Remember last week when BP was like, “Oil leaking in the Gulf? What oil? Oh, that. We didn’t do it.”? Well, apparently the new leak off the coast of Louisiana really does belong to BP, and appears to be coming from the same well that unleashed 4.9 million barrels of crude on the Gulf last year.
The Press-Register reports today that tests have confirmed that the oil seen leaking last week matches the oil that leaked from BP’s Macondo well. The paper took a sample, and sent it to Ed Overton and Scott Miles, two chemists at Louisiana State University who work on oil:
“After examining the data, I think it’s a dead ringer for the MC252 oil, as good a match as I’ve seen,” Overton wrote in an email to the newspaper. “My guess is that it is probably coming from the broken riser pipe or sunken platform. … However, it should be confirmed, just to make sure there is no leak from the plugged well.”
In an emailed statement, BP officials wrote that the company had a vessel stationed at the site all day Thursday but never saw any oil.
But BP says they still don’t think the oil is theirs:
“There is still no evidence that the oil came from the Macondo well,” BP officials wrote in the emailed statement.
Well, I guess it’s good to know that some things never change.
