint hearing by the Interior and Energy departments last month that the government would be able to calculate an accurate flow rate within hours in the event of a future spill.

“We were going blind on how to calculate the flow rate for a mile-deep well,” McNutt said. In a future spill, “we know exactly what we would do, what technique to use and under what circumstances. We would have the right technology in the field within hours to days.”

Environmentalists are already using the report’s findings to blast the administration on its spill response and drilling regulation.

“How can we trust the government to expand drilling when they were trying to hide the problem in the first place? When our government aligns itself with the interests of oil corporations at the expense of the truth, the people and the environment lose,” Greenpeace USA Director Phil Radford said in a statement.

“This underscores the need for independent research that is not tainted by corporate dollars,” he added. “The impacts of this will be with us all for decades, and it is clearer than ever that it is going to take time — and a lot of work — to fully understand the true impacts of this disaster.”

Oil budget
The report also blasts comments made by White House climate adviser Carol Browner and NOAA’s Jane Lubchenco about a government paper released in August that described the fate of the oil in the Gulf.

That oil budget report estimated the fate of the oil and detailed how much had been burned and skimmed. It was meant to aid responders as an operational tool, but some government officials, including Browner and Lubchenco, hailed its findings immediately after its release. Browner and Lubchenco said on separate occasions that the report showed a significant quantity of the oil was “gone.”

“These references … likely contributed to public perception of the budget’s findings as more exact and complete than the budget, as an operational tool, was designed to be,” the report says. “The oil budget was never meant to be a precise tool, and its rollout as a scientific report obscured some important shortcomings.”

The oil budget and the federal government’s presentation of it have been widely criticized by lawmakers and outside scientists, primarily because it does not include any data used to calculate the findings.

The presidential commission’s report suggests that “government scientific study groups disclose more of their underlying methodologies, assumptions and data, allowing for greater review and input from the rest of the scientific community.”

Arctic drilling
The commission staff today also released three other reports. One questions the adequacy of Shell Oil Co.’s spill-response plan for its Arctic drilling proposal.

Shell is pushing to drill exploratory wells in Alaska’s Chukchi Sea, but plans have been put on hold as the federal government reviews offshore drilling safety in the wake of this summer’s spill.

“Shell’s exploratory drilling [contingency plan] is currently the only formal industry proposal for contingency planning and oil spill response in the Arctic. While Shell’s plan acknowledges many of the challenges of spill response in the Arctic, questions remain as to whether its solutions to those challenges are realistic,” the report says.

The report also says the presidential commission should examine regulatory standards that govern Arctic drilling and whether they need to be amended and should consider calling for increased Coast Guard capacity to respond to a potential Arctic spill.

Other reports from the commission staff detail government decisionmaking and use of dispersants (see related story).

The reports were written by staff members of the bipartisan commission and do not necessarily reflect the views of the entire panel.

Special thanks to Richard Charter