2nd UPDATE: BP Oil Spill Capture Rate Rises To 25,000 Barrels

(Updates to add background, details from BP press conference.) By Angel Gonzalez Of DOW JONES NEWSWIRES BP Plc (BP, BP.LN) captured about 25,000 barrels of oil Thursday from the damaged well on the floor of the Gulf of Mexico, the highest amount since installing a containment cap two weeks ago. The company, under intense pressure to contain a spill that continues to grow nearly two months after its leased rig exploded and sank, said Friday that 16,020 barrels were collected and 9,270 barrels of oil were burned. BP is working on enhancements to its containment strategy that it says will push the collection capacity to more than 50,000 barrels a day by the end of this month and to as much as 80,000 by mid-July. The rate of capture on Thursday, about 10,000 barrels more than the average last week, was in line with BP's projection that the deployment of a second collecting vessel on the water's surface would allow for between 20,000 and 28,000 barrels to be captured. Earlier this week, BP ramped up operations on the second vessel, the Q4000, which is flaring all the oil and gas it is getting from the leaking well. The other vessel, the Discoverer Enterprise, is collecting and processing the oil, but has a capacity of no more than 18,000 barrels a day. U.S. Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen said in a news conference Friday that he was "very pleased" to report the latest figures, adding that the drilling of two relief wells, meant to stop the flow of oil from the Macondo well, is progressing. He said the first relief well, which officials have said should be completed by mid-August, is "starting to close in on the wellbore" at a depth of 10,677 feet below sea bottom, or nearly 700 feet deeper than on Thursday morning. A second back-up well was at a depth of about 4,600 feet. In a separate press conference on Friday, BP executive Doug Suttles said that although the drilling is ahead of schedule, the company is sticking to its August target date because the operation must slow as BP seeks to intersect the leaking well. Despite BP's success in capturing more oil, large volumes of crude continue spewing in the Gulf waters and estimates of the size of the leak have steadily risen, while the slick causes environmental and economic harm along an increasingly wide portion of the U.S. Gulf Coast. Earlier this week, a team of government and independent scientists said the Macondo well could be leaking between 35,000 and 60,000 barrels of oil per day. Just last week, the team had estimated the leak was between 20,000 and 40,000 barrels a day. Meantime, BP and its executives have been pilloried by U.S. politicians and the company's stocks and bonds have taken a beating as concerns about the company's future mount. BP Chief Executive Tony Hayward testified before a congressional committee Thursday, one day after the company gave into political pressure and created a $20 billion escrow fund to pay damage claims related to the disaster. It also cut its dividend payments for the remainder of the year and lowered its capital spending plans. Hayward's taciturn responses, mostly reiterating that BP is still investigating the causes of the spill and that top management was not involved in key decisions at the Macondo well site, visibly irked members of Congress. On Friday, ratings agency Moody's Investors Service downgraded BP's credit rating three notches due to mounting costs and litigation exposure. The agency lowered BP's senior unsecured ratings to A2 from Aa2, after a June 3 downgrade to Aa2 from Aa1. Fitch and Standard & Poor's also downgraded BP this week, in moves that raised market fears about the company's ability to get financing in the future. BP shares, which have lost nearly half their value since the April 20 explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig, were up three cents at $31.74 in early afternoon trading Friday. While political noise surrounding BP has dominated the headlines in recent weeks and will continue to grab attention, the focus will likely turn back to the containment efforts in the Gulf. BP expects to have an additional production vessel to process and offload oil in place by the end of June. The new ship would work in conjunction with the Q4000 and the Discoverer Enterprise, boosting the total capture rate to between 40,000 and 50,000 barrels a day, according to BP's latest containment plan released earlier this week. Adm. Allen said Friday that responders would have to decide at that point whether to replace the current system with more permanent floating production and offloading units that will be able to resist storms, as BP had outlined in its latest plan. If most of the leak is contained by the current system, it is possible that it will be left in place, he said, as switching gears carries a certain amount of risk. The BP plan had called for installed oil-containment capacity to reach 60,000 to 80,000 barrels a day by mid-July. -By Angel Gonzalez, Dow Jones Newswires, 713-547-9214; angel.gonzalez@dowjones.com (Isabel Ordonez and Jeffrey Sparshott contributed to this article.) (END) Dow Jones Newswires June 18, 2010 14:01 ET (18:01 GMT)