Feds, BP agree oil captured not part of penalties

Fireboats battle a fire at the offshore oil rig Deepwater Horizon April 21, 2010, in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Louisiana. / U.S. Coast Guard via Getty Images

Updated 10:43 PM ET

NEW ORLEANS BP and the federal government have agreed that 34 million gallons of oil captured during the massive 2010 spill in the Gulf of Mexico can't count toward civil penalties the oil giant faces.

The agreement is contained in a court filing Tuesday. It came in response to BP's argument that workers either burned the collected oil or shipped it to shore before it could enter the Gulf waters and that it shouldn't count in calculating the company's Clean Water Act penalties. The penalties will be in the billions of dollars.

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The first phase of a trial is scheduled to start Feb. 25. It is designed to determine the causes of BP's well blowout and assign percentages of fault to the companies involved in the drilling project that went wrong.

The second phase will address efforts to stop the flow of oil from the well.

U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier noted Tuesday that neither party shall dispute the number of gallons collected "during Phase Two or later phases of this civil action."

A criminal settlement with the Justice Department in November didn't resolve the government's civil claims against BP.

A team of scientists working for the government estimated that more than 200 million gallons of oil spewed from BP's blown-out Macondo well from April to July 2010. That estimate included oil that was collected.

[anothervoter]

It sounds like the majority of oil BP was able to gather was floating on the surface or burned from the surface, which is much cheaper to claim. True, some came from some beaches. However, I haven't read much about the costly oil to recover which is under the surface, on the bottom of the ocean and still in some marshes. Sounds like they lowered their bottom line of the fine by claiming the portion that they recovered from the total release, which I believe was the cheapest portion to capture. Now, they want to drill again. The oil industry as a whole just has had to many spills in the worlds oceans and their track records show they just really don't care. It is only about MONEY.

[judderwocky]

***. Lighting the oil on fire and sending the toxic ash into the ocean isn't a violation? As usual they have given BP a complete pass.