McClatchy Newspapers: Coast Guard rejects BP oil leak plan as too little, too late, & AP: Coast Guard To BP: Speed it up, stop the spill & McClatchy Newspapers: Obama overlooked Key points in giving OK to offshore drilling & Agence France-Presse: Obama insists anger at BP not directed at Britain

McClatchy Newspapers
Posted on Sat, Jun. 12, 2010

Coast Guard rejects BP oil leak plan as too little, too late

Mark Seibel
McClatchy Newspapers
 
WASHINGTON – The Coast Guard has told oil giant BP that its proposed plan for containing the runaway Deepwater Horizon well does not take into account new higher estimates of how much oil is gushing into the Gulf of Mexico and demanded that the company provide a more aggressive plan within 48 hours.
In a letter dated Friday and released Saturday, Coast Guard Rear Adm. James A. Watson also said that BP was taking too much time to ready ships to capture oil spewing from the well.
 
“You indicate that some of the systems you have planned to deploy may take a month or more to bring online,” Watson, who is the federal on-scene coordinator for the Deepwater Horizon disaster, wrote Doug Suttles, BP’s chief operating officer. “Every effort must be expended to speed up the process.”
 
The 48-hour deadline is the second the Coast Guard has given BP in the past week and indicates a growing recognition on the part of the Coast Guard that both BP and the Obama administration underestimated for weeks the amount of oil pouring from the well, which began leaking when an April 20 explosion shattered the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, killing 11 workers. The rig sank two days later, taking a mile of well pipeline with it.
 
For weeks, the Obama administration and BP said the spill was leaking 5,000 barrels a day – about 210,000 gallons. On May 27, a government task force of scientists revised that estimate to a minimum of 12,000 to 25,000 barrels a day, and possibly much more. Then on Thursday, the government doubled those estimates to between 20,000 and 50,000 barrels a day, saying those, too, may understate the size of the leak because a decision to shear off the well’s riser pipe to add a “top hat” containment device may have unleashed more oil.
 
Watson said the new estimates were the reason for the new deadline, saying the plan Suttles outlined was only “consistent with previous flow rate estimates.”
 
“Because those estimates have now been revised . . . it is clear that additional capacity is urgently needed,” he said.
 
BP said it would respond to Watson’s letter “as soon as possible.”
 
BP and Coast Guard representatives have been meeting throughout the week, Coast Guard officials have said, to refine the plan, which Suttles outlined in a letter to Watson dated Wednesday – before the new flow rate estimates were released. In his letter, Suttles said the plan had been outlined on Tuesday to Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and Energy Secretary Steven Chu. “No objections were raised,” he wrote.
 
Under that proposal, BP outlined two phases – a temporary one involving three recovery ships and a jerry-rigged system combining the “top hat” containment device with hoses already in place from the “top kill” procedure that failed to stanch the well last month, and a more permanent one that involves construction of two new risers from the well that would be serviced by two large recovery ships that are en route to the site now.
 
BP said that the temporary phase would bring the amount of oil captured to 20,000 to 28,000 barrels a day by the end of next week. Most of that oil would be recovered by the Discoverer Enterprise drilling ship, which has been collecting around its stated 15,000-barrels-per-day capacity through the “top hat” but that Coast Guard officials believe can be pushed to 18,000 barrels a day. The remaining 5,000 to 10,000 barrels per day would be taken up by a second vessel, the Q4000 drilling platform, which would burn the oil in a rarely used, if not unprecedented, procedure. BP vice president Kent Wells said Friday that burning could begin as soon as Monday.
 
The burning idea has provoked some experts to raise questions about the health and environmental effects of the process.
 
Containment capacity would be pushed further during the temporary phase by the addition of a third vessel, the drill ship Discoverer Clear Leader, which would take on an additional 5,000 to 10,000 barrels a day when it is operational in mid July, Suttle wrote.
 
