Spill panel hits administration on oil flow data

The commission probing the BP oil spill says low-balled oil flow estimates might have hampered attempts to plug the ruptured well, and White House officials might have blocked release of “worst case” discharge models.

Those are two of the findings in a series of four staff papers released Wednesday by the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling, a panel the White House created to explore the “root causes” of the disaster and recommend policy changes.

One paper explores the escalating estimates of how much oil was spewing from the blown-out Macondo well after the April 20 explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig.

“The Commission staff has also been advised that, in late April or early May 2010, [the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] wanted to make public some of its long-term, worst-case discharge models for the Deepwater Horizon spill, and requested approval to do so from the White House’s Office of Management and Budget. Staff was told that the Office of Management and Budget denied NOAA's request,” the paper states.

In the initial days after the accident, federal officials and BP initially provided estimates that 1,000 barrels per day were flowing from the well but shortly revised them to 5,000 barrels per day. 

But those initial figures soon came under attack from outside scientists, and a federal task force that included outside experts convened in mid-May — called the Flow Rate Technical Group — offered a series of escalating estimates in the subsequent months. 

In August, the federal team said 62,000 barrels per day were escaping from the well at the beginning of the spill, falling to 53,000 by the time the well was finally capped in mid-July.

Thad Allen, who served as the National Incident Commander, and other federal officials have said the low initial estimates did not hinder the massive mobilization in response to the spill — the paper notes that responders based their actions on a worst-case scenario.

The paper says the commission staff is still evaluating these claims but adds that inadequate estimates might have affected the well containment operation, which went through a series of failures before the flow was stopped in July. The well was later permanently sealed with drilling mud and cement.

“Moreover, it is possible that inaccurate flow-rate figures may have hindered the subsea efforts to stop and to contain the flow of oil at the wellhead. A later staff working paper will consider the impact, if any, of flow-rate estimates on well control and containment,” the paper adds.

It notes that early official estimates might have been more accurate if the federal government had either made better use of in-house scientific expertise or “enlisted outside scientific expertise by making available the data on which government estimates were based.”

“The government appears to have taken an overly casual approach to the calculation and release of the 5,000 bbls/day estimate — which, as the only official estimate for most of May, took on great importance,” the paper states.

Elsewhere, the paper explores the White House’s controversial August rollout of an “oil budget” that concluded about 75 percent of the oil had been burned, skimmed, captured, evaporated or dissolved, or dispersed. The document came under attack for providing an overly rosy picture of the spill’s impact.

The paper faults White House energy adviser Carol Browner and NOAA Administrator Jane Lubchenco for emphasizing that the report was peer reviewed by federal and outside scientists.

“These references to peer review by two senior officials in a White House press briefing 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 paper states.

The commission staff later add: “[T]he Oil Budget was a rough operational tool, and its findings were neither as clear nor as reassuring as the initial rollout suggested.” The draft staff paper is meant to inform the commission's final report to the White House early next year.

This post was updated at 5:59 p.m.