By Jeff Mason and Ayesha Rascoe
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - BP <:BP.LO:>s moves to contain and capture more oil from a leaking undersea well in the Gulf of Mexico did not make the spill dramatically worse, U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu said on Friday.
Chu, speaking to Reuters in a telephone interview, also expressed optimism that sufficient safety measures could be made to lift a U.S. moratorium on deepwater drilling eventually.
Some scientists have raised concerns BP exacerbated the spill, which is causing an ecological and economic disaster on the U.S. Gulf Coast, when it cut the so-called riser pipe from the well last week to install a containment system, or cap.
The Obama administration initially said that cutting the riser could raise the oil spill flow rate by as much as 20 percent, but Chu said pressure measurements indicated the actual increase was much smaller.
"The estimates of 20 percent or more are incorrect," Chu said, adding the government was confident in its estimates of a 4-5 percent flow increase since the operation.
Millions of gallons of oil have gushed into the Gulf since an April 20 explosion on an offshore rig killed 11 workers and ruptured BP's well.
U.S. scientists have said the flow rate may have been as high as 40,000 barrels (1.68 million gallons/6.36 million litres) per day before the pipe was cut on June 3.
Chu said his team was working with BP to get new pressure readings in the next several days, which would provide an accurate estimate of the oil now escaping from the well.
"We think we can give a good number, a number that we think should be more reliable than trying to estimate flows based on videos," Chu said.
President Barack Obama imposed a six-month moratorium on deepwater drilling because of the spill and said he would not feel comfortable lifting it without assurances that such an accident would never happen again.
"Of course there's a possibility of having that," Chu said when asked whether those safety assurances could be met.
"Certainly, one can do a lot of things to make it much safer. That much we know and those things will be done. And quite frankly, one can do a lot of these things by retrofitting existing equipment in an accelerated way, which will also be very good," he said.
The moratorium has unsettled the oil industry and prominent lawmakers from Louisiana, including Governor Bobby Jindal, who said on Friday that it represented too big a hit to the state's economy without widespread agreement it would improve safety.
Touring coastline protection measures in Buras, Louisiana, Jindal told reporters that the moratorium was prompting businesses in numerous sectors to scale back spending and workers' hours.
"The fact that the federal government can't do their jobs shouldn't cost thousands of Louisianans our jobs," Jindal said. Louisiana is one of the nation's main beneficiaries of offshore drilling, supplying and servicing much of the industry's activities in the Gulf.
OVERSIGHT ROLE
Though the Department of Energy that Chu heads has little jurisdiction over the spill, the White House has emphasized Chu's role as a scientist and Nobel laureate in overseeing and advising BP.
Chu, who said he had made three trips to Houston to consult with BP officials, said the company had a good team but had benefited from government scientists' oversight and ideas.
"I think they have a very, extremely competent set of engineers," Chu said.
He said DOE officials had not been critical enough in the beginning of the process when analyzing BP data. That has changed, he said.
"We also deliberately wanted to take an extremely cautious, more paranoid point of view, in the sense (of) trying to think very hard about what could go wrong and if it goes wrong, what do you do next?" Chu said.
"BP has been doing this as well, but to have another independent team doing that and looking very hard at all this sort of worst case scenarios ... has been valuable to helping BP plot strategies going forward."
(Additional reporting by Jeffrey Jones in Buras, Louisiana)
(Editing by Paul Simao)