In the second, more permanent phase, Suttles said BP was building two permanent floating risers to provide oil to the Taisa Pisces and the Helix Producer recovery ships. Each riser takes about a month to complete, Suttles said. One is expected to be finished next week. Work on the second began Monday, June 7. Once operational, the new risers and ships would have capacity to receive between 40,000 and 50,000 barrels per day, BP said.
 
The plan foresees both the Q4000 and the Discoverer Clear Leader discontinuing operations once the new floating risers are operational, but says the Discoverer Enterprise would remain on site and could provide additional capacity, if needed.
 
In offering an estimate of the total capacity of the temporary phase, BP’s plan is more cautious than numbers Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen used in press briefings with reporters. On Friday, Allen said capacity would reach 38,000 barrels a day once the Discoverer Clear Leader is operational.
 
BP’s numbers may be more realistic, however. While Allen has said that the Discoverer Enterprise could be pushed to receive 18,000 barrels per day, the actual amount it’s recovered has declined by a few hundred barrels since it peaked at 15,800 barrels on Wednesday. On Thursday, the ship recovered 15,400 barrels and on Friday, it recovered 15,500 barrels, BP reported Saturday.
 
How much oil will flow to the Q4000 and the Discoverer Clear Leader is also uncertain. Neither vessel will be “pumping” the oil up from the sea, but instead will rely on the oil’s natural pressure to push it up through hoses that were originally used to push drilling mud into the well’s dysfunctional blowout preventer during the “top kill” effort. Based on the size of the hoses, the maximum amount likely to flow through to those ships would be 10,000 barrels per day, but could be less, depending on the oil reservoir’s pressure.
 
Both Suttles and Wells warned that there could be additional delays in the plans because of adverse weather and conditions at the drill site, which officials describe as crowded with dozens of ships.
 
© 2010 Miami Herald Media Company. http://www.miamiherald.com
 
Read more: http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/06/12/v-print/1677002/coast-guard-rejects-bp-oil-leak.html#ixzz0qfvaDv4s
 
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Coast Guard to BP: Speed it up, stop the spill

Published: Saturday, June 12, 2010, 4:06 PM     Updated: Saturday, June 12, 2010, 4:11 PM

The Associated Press

ORANGE BEACH, Ala. — The Coast Guard has demanded that BP step up its efforts to contain the oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico by the end of the weekend, telling the British oil giant that its slow pace in stopping the spill is becoming increasingly alarming as the disaster fouled the coastline in ugly new ways today.
The Coast Guard sent a testy letter to BP’s chief operating officer that said the company urgently needs to pick up the pace and present a better plan to contain the spill by the time President Barack Obama arrives on Monday for his fourth visit to the beleaguered coast. The letter, released Saturday, follows nearly two months of tense relations between BP and the government and reflects the growing frustration over the company’s inability to stop the largest environmental disaster in U.S. history.
 
The dispute escalated on the same day that ominous new signs of the tragedy emerged on the beaches of Alabama. Waves of unsightly brown surf hit the shores in Orange Beach, leaving stinking, dark piles of oil that dried in the hot sun and extended up to 12 feet from the water’s edge for as far as the eye could see.
 
It was the worst hit yet to Alabama beaches. Tar-like globs have washed up periodically throughout the disaster, but Saturday’s pollution was significantly worse.
 
“This is awful,” said Shelley Booker of Shreveport, La., who was staying in a condominium with her teenage daughter and her friends near the deserted beach about 100 miles from the site of the spill.
 
Scientists have estimated that anywhere between about 40 million gallons to 109 million gallons of oil have spewed into the Gulf since a drilling rig exploded April 20, killing 11 workers. The latest cap installed on the blown-out well is capturing about 650,000 gallons of oil a day, but large quantities are still spilling into the sea.
 
The Coast Guard initially sent a letter to BP on Wednesday asking for more details on its plans to contain the oil. BP responded, saying a new system to trap much more oil should be complete by mid-July. That system’s new design is meant to better withstand the force of hurricanes and could capture about 2 million gallons of oil daily when finished, the company said.
 
