ENERGY giant BP presented a plan to contain more than 50,000 barrels a day of oil gushing from a ruptured Gulf of Mexico well by the end of June as President Obama likened the effects of the spill to the September 11 attacks.
“In the same way that our view of our vulnerabilities and our foreign policy was shaped profoundly by 9/11, I think this disaster is going to shape how we think about the environment and energy for many years to come,” Mr Obama told Politico.com.
He said he would be making a fresh bid to get Congress to pass a major energy and climate bill, vowing to “move forward in a bold way in a direction that finally gives us the kind of future-oriented … visionary energy policy that we so vitally need and has been absent for so long.”
Mr Obama told Politico.com he could not predict whether the nation would transition completely from an oil-based economy within his lifetime but that “now is the time for us to start making that transition and investing in a new way of doing business when it comes to energy.”
The U.S. president’s comments came as BP outlined a new plan to capture more than 50,000 barrels of oil by June, two weeks earlier than originally suggested, a White House official said.
In a letter to the U.S. government, the oil company said it was bringing a vessel for producing and storing oil from South America, two additional lightering tankers from Europe and 3,800-foot, six-inch flexible pipe from Brazil to reinforce the existing efforts to suck up crude from leaking well.
The revised plan was submitted as Obama began a tour of the affected states today on his fourth visit to the Gulf of Mexico since the disaster.
“The president is going down to the Gulf on Monday and Tuesday to the states he hasn’t visited – Alabama, Mississippi and Florida. When he returns he will address the nation from the White House,” top aide David Axelrod said.
BP said the cleanup and compensation effort cost had risen to about $1.6 billion so far, which included “the cost of the spill response, containment, relief well drilling, grants to the Gulf states, claims paid, and federal costs.”
The revised figure came ahead of a meeting of BP’s board in London, who were planning to consider demands to defer second-quarter dividend payments to fund the relief effort.
U.S. officials demanded yesterday that BP set up a special fund to pay oil spill claims and said President Barack Obama will give a rare White House address tomorrow, in a sign of the seriousness of the disaster both for the country and his presidency.
In other reports, BP executives were warned they could face up to 15 years in jail for their role in the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster.
Jody Freeman, Professor of Environmental Law at Harvard Law School, told The (London) Times that if criminal negligence could be proved then “the law certainly provides for prison for environmental crimes.”
She said that under normal circumstances, the maximum criminal penalty in such a case would be up to three years in prison, but in those where death and serious injury had occurred, as in the case of the Gulf oil spill, this could increase to 15 years.
Further weight was given to the claims as it emerged executives from the world’s other major oil companies were preparing to tell a House subcommittee that the accident “was preventable,” the Financial Times reported.
Bosses from Exxon-Mobil, Shell, Chevron and ConocoPhillips prepared to distance themselves from BP, according to planned statements seen by newspaper sources, which said the explosion on board the Deepwater Horizon would not have happened if the industry’s “best practices” were followed.
The move was intended to make the case for continued new drilling in the deep waters of the Gulf.
Eleven people were killed when the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded on April 20, unleashing a torrent of crude into the Gulf of Mexico that has created America’s worst ever oil spill.
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