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NEW ORLEANS (AP) — On the day the Deepwater Horizon sank, BP officials warned in an internal memo that if the well was not protected by the blow-out preventer at the drill site, crude oil could burst into the Gulf of Mexico at a rate of 3.4 million gallons a day, an amount a million gallons higher than what the government later believed spilled daily from the site.

The email conversation, which BP agreed to release Friday as part of federal court proceedings, suggests BP managers recognized the potential of the disaster in its early hours, and company officials sought to make sure that the model-developed information wasn’t shared with outsiders. The emails also suggest BP was having heated discussions with Coast Guard officials over the potential of the oil spill.

The memo was released as part of the court proceedings to determine the division of responsibility for the nation’s worst offshore oil disaster, which began when the BP-leased Deepwater Horizon exploded April 20, 2010, killing 11 men about 50 miles southeast of the Louisiana coast. The first phase of the trial is set to start Feb. 27.

BP officials declined to comment on the emails late Friday.

The official amount of oil that flowed from the well was pegged at 206 million gallons from at least April 22 until the well was capped on July 15, a period of 85 days. That’s a daily flow rate of about 2.4 million gallons — two-thirds of the way to BP’s projection of what could leak from the well if it was an “open hole.” BP has disputed the government’s estimates.

Having an accurate flow rate estimate is needed to determine how much in civil and criminal penalties BP and the other companies drilling the well face under the Clean Water Act.

In the memo, a BP official urges not to share the flow-rate projections and refers to the “difficult discussions” the company was having at the time with the Coast Guard.

Gary Imm, a BP manager, told Rob Marshall, BP’s subsea manager in the Gulf, to tell the modeler doing the estimates “not to communicate to anyone on this.”

“A number of people have been looking at this we already have had difficult discussions with the USCG on the numbers,” Imm said in the email string, referring to the Coast Guard and flow estimates.

On April 23, 2010, the Coast Guard, relying on BP’s remotely operated vehicles, said no oil was leaking from the well a mile under the sea. A day later, Coast Guard Rear Adm. Mary Landry announced that oil was leaking an estimated rate of 42,000 gallons a day. The Coast Guard and BP did not divulge how they reached that figure.

In the second week after the spill, the official flow rate was increased to 210,000 gallons a day, an estimate the government continued to use until May 27.

On May 24, BP informed Congress they used an “undisclosed method to generate much higher figures” than the official estimates, according to a report from a presidential commission investigating the spill. BP estimated that the flow rates were between 210,000 gallons and 1.6 million gallons a day, the January 2011 report said.

As the spill grew into weeks and months, and soiled fishing grounds, beaches and coastal marshes, independent scientists questioned the official flow rates. Eventually, the federal government convened teams of government and independent scientists to determine how much oil leaked out of the well. They came up with an official estimate of about 2.4 million gallons of oil a day on average.

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See Also:

• US GEOLOGICAL CHIEF: The White House Gave Misleading Info About The BP Spill Size
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Russian scientists have uncovered trapped methane gas in the Arctic Ocean that, if released, could greatly accelerate that rate of global warming, reports the Independent.

The scale of the methane plumes, trapped under the frozen sea has amazed researchers. One scientist told the Independent:

“Earlier we found torch-like structures like this but they were only tens of meters in diameter. This is the first time that we’ve found continuous, powerful and impressive seeping structures more than 1,000 metres in diameter. It’s amazing.”

Methane has an effect on the environment 20 times worse than that of carbon dioxide, so understandably there is great concern over whether this gas will be released.

On the bright side, an op-ed in the New York Times begs to differ that this new discovery is a huge threat to the environment. It argues that though the build of of methane in the Arctic Ocean can’t be denied, this process has been going on for thousands of years.

It concludes, with the help of scientific research, that the release of the gas won’t affect the planet this millennium. 

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See Also:

• Now Russia’s Joint Venture With BP Is Spending $10 Billion To Find Oil In The Arctic
• WATCH: This Russian Burger King Ad Is, Quite Frankly, Insane
• Russia Just Pledged At Least $10 Billion To Help Save The Eurozone

Exxon Mobil, which is the world’s largest oil company, has today announced profits nearly doubled in the April to June period – easily exceeding analysts’ expectations.
The oil giant said net earnings rose to $7.56 billion, or $1.60 a share, against $3.95 billion, or 81 cents a share, in the same period a year earlier.
Analysts had [...]

Oil giant Royal Dutch Shell has today announced second quarter profits almost doubled after completing its restructuring programme ahead of schedule.
Shell posted profits of $4.5 billion (£2.9 billion) – a rise of 94% on the $2.3 billion reported a year ago.
The Anglo-Dutch firm, which is Britain’s second largest oil company, has undergone a major a [...]

Oil giant BP has today reported a massive loss of $16.9 billion in the three months to June as a result of the major oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
The company added that costs related to the spill will reach $32.2 billion (£20.8 billion).
Excluding oil spill and other non-operating costs, BP’s replacement cost profit [...]