But Coast Guard Rear Adm. James A. Watson said in a follow-up letter Friday he was concerned that BP’s plans were inadequate, especially in light of revised estimates this week that indicated the size of the spill could be up to twice as large as previously thought.
 
“BP must identify in the next 48 hours additional leak containment capacity that could be operationalized and expedited to avoid the continued discharge of oil … Recognizing the complexity of this challenge, every effort must be expended to speed up the process,” Watson said in the letter addressed to chief operating officer Doug Suttles.
 
Suttles said the company will respond to the letter by Sunday night.
 
“We’ve got a team of people looking to see, can we accelerate some items that are in that plan and is it possible to do more,” Suttles said as he spoke to workers at a command center where he thanked BP employees and contractors for their work in cleaning up the spill. “There are some real challenges to do that, including safety.”
 
The letter and deadline come just before Obama is set to visit the Gulf Coast on Monday and Tuesday. On Saturday, Obama reassured British Prime Minister David Cameron that his frustration over the oil spill in the Gulf was not an attack on Britain.
 
The two leaders spoke by phone for 30 minutes Saturday to soothe trans-Atlantic tensions over the spill. Cameron also has been under pressure to get Obama to tone down the criticism, fearing it will hurt the millions of British retirees holding BP stock that has taken a beating in recent weeks.
 
Cameron’s office said the prime minister told Obama of his sadness at the disaster, while Obama said he recognized that BP was a multinational company and that his frustration “had nothing to do with national identity.”
 
BP is hard at work trying to find new ways to capture more oil, but officials say the only way to permanently stop the spill is a relief well that will drill sideways into the broken well and plug it with cement.
 
Right now, a containment cap sitting over a well pipe is siphoning off around 653,100 gallons of oil to a ship the ocean surface. That oil is then unloaded to tankers and taken ashore.
 
To boost its capacity, BP also plans to trap oil using lines that earlier shot heavy drilling mud deep into the well during a failed attempt to stop the flow. This time, those lines will work in reverse. Oil and gas from the well will flow up to a semi-submersible drilling rig where it will be burned in a specialized boom that BP estimates can vaporize a maximum 420,000 gallons of oil daily. Another ship should be in place by mid-July to process even more oil.
 
News that the federal government had given BP until the end of the weekend to speed up the oil containment was met with raised eyebrows and long sighs as locals gathered to barbecue, drink Budweiser and listen to classic rock at a fishing benefit in Pointe a la Hache, La.
 
“I’ll believe it when I see it,” said Dominic Bazile, a firefighter.
 
Meanwhile, Gulf states affected by the disaster are putting the squeeze on BP, seeking to protect their interests amid talk of the possibility that BP may eventually file for bankruptcy.
 
The attorney general in Florida and the state treasurer in Louisiana want BP to put a total of $7.5 billion in escrow accounts to compensate the states and their residents for damages now and in the future. Alabama doesn’t plan to take such action, while Mississippi and Texas haven’t said what they will do.
 
As of the end of March, BP had only $6.8 billion in cash and cash equivalents available.
 
© 2010 al.com.
 

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McClatchy Washington Bureau
Posted on Fri, Jun. 11, 2010

Obama overlooked key points in giving OK to offshore drilling

Steven Thomma | McClatchy Newspapers

last updated: June 11, 2010 07:47:56 PM
 
WASHINGTON – Weeks before the world had ever heard of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, President Barack Obama stood in the Roosevelt Room of the White House poring over maps of oil drilling sites in the Gulf of Mexico, Alaska and elsewhere.
 
Satisfied that he knew all he needed to know and confident that it was safe, he decided to propose expanded offshore drilling.
 
“This is not a decision that I’ve made lightly,” he said when he unveiled his proposal on March 31.
 
“Oil rigs today generally don’t cause spills,” he added two days later. “They are technologically very advanced. Even during Katrina, the spills didn’t come from the oil rigs, they came from the refineries onshore.”
 
On April 20, the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded, setting off the largest oil spill in U.S. history. It drove Obama to freeze the proposal he’d just made.
 
