Oil Spill Update: Is the Cap Working Too Well?

The oil containment cap that BP installed on Friday may be working too well.

The cap is already diverting between 10,000 and 15,000 barrels of oil to the Discoverer Enterprise, a ship floating above the oil well in the Gulf of Mexico, but the boat can only handle 15,000 barrels a day. BP had planned to close four valves on the cap over the weekend, but decided to leave some of them open when they realized they could not handle the amount of oil that would be contained with the valves closed.

The Enterprise has a maximum capacity of 139,000 barrels. This morning, U.S. Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen said a second ship was on its way to help receive the diverted oil, allowing the capacity to increase to 20,000 barrels a day.

Another containment device – a free standing riser pipe - will be added by the end of the week, Tony Hayward, BP's CEO, said over the weekend.

Even as containment efforts gain traction, the scope of the cleanup is becoming clearer and more troubling. Allen said this morning that the one million gallons of chemical dispersants used on the spill have succeeded at fragmenting one giant spill into "hundreds of thousands" of mini spills that will now need to be found and removed, "increasing vastly the complexity of the response."

Even worse, the chemical dispersants shot at the well head could be causing some of the crude to sink lower into the ocean rather than coming to the surface, according to Newsweek.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story referred to the ship Discoverer Enterprise as the "Discoverer Explorer."