BP said pay-outs to people affected by its Gulf of Mexico oil spill had dramatically increased since it surrendered authority for dispensing funds to an independent administrator.
BP said the Gulf Coast Claims Facility, the $20 billion fund it set up to compensate fishermen, hoteliers and retailers whose business was hit by the spill, had paid out 19,000 claims totalling over $240m.
The total cost of the spill response has hit $9.5 billion, Europe's second-largest oil company by market value said in a statement last night. The GCCF is run by lawyer Kenneth Feinberg, formerly the Obama Administration's executive pay czar.
Just over a week ago, Bob Dudley, who will take over as BP's CEO on October 1, told analysts that he expected the $20 billion fund to more than cover the total valid claims for compensation.
Meanwhile, US officials finally declared BP's broken well in the Gulf of Mexico 'dead' yesterday, five months after the deadly oil rig explosion that set off one of the costliest and largest environmental disasters ever.
Retired admiral Thad Allen, the US pointman for the response to the disaster, said the operation to intersect and cement the deepwater well had been successfully completed.
'With this development, which has been confirmed by the Department of the Interior's Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, we can finally announce that the Macondo 252 well is effectively dead,' Allen said.
'Additional regulatory steps will be undertaken but we can now state, definitively, that the Macondo well poses no continuing threat to the Gulf of Mexico,' he added.
The announcement marked an anti-climactic end to a five-month battle to cap a busted undersea well that gushed 4.9 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, the largest maritime spill ever.
No oil has leaked into the Gulf in the three months since the well off the Louisiana coast was plugged in a so-called 'top kill' operation, but the US administration insisted that it also be sealed from the bottom with a relief well. A final pressure test of the cement seal was completed yesterday morning, officials said.
BP pledged to continue 'remedying the harm that the spill caused to the Gulf of Mexico, the Gulf Coast environment, and to the livelihoods of the people across the region.'
The disaster, which erupted with a massive explosion on the BP-leased Deepwater Horizon rig, killing 11 workers, exposed the vulnerability of the oil- and wildlife-rich Gulf of Mexico to deep sea drilling.
For weeks every effort to plug the well 1,500 metres below the surface of the sea fell short as the spreading oil fouled hundreds of miles of shoreline, closed fishing grounds and threatened fragile ecosystems. The Obama administration also imposed a moratorium on deepwater drilling, setting back another mainstay of the Gulf economy while the cause of the disaster is investigated.
87 days into the crisis, BP finally succeeded in placing a giant cap over the well that stopped the flow of oil into the Gulf. But the costs were huge, with local livelihoods disrupted and nearly $70 billion wiped off BP's market value.
BP, whose chief executive Tony Hayward was forced to resign, has spent $8 billion trying to contain the disaster and has forecast it will eventually cost the energy giant more than $32.2 billion.
