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Keith Olbermann talked to Rep. Ed Markey about his attempts to get BP to release their data on the Deepwater Horizon well spill.

Markey To BP: Stop Stonewalling On Well Data:

Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) demanded Wednesday that BP release information on the integrity of the wellbore and sea floor leaks, after efforts to carry out pressure tests on the new containment cap system for BP's Macondo well were delayed due to a lack of seismic data.

"Everyone is hoping for a successful outcome for this capping system, and for the relief wells," said Rep. Markey in a statement Wednesday. "But given BP's bad track record on all of its efforts thus far, all information about the risks of these tactics must be provided to Congress and to the public."

Markey first requested the information in a letter sent to BP on June 23. He still has received no response as to how BP plans to close off the well using the new cap system.

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Haley Barbour backtracked from his previous statement that the $20 billion escrow account would make it less likely that BP will pay for everything in regards to the damages from the Deepwater Horizon disaster. Now that he's found out the money will only go out in payments of $5 billion a year, he's much less worried his campaign donor will go out of business any time soon.

GREGORY: Governor, you--Governor Barbour, you've been concerned about the idea of this escrow fund, this $20 billion fund. Why?

BARBOUR: Right. Well, I thought that they were talking about taking $20 billion from BP all at once, and my fear was if you took $20 billion from them all at once, put it in an escrow account, then they wouldn't have the working capital to generate the revenue to pay us. I think the president was smart, and I congratulate him and BP that they reached an agreement. Instead of $20 billion taken out of that working capital all at once, it's actually going to be $5 billion this year, $5 billion the next year, $5 billion the following year and $5 billion the fourth year. That makes sure--as Mary Landrieu says, we want to make sure that BP stays in business, generates the revenues that will pay what they owe the states and our citizens. And I think the--I don't know if it's a compromise or not--the agreement they worked out not to do all the $20 billion, put it in an escrow account all at once, means that we're much more likely to get everything paid by BP, who, by the way, is supposed to pay everything.

I'm still wondering when Barbour will admit that there is a need for the fund in his state and that the oil has washed up on the shores of Mississippi as well.

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Well it appears Gov. Haley Barbour (R-BP) is still living on a river named Denial and refusing to admit the potential damage to Mississippi's coast line from the Deepwater Horizon disaster. John King asks Barbour if his perspective on the risk to his state has changed now that the government has admitted the amount of oil pouring into the Gulf is probably twice as much as originally estimated. (And John King fails here since that number would be more like forty to a hundred times more than we were originally told by BP and the government. They said it was one thousand barrels John, then five thousand and they're still not telling us the truth.)

Barbour: Well of course it changes the scope because there's a lot more oil. Now as I understand it the numbers they put out yesterday were the total flow did not include the 15,000 barrels that's being captured by their cap, whatever they call it, but yeah, it means that much more oil's in the Gulf and it means that there's that much more that has to either be dispersed, burned, skimmed or whatever.

And it also means that there's a higher likelihood that it will get to Mississippi. We have not had any of oil onto Mississippi's beaches. We had one intrusion on one of the barrier islands. It came up one day and washed out the next day and left no uhh... you couldn't even tell it had even been there.

Washed away huh? Just like magic. Can't even tell it was there. Good grief who does this goober think he's kidding? He goes onto repeat the line about how the biggest economic damage to his state has been caused by the news scaring all the tourists away and of course tries to give more cover to his good buddies in the oil industry.

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As Rachel notes the "top kill" was just "the latest failure in a long line of failures to plug the Deepwater Horizon rig" and reminds us that if history is any indication, the relief wells that they are drilling that they keep calling "the ultimate solution" to the oil well disaster are hardly assured to work on the first attempt.

Drilling relief wells to stop Gulf oil leak poses challenges:

With the "top kill" declared a failure and BP moving on to less-desirable options to stop its well from continuing to shoot thousands of barrels of oil each day into the Gulf of Mexico, the grim reality set in that the company may be unable to stop the oil until it completes the first of two "relief wells" in August.

...But relief wells are something that, fortunately, engineers don't have to do very often. Drilling the relief well also can be fraught with challenges -- especially working in deep water on a well that has already had problems with gas bubbles.

"You have to hit something the size of a dinner plate miles into the earth, " said Richard Charter, a senior policy adviser at the nonprofit Defenders of Wildlife, who follows spills around the world. "Even in a shallow-water blowout, the drilling of a relief well can be complicated and problematic."

On Sunday, the White House said the government had insisted that BP drill two relief wells instead of one to ensure that it can reach the original well without problems.

...The world's worst well blowout and oil spill, the Ixtoc I well in Mexico's Bay of Campeche, was ultimately stopped with a relief well after a containment dome, junk shot and top kill failed, but it took nearly 10 months.

The oil platform sat in about 150 feet of water and blew out in early June 1979 at a depth of 11,625 feet.

According to a 1981 report from the Society of Petroleum Engineers detailing how Pemex, the Mexican state oil company, stopped the well, engineers decided to start drilling two relief wells at the end of June.

Progress was slow. It took one well until Nov. 20 to reach the original well, and the second took until Feb. 5, 1980.

Shutting down the main well took multiple attempts in February and March 1980 as Pemex shot drilling mud through both wells and gradually decreased the flow of oil.

The oil stopped flowing on March 17, and then it took a few more weeks to plug the wells with cement, wrapping up the operation in early April.

The blowout, according to the Society of Petroleum Engineers, lasted for nine months and 22 days.

Tyler Priest, a historian at University of Houston who has written a book about the history of offshore drilling, said Pemex thought it would go a lot faster. He cited a headline in the Aug. 6, 1979, issue of Oil & Gas Journal that reads, "Pemex: Ixtoc may flow until Oct. 3."

"They initially estimated three months. It took them almost 10, " Priest said. Read on...