Abandoned by Big Oil, BP stands alone on drilling record

WASHINGTON -- Big Oil's top executives are casting BP PLC as a rogue player in the offshore industry amid fresh evidence that the Gulf of Mexico spill is likely much larger than anyone thought.

The blown BP well off New Orleans is likely spewing 35,000 to 60,000 barrels of oil a day into the Gulf of Mexico, a panel of government and independent experts said Tuesday.

That's up from an earlier estimate of 20,000 to 40,000 barrels, and well shy of the roughly 18,000 barrels a day of oil that BP is recovering at the site now.

"This estimate brings together several scientific methodologies and the latest information from the sea floor, and represents a significant step forward in our effort to put a number on the oil that is escaping from BP's well," Energy Secretary Steven Chu said in a statement.

It marks at least the fourth time that the government and BP have revised their best guess of how much oil is gushing from the ruptured well.

The new estimate comes as the heads of several major U.S. producers accused BP Tuesday of not following safe industry drilling practices in the lead-up to the catastrophic April 20 blowout of the Deepwater Horizon rig.

The executives made the comments to a U.S. congressional committee looking into the disaster.

The heads of five oil giants stood shoulder to shoulder as they swore to tell the truth to the House energy and environment subcommittee.

One of them - BP America president Lamar McKay - was the clear outlier Tuesday, fingered by his industry colleagues as a risky operator and repeatedly savaged by members of Congress.

The unambiguous message from top executives of BP rivals Exxon Mobil, Chevron and Royal Dutch Shell:

It's not drilling on the outer reaches of the continental shelf that is the problem; it's BP.

The comments came as U.S. President Barack Obama moved Tuesday to take the damage claims stemming from the accident out of the hands of BP. On Wednesday, he's slated to meet top BP executives at the White House.

The hearing was briefly disrupted by protesters, who were escorted out of the packed hearing room after calling for an end to all offshore drilling.

Eager to get the government to lift an emergency ban on deepwater drilling and avoid tougher regulation down the road, industry executives painted BP as a rogue operator which disregarded standard industry drilling practices.

"We would not have drilled the well the way they did," Exxon chairman and CEO Rex Tillerson bluntly told members of the House subcommittee.

For example, Exxon would have used a different cement to build the well casing, designed the well differently and responded more aggressively to early signs of trouble, Mr. Tillerson said.

He pointed out that 14,000 deepwater wells have been drilled around the world, with few problems until now.

"It's not a well that we would have drilled," echoed Shell Oil president Marvin Odum.

Chevron chairman and CEO John Watson said his company too would have done things much differently. "Not all standards that we would recommend or that we would employ were in place," he said of the Deepwater Horizon spill. He cited BP's well-casing design and mechanical barriers as examples.

The comments come a day after the committee sent a 25-page letter to BP chief executive officer Tony Hayward, accusing the company of making decisions that "posed a tradeoff between cost and well safety."

But under questioning, BP's rivals acknowledged that their own spill response plans aren't significantly different.

And Exxon's Mr. Tillerson conceded that no disaster plan would be adequate to prevent damage from a spill of this magnitude. "When these things happen, we are not well-equipped to handle them," he testified. "It's just a fact of the enormity of what we're dealing with."

Asked by one committee member if offshore drilling is inherently risky, BP's Mr. McKay said, "There's risk in everything."

Meanwhile, BP suffered another setback in its effort to mitigate the damage from the spill when lightning struck a ship collecting leaked oil, igniting a fire. The fire, which was quickly put out, occurred on the Discoverer Enterprise, where engineers are siphoning oil through a cap on top of the well.

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