He sparked outrage in the US when he suggested that the Gulf of Mexico oil spill was nothing but a drop in the ocean.

And he was hounded out of his job for overseeing one of the world’s worst oil disasters as pictures of dying seabirds floundering in oil dominated the front pages of the US press for weeks on end.

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But now, 16 days after the leak was finally stopped, scientists are coming forward to suggest that perhaps BP boss Tony Hayward may have been right after all.

Oil from the well is clearing from the sea surface much faster than scientists expected.

Indeed, some are asking whether the original threat was actually exaggerated.

And just over 100 days after the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, killing 11 workers, the water around the Gulf is almost entirely clear.

The backtracking by the US media in particular stands in stark contrast to the way in which they pursued Mr Hayward in the wake of the spill.

Time Magazine, The Washington Post, the New York Times and Vanity Fair have all now raised the prospect that the much-maligned ex-BP boss may have been right after all.

The disaster led BP to a record £11bn loss, after it set aside £21billion to pay for the clean-up of the Gulf, fines and legal liabilities.

And BP’s woes have a direct knock-on affect on ordinary British people with most having pensions which hold the oil giant, always a generous payer of dividends, in their portfolio.

Officials estimate that between 107 million gallons and 184 million gallons spewed into the Gulf before the cap stopped the flow on the 15th July.

A graphic from May 24th which shows the extent of the oil spill around a month after the disaster

By July 26th much of the oil has dispersed either naturally or has been skimmed from the surface

The permanent solution, using a relief well to fill it in with mud and cement, is still several weeks away.

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So far, officials say they have recovered 34.6 million gallons of oily water using skimmer boats and burned about 11.1 million gallons off the ocean’s surface.

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But the vast majority of the oil still remains unaccounted for.

Marine scientist Ivor van Heerden told Time magazine: ‘There’s just no data to suggest this is an environmental disaster.

‘I have no interest in making BP look good – I think they lied about the size of the spill – but we’re not seeing catastrophic impacts.There’s a lot of hype, but no evidence to justify it.’

Jane Lubchenco, the head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, made the decision last week to reopen a third of the 80,000 square miles of federal waters previously closed to fishermen as the threat began to diminish.

She said government and independent scientists have been working hard to figure out where the oil might be, but have not yet worked it out.

Some is still washing up on beaches and in coastal wetlands, but nothing like in the quantities it was a few weeks ago.

Read the rest of the article

July 31, 2010

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