President Barack Obama wants BP Plc to set up an escrow account to pay the claims for damages caused by its oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, White House advisor David Axelrod said.
“We want to make sure the money is escrowed for the businesses and want to make sure the money is independently administered so it’s not slow-walked,” Axelrod said today on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
Axelrod’s comments came as the Obama administration steps up pressure on BP to control the spill and pay for cleanup. The US Coast Guard gave BP until tomorrow to find more capacity to contain the leak. BP’s board meets tomorrow to discuss whether to reduce or defer its second-quarter dividend.
“The board will be looking at a number of options when it meets tomorrow,” Sheila Williams, a spokeswoman for BP, said after Axelrod spoke. “No decision is expected this week.”
Obama will address the nation after he returns from a two-day visit to the Gulf Coast beginning tomorrow to check on the oil spill progress, Axelrod said. The president is scheduled to meet June 16 at the White House with BP’s chairman, Carl-Henric Svanberg, and other company officials.
Establishing the reserve account will be a subject for “discussion between us and BP, but it has to be substantial enough to meet the claims,” Axelrod said.
“BP has the resources to meet the claims and we’re going to make sure they do,” he said.
Scientists and researchers doubled their estimates of the spill’s size on June 10, and BP’s efforts don’t “provide the needed collection capacity consistent with the revised flow estimates,” said Rear Admiral James A Watson, the federal on-scene coordinator, in a letter dated June 11. It was sent to Doug Suttles, BP’s chief operating officer for exploration and production, and was released yesterday.
BP plans to almost triple its capacity to capture oil from its leaking well to as much as 50,000 barrels a day by mid-July, the Coast Guard said June 11. The plan calls for two pairs of production ships and shuttle tankers to replace a cluster of vessels at the site, Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen, the government’s national incident commander for the spill, said June 11 at a press conference in Washington.
BP collected about 15,040 barrels of oil and flared 32.9 million cubic feet of gas yesterday, the company said today in a statement on its website.
The well was releasing between 20,000 barrels and 40,000 barrels a day, twice as much as previously estimated, before BP cut away a kinked pipe on June 3, US government scientists and independent researchers reported June 10. They are still studying the current leak rate. BP recovered about 7,570 barrels of oil from midnight to noon yesterday.
Based on government estimates, the drillship isn’t capturing as much of the spill as BP predicted earlier this month. In a June 4 interview with CBS, Suttles said the system would be capable of capturing as much as 90 per cent of the flow.
The additional ships planned next month will give BP backup pumping ability in the event that one of the vessels can’t be used, Allen said.
“The issue is for BP to move quickly,” Allen said.
In its application for the well, BP told the government it was prepared for a worst-case oil spill of 250,000 barrels a day.
UK Prime Minister David Cameron and President Obama, meantime, talked yesterday and Cameron expressed his “sadness” at the “human and environmental catastrophe” caused by the spill.
“The president and prime minister agreed that BP should continue — as they have pledged — to work intensively to ensure that all sensible and reasonable steps are taken as rapidly as practicable to deal with the consequences of this catastrophe,” Cameron’s office in London said in an e-mailed statement.
