BP’s oil response plan full of holes

The operator of the sunken Transocean Deepwater Horizon platform that led to as much as 80,000 barrels of oil pouring into the Gulf of Mexico per day wildly overstated its capacity to handle a spill.

In documents submitted to the U.S. Minerals Management Service in 2009, BP PLC claimed it was capable of skimming 17.6 million gallons of oily water per day in a Gulf spill.

Tuesday, the company said it had recovered 6 million gallons of oily water—total.

Because the ratio of oily water to oil is ten to one, that means that BP has collected a total of 600,000 gallons.

BP’s Oil Spill Response Plan is a 582-page document full of facts and figures on deploying skimmers, dispersants and burning.  According to the report, the company claims that it can control a spill of up to 12.6 million gallons of oil per day, which is 60 times greater that the Deepwater Horizon gusher.