Cabinet officials and leading senators Monday said they will continue to put the pressure of the federal government on BP plc until it caps the oil leak, cleans up the waters off the southern coast of Louisiana and pays damage claims.

BP is the responsible party and “we will keep our boot on their neck until the job gets done,” said Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, who was joined by Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, Assistant Senate Majority Leader Richard Durbin (D-IL) and several other senators, at a press briefing in Galliano, LA, after touring the Gulf of Mexico.

“This is a BP mess. It is a horrible mess…We will not rest until [the] job is done.” He said the federal government is not standing on the sidelines but rather has mounted the largest response to such a disaster.

“We are going to stay on this, stay on BP until this gets done,” said Napolitano.

Durbin was highly critical of the London-based oil company’s efforts to stem the flow of the oil. “BP no longer stands for British Petroleum. It stands for Beyond Patience,” he told reporters.

“Excuses [from BP] don’t count anymore,” Durbin said, adding that the oil company would “pay for every dollar” of the damages.

During the fly-over “I looked down at the ocean with great sadness,” said Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, the ranking Republican on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. It is “deja vu all over again for those of us from Alaska,” she said, referring to the Exxon Valdez oil tanker that ran aground in Prince William Sound, AK, in March 1989, causing a major oil spill.

The New York Times Monday reported that BP was ignoring a demand of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to not use a chemical dispersant called Corexit in favor of less toxic dispersants. “The whole federal team led by Secretary Napolitano hear loud and clear from EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson who’s been involved in the matter relating to the use of dispersants,” Salazar said.

There’s a “continuing dialog” over the use of dispersants, and a key issue at this point is that “it is better to use the dispersants than to have the oil make landfall,” he said.

Salazar also was asked to respond to reports that the Minerals Management Service was approving new drilling projects in the Gulf of Mexico despite President Obama’s moratorium on permits for drilling new offshore wells.

“We have a pause in place…We are bringing things to a halt until we can learn some of the lessons, put in safety measures in place and decide how we are going to move forward,” he said.

Interior spokesman Frank Quimby clarified that the moratorium applies only to applications for permits to drill new oil wells in the Gulf of Mexico (GOM); existing wells are excluded from the ban.

As for BP’s latest plan to plug the leak, Napolitano said “we hope it works, but we don’t want to hope unrealistically.”

As patience with BP’s efforts to cap its ruptured GOM well continued wear thin in Washington, DC, the company was planning to mount its “top kill” operation Wednesday morning.

The top kill is a procedure in which heavy drilling mud will be pumped at a rate of about 50 bbl per minute into the well’s blowout preventer (BOP) in the hope of overcoming the flow of oil so the well can be sealed with cement. BP had planned to attempt the procedure last Sunday, then Tuesday, but on Monday the plan was to do begin it Wednesday morning. BP COO Doug Suttles said the delays had been caused by the necessity of carefully planning the attempt.

“This job has taken quite some time to prepare and plan for,” Suttles told reporters Monday. “It’s not unique and new but it is unique and new to being done in 5,000 feet of water.”

The top kill needs to be done during daylight hours, Suttles said. BP — and everyone else — should know by Wednesday evening whether the attempt was successful, something Suttles conceded is not a sure thing.

Analysts at Tudor, Pickering Holt & Co. Securities Inc. said in a note Monday that they were “hopeful if not optimistic” that BP would succeed, “pegging [the] chance [of success] below 50% as complicated and BOP could have lots of debris that might [make] it hard to get fluids down into well.”

The spill is the result of a well blowout that occurred a month ago and resulted in the sinking of the BP-contracted Deepwater Horizon, a drilling rig owned by Transocean Ltd., and the death of 11 crew members. (see Daily GPI, May 24; May 18).

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