PENSACOLA, Fla. — Oil giant BP will deploy a second containment system by mid-June to capture more crude gushing from the undersea blowout, federal officials said Monday, as President Barack Obama continued to take a tough stance against the petroleum company, saying he wants claims settled quickly.
“The economic impact of this disaster is going to be substantial, and it is going to be ongoing,” Obama said at a Cabinet meeting to address the containment efforts. “I do not want to see BP nickel-and-diming these businesses that are having a tough time.”
He also said Monday that he’s been talking closely to Gulf Coast fishermen and various experts on BP’s catastrophic oil spill “so I know whose ass to kick.”
The salty words, part of Obama’s efforts to telegraph to Americans his engagement with the crisis, came in an interview in Michigan with NBC’s “Today” show.
In a move expected to increase the recovery of oil spilling from the broken well 5,000 feet below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico, federal officials said BP will use the hoses and manifold from the earlier, failed “top kill” operation to siphon oil and gas from the blowout preventer to a ship on the surface.
A separate ship already stationed over the well and siphoning oil through a containment cap is capturing about 11,000 barrels a day, said U.S. Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, the government’s point man on the recovery effort.
The two containment systems are projected to capture about 20,000 barrels of oil a day, Allen said.
Yet, as the amount of oil captured from the underwater well increases, the fight to recover oil on the surface and elsewhere has grown more complex.
Allen said that response teams are no longer battling one monolithic spill but “patches of oil going in lots of different directions.”
He added that no one knows exactly how much oil is gushing daily from the busted undersea well, but more privately owned boats are responding to the recovery effort — helping to skim oil from the surface and to lay booms designed to capture the crude before it reaches shore.
Allen added that the government, and not BP, is now in charge of measuring the amount of oil gushing from the broken well.
However, he said, “we still haven’t established what the flow rate is.”