An in-depth review by McClatchy reveals how Obama reached that initial decision to expand offshore drilling _ and why he failed to get information that might have led him instead to delay or oppose it and perhaps even raise questions about the deepwater drilling that was already under way.
 
Obama did roll back some of the offshore drilling that the George W. Bush administration had approved on Bush’s last day in office. However, Obama never challenged the Bush era’s fundamental faith in the oil industry or its ability to clean up a massive spill. Instead, he embraced expanded offshore drilling, in part to win Republican support for broader legislation to curb climate change.
 
“He deserved to be more skeptical,” said Stephen Hess, a veteran of four White Houses back to the Eisenhower administration and an expert on how presidents do their job.
 
“They hadn’t thought through the various ramifications. They should have, obviously. But it didn’t seem obvious at the time.”
 
“Not well thought through,” said Rick Steiner, a retired University of Alaska marine scientist. “If they had really done their job, they would have understood there was high risk here.”
 
Indeed, Obama and his team overlooked some important points as they prepared to give the green light to more offshore oil drilling. Expanding the drilling was something he’d promised to do during his campaign, when gas prices topped $4 a gallon, and it was a lure he planned to use to win Republican votes for legislation aimed at curbing climate change.
 
Among their oversights:
 
Obama thought that funneling information through White House “czars” such as energy and environment adviser Carol Browner would get him all the data he needed.
 
He failed to drill into the government bureaucracy to test that information. He didn’t, for example, ask about the Interior Department’s Minerals Management Service, which had prepared a report in 2000 on the dangers of deepwater drilling that proved to be eerily predictive of what happened in the Gulf. The MMS regulates offshore drilling.
 
He never talked to the Coast Guard about its 2002 oil-spill drill in the Gulf or to the man who ran it, Adm. Thad Allen, who later would oversee the response to the Deepwater Horizon spill.
 
He didn’t reach out to outside experts, such as the National Academy of Engineering, to question claims that deepwater drilling technology was dependable.
Top Obama administration officials say that they did an exhaustive job marshaling information for more than a year, and that the president asked what he needed to ask when it arrived at his desk. Anyone, they said, would grow complacent about the safety of offshore drilling after decades without a major spill.
 
“It’s really important to understand you have decades of nothing going wrong,” said one senior administration official, who spoke only on the condition of anonymity as a matter of White House policy.
 
“The last time you saw a spill of this magnitude in the Gulf, it was off the coast of Mexico in 1979,” a second senior administration official said. “If something doesn’t happen since 1979, you begin to take your eye off of that thing.”
 
Obama’s management of the March 31 oil decision is important not simply because the April 20 disaster turned a global spotlight on the entire subject. The governing style of Obama, a new president with no prior executive experience, has been subject to constant second-guessing.
 
How he makes decisions when no one is watching is arguably as illuminating – perhaps more so – as how he decides when the whole world is watching, such as his long deliberation last fall over whether to send more troops to Afghanistan.
 
Then, he held three months of meetings, publicized with White House photos released to the media and documented with briefings to reporters backed by notes taken during the sessions.
 
This time, he met twice with the top administration officials on the oil drilling question. Aides couldn’t recall details of the deliberations, such as the date of the last meeting with the president or the length of the memo they gave him on oil drilling.
 
“I had never had an inquiry about how we made that decision,” one top aide said, until after “one of them blew up in the Gulf.”
 
For Obama, a former campaign adviser said, the decision to expand offshore drilling was born in the 2008 campaign, when gasoline prices were soaring and Republican rival Sen. John McCain of Arizona was scoring with his promise of more production – drill, baby, drill – to drive down prices.
 
Obama also warmed to new offshore drilling as part of a bipartisan proposal in Congress, led by Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., to allow expanded drilling while pushing higher fuel efficiency.
 
The president and his political aides looked at proposing expanded drilling as a way to win Republican support for a broader energy bill aimed at climate change.
 
“Involving offshore drilling way back in the campaign, and then in March, has been part of a series of bank shots all intended to address other issues, as opposed to being a free-standing priority,” said an environmental activist who’s close to the White House, who asked not to be identified because he was criticizing the administration.
 
