BP accused at trial of lying about oil spill

In the frantic days after the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill, BP lied about how much oil was leaking from its Macondo well and took too long to cap it, plaintiffs’ lawyers have said at the opening of the second phase of the company’s trial.

A lawyer for BP told the US District Court in New Orleans on Monday that the company did not misrepresent the oil flow and followed US standards before and after the spill, the worst marine pollution disaster in the United States.

The British oil company is fighting to hold down fines that could hit $18bn at the trial, which will determine damages. BP’s annualized earnings, based on last quarter, are running at about $17bn.

“BP refused to spend any time or money preparing to stop a deepwater blowout at its source,” said Brian Barr, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, which include people affected by the spill, the US government and Gulf states, and BP’s former contractors.

“BP then made the situation worse,” Barr said. “By lying about the amount of flow from the well.”

The second phase of the trial, expected to last a month, is focused on how much oil spewed from the well and whether efforts to plug it were adequate.

“BP had a response plan that was fully consistent with US standards for spill preparedness,” said a BP lawyer, Mike Brock. “BP did not misrepresent the flow rate in a way that caused a delay in the shut in of the well. It made reasonable decisions based on what was known at each step along the way.”

Fines could reach $17.6bn

Internal company emails presented at the trial on Monday showed BP saying publicly after the spill in April 2010 that 5,000 barrels of oil a day were leaking into the ocean when it knew up to 100,000 barrels a day could have been leaking.

John Wilson, a professor at New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology who was called to testify against the company, said BP’s reliance on unsubstantiated estimates of the size of the leak contributed to poor decisions on how to plug the well.

BP took 87 days and several attempts to cap it.

In the costliest scenario the fines under the Clean Water Act could reach $17.6bn – an amount well beyond the $42bn BP has so far set aside for clean-up, compensation and damages.

The US government says 4.9m barrels were spilled in the worst offshore disaster in US history. BP says 3.26m barrels leaked from the well during the nearly three months it took to cap the blowout at the Deepwater Horizon rig.

Both those totals include 810,000 barrels that were collected during clean-up that the judge has agreed to exclude.