In a court order, US District Judge Carl Barbier said that the captured oil “never came into contact with any ambient seawater and was not released into the environment. The US and BP agree that the 810,000 barrels of collected oil are not to be used in calculating the statutory maximum penalty.”
BP is set to face trial for gross negligence next week; if the company is found to have been grossly negligent, it will face a maximum fine for civil pollution under the US Clean Water Act, which penalises polluters between $1,100 and $4,300 per barrel spilled.
Removal of the 810,000 barrels from the equation leaves a total of 4.9 million barrels still to be accounted for -– to $17.6bn, down from $21bn, which was until yesterday set to be BP’s potential maximum civil pollution fine, in the event that BP is found to have been grossly negligent.
“Gross negligence is a very high bar that BP believes cannot be met in this case,” said BP group general counsel Rupert Bondy. “This was a tragic accident, resulting from multiple causes and involving multiple parties. We firmly believe we were not grossly negligent.”
In other Deepwater Horizon news, Transocean recently won approval for a $1bn settlement for its role in the spill, pleading guilty to misdemeanour in the violation of the Clean Water Act.
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