“It was not a full-blown policy proposal,” the activist said. “It was bait in the water.”
 
“Absolutely not true,” Browner said in an interview. “There was a lot of time and energy spent on this … trying to determine what was the appropriate thing to do.”
 
Interior Secretary Ken Salazar gathered information about oil drilling for a year, including public hearings in Alaska, California, Louisiana and New Jersey. More than 530,000 comments were collected.
 
Browner was the West Wing aide responsible for taking Salazar’s recommendations and all viewpoints to Obama. She’s the assistant to the president for energy and climate change, with a deep background in environmental work. She was an aide to Al Gore, the director of the Florida Department of Environmental Protection and the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency in the Clinton administration.
 
She said she didn’t advocate choices inside the White House.
 
“My job is to be an honest broker … on behalf of the Cabinet agencies,” she said, “to ensure that they are able to present their best recommendations to the president and that he has all of the information he needs to make a decision.”
 
Despite the brouhaha over Obama’s reliance on White House aides dubbed “czars” to oversee areas of policy, all modern presidents rely on top aides to funnel information to them, particularly when it comes from more than one department.
 
Bush, for example, insisted that one presidential assistant “own” any given issue so the president would know whom to go to and who could be held accountable, according to Bradley H. Patterson, the author of an authoritative book on White House management, “To Serve the President.”
 
After being updated periodically by Browner on the discussions that were under way, Obama received the final summary of recommendations first in a memo – aides couldn’t recall how many pages it was – then in a meeting for a final decision.
 
In the Roosevelt Room, Obama met with Browner, Salazar and others, including Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, Deputy Chief of Staff Mona Sutphen and Budget Director Peter Orszag.
 
DISSENT
 
Administration officials said they heard dissent and changed the proposal in response. They banned drilling in Alaska’s Bristol Bay and refused to propose new drilling leases for Alaska’s Beaufort Sea.
 
“There were people who argued that certain areas should be protected, so, for example, the Beaufort Sea got protected,” Browner said.
 
However, the March 31 decision left in place plans to allow Shell Oil to start drilling five exploratory wells already leased in the Beaufort Sea, plans that weren’t frozen until May 27, five weeks after Deepwater Horizon exploded.
 
Obama never reached out himself to prominent dissenters such as marine scientist Steiner, who’d argued to Interior against expanding offshore drilling. Steiner had worked on oil spill responses from the Exxon Valdez in 1989 through today’s Gulf spill.
 
“He didn’t talk to me,” Steiner said.
 
DIGGING INTO HIS GOVERNMENT
 
As he reviewed the pending decision, Obama didn’t ask for more information about the Minerals Management Service. Now infamous but little-known then, the MMS is the primary agency that oversees oil drilling. In 2000, it prepared a report that warned of the possibility of a major spill that could start with a fire atop a rig, noting that “retaining well control in deep water may be a problem,” and said that spreading oil could both remain underwater and rush ashore.
 
That report was shelved during the Bush years as the government bowed to the claimed technological infallibility of the oil industry. In fact, the agency became known for cozy relationships between regulators and the oil industry, something Salazar set out to fix when he took office last year.
 
Obama recently conceded that he was wrong to trust the oil companies.
 
“Where I was wrong was in my belief that the oil companies had their act together when it came to worst-case scenarios,” he said. “Now, that wasn’t based on just my blind acceptance of their statements. Oil drilling has been going on in the Gulf, including deep water, for quite some time. And the record of accidents like this we hadn’t seen before.”
 
He also laid some blame on the MMS.
 
“Prior to this accident happening, I think there was a lack of anticipating what the worst-case scenarios would be. And that’s a problem,” he said. “And part of that problem was lodged in MMS and the way that that agency was structured. That was the agency in charge of providing permitting and making decisions in terms of where drilling could take place, but also in charge of enforcing the safety provisions.”
 
