BP achieves first major success to slow oil leak

BP’s efforts to slow the flow of oil into the Gulf of Mexico appeared to be working Monday as a mile-long suction tube captured about a fifth of the crude spouting from a broken pipe and transferred it to a waiting ship, company officials said.

The suction operation is not stopping the flow of oil, but it is the first major success BP has achieved after weeks of failure in trying to check the oil gusher rising from nearly a mile below the gulf surface.

“We’re very encouraged by this,” BP Chief Operating Officer Doug Suttles said Monday. “We’re already capturing over 1,000 barrels a day.”

Engineers are slowly increasing the oil uptake and the tube could suck as much as half of the leak into the ship Enterprise, he said.

In the meantime, BP is working on what the company hopes will be a more complete fix, a “top kill” operation that could be in place by the end of the week. The procedure involves pumping heavy liquid into the blown-out well head to block the oil and water that is pouring into the mangled riser pipe feeding the spill.

“That should stop the flow,” Suttles said.

Cement would then be pumped into the well hole to permanently seal it. “There is absolutely no intent to ever, ever produce this well,” Suttles said. “We intend to fill up the bottom portion of this well with cement.”

As BP reported progress with the leak, a group of U.S. senators asked the Justice Department to open an investigation into whether the company made false statements regarding its ability to respond to oil spills.

“BP has consistently understated the risks associated with the Deepwater Horizon oil drilling operation,” said Sen. Benjamin L. Cardin (D-Md.), among seven Democrats and an independent, Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who called on Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. to open an investigation.

“The corporation has also overstated its ability to respond to a catastrophic failure at the well site. The American people have a right to know whether these misrepresentations were intentional and if they violated federal civil or criminal statutes.”

A BP spokesman declined to comment.

The request came as Congress turned its attention to the U.S. Minerals Management Service’s enforcement of environmental and safety rules.

“It seems to me that the Minerals Management Service did not ask enough of you and the other oil companies doing deep-water drilling,” Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, told BP America President Lamar McKay during a hearing Monday. “And the companies didn’t do enough themselves, including BP, to prepare for an accident.”

Also on Monday, Minerals Management said that its associate director who oversees offshore drilling programs, Chris Oynes, would retire at the end of the month.

And the White House said it would establish an independent commission to investigate the spill, in the mold of the commissions that looked into the Three Mile Island nuclear disaster in Pennsylvania and the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger.

An administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the commission would be empowered to investigate “a range of issues including industry practices; rig safety; federal, state and local regulatory regimes; federal governmental oversight, including the structure and functions of [the Minerals Management Service]; and environmental review and other protections.”

Federal officials downplayed weekend reports that large plumes of oil had been found below the surface by a research team. The scientists detected what they think are hydrocarbons in the water, said Charlie Henry, scientific support coordinator within the federal National Ocean Service. But the water samples are not cloudy with oil and have not been analyzed.

“We don’t even know for sure what is in those samples,” Henry said.

BP’s Suttles said that when he flew over the gulf Monday morning, the spill appeared to be the smallest since containment efforts had begun. But there are concerns that the slick is brushing up against the Loop Current, which curls around the central Gulf of Mexico and heads through the Florida Straits to join the Gulf Stream.

In the worst-case scenario, the loop could carry oil up the Florida coast of Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties, where local winds and currents could drive it toward shore.

The Coast Guard said the bulk of the oil remained miles from the current, although a branch of the slick was approaching it. “But it has not entered the Loop Current,” Coast Guard Rear Adm. Mary Landry said Monday.

The Coast Guard also said that 20 tar balls had been found off Key West, but a lab analysis would have to determine their origin, the Associated Press reported.

The Interior Department said it had continued to issue some permits to modify existing drilling operations in the gulf since President Obama called a halt to all new gulf drilling in the aftermath of the Horizon accident.

The permits that have been issued allow existing operations to drill around mechanical problems in a previously permitted well, or to drill to a new target from an existing well bore. Interior officials said those permits were often issued for safety reasons and only to operations that had passed a new round of safety inspections.

bettina.boxall@latimes.com

richard.simon@latimes.com

Jim Tankersley of the Washington bureau and David Fleshler and William E. Gibson of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel contributed to this report.