LONDON (Dow Jones)--The oil flow from the damaged Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico has "noticeably declined" as BP PLC (BP) is successfully siphoning off 5,000 barrels a day to a tanker on the surface, a company spokesman said Thursday.
"The visible oil plume escaping from the riser pipe has noticeably declined," although it is impossible to give an exact measure of how much oil is still flowing into open water, he said.
"All of the oil we are capturing is going into safe storage," in addition to 15 million cubic feet a day of gas that is being burned off from the Discover Enterprise drill ship at the surface, he said.
The official estimate of oil flow from the damaged well was previously 5,000 barrels a day, based on aerial observations of the oil slick by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The latest data show the leak must be larger than that initial estimate. Some scientists have estimated the leak could be ten times that amount, based on observations of a large plume of oil deep beneath the surface of the Gulf.
-By James Herron, Dow Jones Newswires; +44 (0)20 7842 9317;
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