Yet Obama didn’t ask about the MMS when he was weighing whether to expand drilling on the Outer Continental Shelf.
 
“In making OCS decisions, you wouldn’t have necessarily needed to ask about sort of what information MMS has,” the first senior administration official said. “In making the OCS decisions, the focus was not based on MMS information per se.”
 
The official said that the president “was aware that Ken Salazar had been making changes in terms of the ethics issues that had been quite significant in the prior administration” and the president was satisfied that Salazar “had taken important steps.”
 
While not asking about the MMS is potentially embarrassing in hindsight, presidential expert Hess said it was unrealistic to expect a president to know much about an otherwise obscure agency.
 
“MMS is probably an agency that never crops up on the White House radar. It’s in the bowels of the bureaucracy,” Hess said. “No president pays equal attention to every piece of the bureaucracy.”
 
COAST GUARD
 
Obama also didn’t personally quiz the Coast Guard or Adm. Thad Allen, who’d run an oil spill exercise off Louisiana in 2002 and who’d be the national commander of any federal oil spill response.
 
“Not that I’m aware of,” the first senior official said.
 
“The president understood that there are safety plans associated with each lease. What are they called? Contingency response plans, something like that. … That’s part of the safety checks and balances in the system.”
 
The administration officials also noted that Obama’s drilling proposal would require further studies and permits before any drilling started.
 
GOING OUTSIDE
 
Some presidents like to reach outside official channels for unfiltered advice. Bill Clinton, for example, loved to call people late into the night.
 
Obama did, too, when he was seeking the office. For example, he reached out to private-sector experts – such as Duke Energy CEO Jim Rogers – discussing energy with them in his campaign headquarters for three hours straight one Monday in June 2008.
 
“That was the beginning, I think, of the thought process” leading to expanded offshore oil drilling, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said.
 
The president also has expressed a desire to seek outside expertise since the oil spill.
 
“We’re relying on experts who’ve actually dealt with oil spills from across the globe,” Obama said at a news conference, adding that he and his administration would talk to the National Academy of Engineering, the National Laboratories and experts in academia.
 
He didn’t seek such outside expertise until the spill, however, at least not to ask about oil drilling technology in deep water or oil-spill response plans.
 
“Beyond routine meetings with ‘green group’ environmental organization CEOs and policy staff, I don’t think the administration reached out,” said Dianne Saenz, the communications director for Oceana, one of the environmental groups. “We did not know the specifics of the March 31 announcement on expanded offshore drilling areas before it was made.”
 
Browner said Obama did reach out.
 
“He’s met several times with representatives of the environmental community who would have raised this issue,” she said. “He also has met with various groups of business leaders who were interested in energy reform, some of whom would have raised this issue.
 
“They were not brought in specifically on this issue; they were brought in on energy more broadly.” Asked why Obama didn’t ask for outside opinions as he did in his campaign, she said that he now had staff do that.
 
“You have all these advisers; their job is to go out and do those sorts of things,” she said. “Our job is to synthesize this information and bring it back to him.”
 
Inside the White House, aides say that they and their president did the best they could, given the context before the unprecedented accident.
 
“The best piece of evidence we had was that there hadn’t been a problem for decades,” Browner said. “There are very few industries where you can probably look back over a several-decade period and not have a large-scale problem.”
 
“Nobody expected the damned thing to blow up,” said Hess, the presidential scholar. “A lot of things don’t get that presidential attention because the president is busy and historically, statistically, it’s not apt to happen very often.
 
“If somebody tells you something happens in Kandahar, you better challenge it if lives are at stake. But most things in the bureaucracy, you have some faith in the people you’ve asked to gather the information.”
 
Ultimately, it’s up to Obama to decide whether he’s satisfied with how he reached his decision to propose more offshore drilling.
 
A president’s decisions are only as good as the information that generates them. That point was driven home in early 1961, when an inexperienced President John F. Kennedy blindly signed off on what would become the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba.
 
