Senate Democrats shelve oil spill legislation until fall

Senate leaders Tuesday shelved offshore drilling legislation that would lift the liability cap on oil spills, while BP moved ahead with a pumping operation to plug its infamous Gulf of Mexico well.

Unable to round up the votes to take up the spill bill this week before the Senate breaks for its summer recess, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) postponed a vote at least until the fall.

“We tried jujitsu. We tried yoga. We tried everything we can with Republicans to get them to come along with us,” Reid lamented. He held out hope the Senate could act when it returns in September. But it may be tougher to pass legislation in the hyper-partisan weeks before the November midterm election.

The Democratic-drafted Senate bill ran into opposition from Republicans and some Democrats from energy-producing states, mostly because of a provision to lift a $75-million liability cap for economic damages caused by a spill. Opponents said it would drive smaller oil companies from the gulf.

The legislation, a version of which was passed by the House last week, also repeals an 1851 law that Transocean, the rig owner in the BP well blowout, has tried to use to limit its liability in the Deepwater Horizon disaster. The bill would write into law the Obama administration’s revamping of the scandal-ridden agency that oversees energy exploration and provide more money for conservation projects funded with federal gas and oil royalties. The Senate Democrats’ bill would also ramp up a per-barrel spill tax.

Although Democrats have a majority in the Senate, they need 60 votes to overcome Republican-led filibusters.

“The Republicans have chosen … to stand with oil companies instead of taxpayers and coastal families, a position that I think would infuriate every American who watched for several months, 200 million gallons of oil gush in the Gulf of Mexico,” Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) said at a Capitol press conference.

“Sen. Reid is predictably blaming Republicans for standing in the way of a bill that he threw together in secret and without input from almost any other member of the Senate,” said Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski, top Republican on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. “Instead of playing the blame game, the majority leader should have allowed an open and transparent process where both sides could have contributed.”

In the gulf, BP started to pump heavy mud into its damaged well Tuesday afternoon after an initial test yielded the results engineers were looking for. It “was textbook,” BP Senior Vice President Kent Wells said of the pumping test. “It went exactly as we would have expected.” By filling the well’s pipe system with dense drilling mud, BP is hoping to block all the upward paths oil could take from its reservoir miles beneath the sea bed. The duration of the procedure will depend on how much of the well network they have to fill. It could take hours or a few days, Wells said.

After the pumping is finished, scientists will decide how to plug the well bottom with cement, the final step in permanently sealing the well, which leaked more than 200 million gallons of oil before it was topped with a mechanical cap last month.

Even if cement is shot into the well from the top, federal officials have said they will not declare the BP well dead until they can check its bottom when a relief well bores into it later this month.

richard.simon@latimes.com bettina.boxall@latimes.com