White House to Create Panel to Study Gulf Oil Spill

WASHINGTON — The White House will establish an independent commission to investigate the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, administration officials said Monday.

Several lawmakers and outside experts have called for the creation of such a panel, modeled on those that investigated the Three Mile Island nuclear plant accident and the Challenger shuttle explosion. The panel will contain no current members of the government and will have a broad charter.

The president will create the panel by executive order “in coming days,” a White House official said. “The commission will take into account the investigations underway concerning the causes of the spill and explore a range of issues including: industry practices; rig safety; Federal, state, and local regulatory regimes; federal governmental oversight, including the structure and functions of M.M.S.; and environmental review and other protections,” the official said, requesting anonymity to discuss the matter in advance of the presidential announcement.

The main administration effort to investigate the causes of the accident and the government and industry responses to it are led by the United States Coast Guard and the Minerals Management Service, the unit of the Interior Department that is responsible for overseeing offshore oil operations. The role of both agencies is an important part of any overall inquiry, so the Obama administration has been in essence investigating itself.

Democratic lawmakers have introduced parallel measures in the House and the Senate proposing that a distinguished independent commission investigate the spill. Experts with long experience in investigating accidents agree that such a panel is needed, saying that however honest or well-intentioned each internal investigator may be, no agency can effectively judge its own role in contributing to an accident.

A new round of Congressional hearings into the spill opened here on Monday afternoon, with the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs taking testimony on the government and private sector response to the spill.

During the hearing, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano defended the administration’s actions after the explosion, saying that officials had engaged in an “all-hands-on-deck response to this event.”

“We planned for a worst-case scenario from the moment the explosion occurred, and now, almost four weeks later, we are continuing to sustain a strong and effective response,” she said.

Ms. Napolitano acknowledged, however, that the government was largely at BP’s mercy in stopping the leak and addressing much of the oil in the water.

“Frankly,” she said, “the federal government has limited capability and expertise in responding to wellhead incidents on the sea floor. Nonetheless, the federal government has mobilized scientists and industry experts to collaborate with BP to identify and execute the best strategies for sealing the well, and the president has tasked the Department of Energy to participate in providing any possible expertise on that front.”

Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, independent of Connecticut, the committee’s chairman, said he wanted improvements in how agencies and companies respond, “so that we can guarantee that if it does happen again, the oil companies and the government will not be left to scurry about, trying to figure out how to stop the oil from gushing into the gulf, like firefighters trying to extinguish fires already burning and consuming a neighborhood.”

He said the emergency response plan submitted by BP and approved by federal regulators seemed geared only to handling oil on the surface, not deep underwater. The leak is coming from a drilling pipe lying on the sea bed 5,000 feet below the surface.

Mr. Lieberman said the leak could be as much as 100,000 barrels a day.

Also on Monday, Representative Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, raised new questions about the use of chemical dispersants to break up the oil plume deep under the surface of the gulf. The Environmental Protection Agency has approved the use of a trademarked oil-dispersing chemical known as Corexit both on the surface and closer to the source of the leaking oil, at a depth of 5,000 feet.

In a letter to Lisa P. Jackson, the E.P.A. administrator, Mr. Markey said that some formulations of Corexit had been banned in Britain because of harmful effects on sea life. More than half a million gallons of the dispersants have already been used in the gulf, and hundreds of thousands more gallons are being prepared for use.

“The release of hundreds of thousands of gallons of chemicals into the Gulf of Mexico could be an unprecedented, large and aggressive experiment on our oceans,” said Mr. Markey, chairman of the House Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment. “The information regarding the chemical composition, efficacy and toxicity of the dispersants currently being used is scarce.”

He asked E.P.A. to provide information on the effect of water temperature and pressure on the dispersant, a combination of solvents, surfactants and other compounds. He also requested detailed data on the subsea tests that led E.P.A. and the United States Coast Guard to approve its use a mile below the surface.

He also asked for information on whether the chemicals accumulate in marine life over time and whether they could affect human health through gulf seafood.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar issued new rules for drilling on public lands. The rules do not immediately affect offshore operations but are likely to be reflected in the recommendations Mr. Salazar delivers to the White House at the end of the month after a review of the BP accident.

The rules provide for additional public input before government-managed lands are opened to oil and gas leasing. They also will limit the use of so-called categorical exclusions from national environmental laws. Such exemptions will now only be granted in “extraordinary circumstances,” Mr. Salazar said in a statement.

The new process will also include visits by government scientists and regulators to all potential parcels to be offered for oil and gas leasing. Until now, many public lands were opened to development based only on studies, maps and data from previous lease sales.

The rules are designed to add a layer of environmental protection as well as to protect the Interior Department from the extensive litigation that often accompanies lease sales.

The longtime top federal regulator of offshore drilling in the gulf said on Monday that he was resigning at the end of the month, according to a Department of Interior official.

The regulator, Chris C. Oynes, ran the New Orleans office of the Minerals Management Service for 12 years, overseeing all offshore operations and revenue collections, until he was promoted to a senior position in Washington in 2007. His tenure in the gulf coincided with a 50 percent increase in offshore oil production, but also in a number of allegations that the minerals service had failed to collect billions of dollars in revenues owed the federal government and had been lax in its oversight of the safety practices of offshore drillers.

Mr. Salazar announced last week that he was splitting the Minerals Management Service into two agencies, one responsible for safety and environmental oversight, the other for leasing and revenue collection programs.

Interior Department officials refused to say whether Mr. Salazar asked for Mr. Oynes’s resignation. Mr. Oynes did not respond to an e-mail message seeking comment.

After more than three weeks of trying to stop the gushing oil leak, engineers had achieved some success Sunday using a mile-long pipe to capture some of the oil and divert it to a drill ship on the surface some 5,000 feet above the wellhead.

After two false starts, engineers successfully inserted a narrow tube into the damaged pipe from which most of the oil is leaking.

In a briefing Monday afternoon with reporters, Doug Suttles, BP’s chief operating officer, said he was “very encouraged” with efforts to capture some of the oil through the mile-long, four-inch-wide tube. He said it was capturing a little more than 1,000 barrels of oil a day from the blown well and its 21-inch-wide riser pipe, and funneling the oil into the tanker ship and that this rate could be increased in the coming days.

Mr. Suttles also said during the briefing that the company would never again try to produce oil from the well, though BP did not rule out drilling elsewhere in the reservoir.

“The right thing to do is permanently plug this well, and that’s what we will do,” Mr. Suttles said.

“We want to slowly optimize it to try to capture as much of the oil and gas as we can without taking in a large amount of seawater,” he said.

Ms. Napolitano and Mr. Salazar cautioned that the tube was not “a solution.”

“We will not rest until BP permanently seals the wellhead, the spill is cleaned up, and the communities and natural resources of the Gulf Coast are restored and made whole," Ms. Napolitano and Mr. Salazar said in a joint statement on Sunday.

So far, the spill has not spoiled beaches or delicate wetlands, in part because of favorable winds and tides and in part because of the use of booms to corral the oil and chemical dispersants.

The capture operation on Sunday was the first successful effort to stem the flow from the damaged well, which has been spewing oil since a rig exploded on April 20 and sank.

The announcement by BP came on the heels of reports that the spill might be might much worse than estimated. Scientists said they had found giant plumes of oil mixed with water in the depths of the gulf, including one as large as 10 miles long, 3 miles wide and 300 feet thick.