Kennedy learned. Afterward he personally questioned experts skeptically, including his own generals. Eighteen months later, facing the Cuban Missile Crisis, he developed an advisory system that remains a model of executive decision-making, one that helped the world escape its closest brush with nuclear war.
 
McClatchy Newspapers 2010
 

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Breaking News / World
http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/breakingnews/world/view/20100613-275340/Obama-insists-anger-at-BP-not-directed-at-Britain
 
Obama insists anger at BP not directed at Britain
 
Agence France-Presse
 
Posted date: June 13, 2010
 
NEW ORLEANS–President Barack Obama said his sharp criticism of BP was not aimed at Britain Saturday as the US Coast Guard increased pressure on BP to contain the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.
Obama, who had been referring to BP by its former full name “British Petroleum,” told Britain’s Prime Minister David Cameron that “frustrations about the oil spill had nothing to do with national identity,” a spokeswoman for the prime minister’s Downing Street office said.
 
Obama has summoned BP Chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg to meet with him in Washington next Wednesday, criticized chief executive Tony Hayward, fired a warning over shareholder payouts and said he wants to know “whose ass to kick” over the catastrophe.
 
British newspapers in turn have demanded that Cameron — who has defended the need for a “financially strong BP” — stand up to Obama amid fears that his rhetoric was stoking an anti-British backlash.
 
“The prime minister stressed the economic importance of BP to the UK, US and other countries,” the Downing Street spokeswoman said. “The president made clear that he had no interest in undermining BP’s value.”
 
The White House said the pair, who spoke by phone, “discussed the impact of tragic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, reiterating that BP must do all it can to respond effectively to the situation.”
 
Separately, the US Coast Guard ordered BP to improve its plans to contain the spill within 48 hours given new US government data this week that suggested the flow was as much as double previous estimates.
 
“Because those estimates have now been revised and estimate a substantially higher flow of oil from the Macado 252 well, it is clear that additional capacity is urgently needed,” it said in a letter dated June 11 and released Saturday.
 
US government data on Thursday suggested the flow of the leak — before a containment system was put in place last week — was between 25,000 and 30,000 barrels a day and could be upwards of 40,000 barrels a day.
 
But the containment system BP is using is only capturing around 28,000 barrels a day, and the company’s operation to boost that rate to between 40,000 to 50,000 barrels is not currently scheduled to be ready until July.
 
There will be no permanent solution until the first of two relief wells is completed, in August at the earliest, allowing the leak to be plugged with cement.
 
“I am concerned that your current plans do not provide for maximum mobilization of resources to provide the needed collection capacity consistent with revised flow estimates,” US Coast Guard Rear Admiral James Watson told BP in the letter.
 
“I am also concerned that your plan does not go far enough to mobilize redundant resources in the event of an equipment failure with one of the vessels or some other unforeseen problem,” he added.
 
“BP must identify in the next 48 hours additional leak containment capacity that could be operationalized and expedited to avoid the continued discharge of oil.”
 
BP meanwhile has indicated it may finally bow to US pressure and suspend its dividend payment due July 27.
 
Suspending the dividend is “an option that’s up for discussion,” a BP spokesman told AFP.
 
“No decision has been made on it, we are looking at options,” said the spokesman. “There’s a board meeting on Monday but they are not necessarily going to take a decision on it then.”
 
Britain’s Times newspaper said BP was preparing to place the second-quarter dividend money — an expected 1.7 billion dollars — in an escrow account in an attempt to ease political pressure on the firm.
 
Top US lawmaker Nancy Pelosi has urged BP not to pay dividends and echoed pleas from Obama not to shortchange those hit by the disaster.
 
The final price tag for BP is still unknown because it is unclear how much oil is flowing from the well, how long the spill will last, and how far the oil will travel.
 
Analysts estimate that BP’s total liability for the environmental catastrophe, including the cleanup, compensation claims, government penalties, and a host of civil lawsuits, could reach 30 to 100 billion dollars.
 
The firm’s share price has fallen more than 40 percent since the Deepwater Horizon rig it leased exploded on April 20, prompting speculation about bankruptcy and a takeover bid.
 
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