BP manages to link spill compensation to continued drilling in the Gulf

From Dan Froomkin at Huffington Post:

BP has managed to link the fate of its $20 billion oil spill victims compensation fund with its continued ability to pump oil from the Gulf of Mexico.

The voluntary trust agreement negotiated with the Department of Justice is not with the British-based multinational, or even with BP America, but with a fairly remote subsidiary, BP Exploration & Production Inc. (BPEC) -- a Delaware corporation that operates BP's Gulf oil leases.

So if BP's drilling revenues from the Gulf suddenly vanished, so, presumably, would the compensation fund, said Tyson Slocum, director of Public Citizen's Energy Program.

"This is a very advantageous agreement from BP's point of view," Slocum told the Huffington Post. "Because their big concern is that the Deepwater Horizon incident would result in sanctions that would significantly reduce BP's involvement in lucrative Gulf operations."

"But if you tie the compensation fund to Gulf of Mexico production, you are helping to guarantee BP's continued involvement in that market," he said.

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Administration gagging scientists studying BP oil disaster

From ThinkProgress:

In an explosive first-hand account, ecosystem biologist Linda Hooper-Bui describes how Obama administration and BP lawyers are making independent scientific analysis of the Gulf region an impossibility. Hooper-Bui has found that only scientists who are part of the Natural Resource Damage Assessment (NRDA) process to determine BP’s civil liability get full access to contaminated sites and research data. Pete Tuttle, USFWS environmental contaminant specialist and Department of Interior NRDA coordinator, admitted to The Scientist that “researchers wishing to formally participate in NRDA must sign a contract that includes a confidentiality agreement” that “prevents signees from releasing information from studies and findings until authorized by the Department of Justice at some later and unspecified date.”

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At Salazar's request, judge allows Alaskan oil testing to proceed

The hits just keep on coming. In other oil news, the judge who stopped drilling off Alaska's Arctic shore says that non-drilling activities, such as seismic testing, can proceed (my emphasis):

A federal judge has clarified his ruling that stopped companies from drilling oil and gas wells off Alaska's coast, saying the ruling shouldn't prevent approved scientific work such as seismic surveying.

U.S. District Judge Ralph Beistline, responding to a motion filed by Shell Gulf of Mexico Inc., said his order last month that blocked drilling doesn't prevent the seismic studies by Shell that had been approved by the federal government or that were pending approval and planned for this summer. Seismic surveying involves blasting sound waves into the sea floor and reading the echoes off rock formations deep underground in an effort to identify where oil and natural gas might be trapped. Seismic work occurs in advance of drilling.

But wait. Didn't the Obama administration Just Say No to Arctic oil drilling? Well, there's those pesky lost corporate profits to consider:

The Obama administration is among those seeking clarification from Beistline, a rare recent case of the administration siding with the oil industry. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar asked the court to narrow the ruling so that another company, Statoil, which owns 16 Chukchi leases, could start seismic testing roughly 100 miles from the coast. Government attorneys told the judge that Statoil, a global oil company partly owned by the Norwegian government, would likely face "significant economic losses" if it couldn't proceed with seismic surveying.

And boom go all the fishies:

Environmental groups said they were stunned by the administration move . . . marine mammals such as whales and walruses can be harmed by the testing. The impact of such tests on marine life was one of the issues the court said the federal government failed to consider adequately before issuing the Arctic drilling leases.

But look at these bright shiny jobs, bro:

"The public interest is in preventing the hardship Alaskans will suffer from lost jobs and economic growth if the injunction remains in place," [Alaska Gov. Sean] Parnell said.

That's Norwegian corporate profits, if you're reading closely.

But don't worry, progressives — the earth still spins on its axis. If Team Change gets a House subpoena after the 2010 elections, it will still be your fault.

GP Read More......

74% of BP oil spill cleaned up; remaining 26% is still 4x larger than Exxon Valdez

As always, good news if true.

The government is expected to announce on Wednesday that three-quarters of the oil from the Deepwater Horizon leak has already evaporated, dispersed, been captured or otherwise eliminated — and that much of the rest is so diluted that it does not seem to pose much additional risk of harm.

A government report finds that about 26 percent of the oil released from BP’s runaway well is still in the water or onshore in a form that could, in principle, cause new problems. But most is light sheen at the ocean surface or in a dispersed form below the surface, and federal scientists believe that it is breaking down rapidly in both places.

The Guardian makes a good point about that remaining 24%:

The volume of the remaining oil, however, is still more than four times larger than the amount lost from the Exxon Valdez tanker in 1989.

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BP oil from the crab holes of LA's barrier islands

The oil is hiding, but it's everywhere. It could be more than a generation before any fisherman or farmer can sell anything that grows where it's found.

In this video, the oil comes up through crab holes, when you press down next to them with your foot. From Fox8 local news (h/t Digby):

BP's Oil on Louisiana's Barrier Islands - FOX8 Story @ Yahoo! Video

Note, by the way, that's a Fox local news channel. According to this Countdown report, they may not be doing these kinds of reports in the future:

Aug. 2: Rupert Murdoch and Dennis Swanson, president for stations operations for Fox, have been sending memoranda and e-mails to local Fox news directors urging them to make their broadcast stations look and sound like the Fox News Channel.

Owned and operated indeed.

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Scientists concur, BP largest accidental oil spill in history

From the Guardian:

Nearly 5m barrels of oil have gushed into the ocean since the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded and sank in April, according to federal scientists. That makes the spill larger than the 3.3m barrels released into Mexico's Bay of Campeche when the Ixtoc I oil rig suffered a catastrophic blowout in 1979.

The new estimate of the size of the spill – of a total of 4.9m barrels – means the potential penalty that BP faces under US law has ballooned. Under the Clean Water Act, BP faces a fine of $1,100 (£691) a barrel, or $4,300 a barrel if it is found that the spill was the result of gross negligence. As a result, BP could be fined either $5.4bn or $21bn. The federal team reckon BP's own containment efforts saved about 800,000 barrels which could be taken into account as a mitigating factor, reducing the fine to either $4.5bn or $17.6bn.

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SEC looking at BP for insider trading

From Reuters:

U.S. securities regulators are investigating whether people may have illegally profited from trading on nonpublic information at BP Plc in the weeks and months following the disastrous Gulf of Mexico oil spill, two sources familiar with the investigation said on Monday.

Gonna be hard to photoshop this one away. Read More......

CSI Gulf of Mexico

Would that the federal officials responsible for overseeing oil drilling and enforcing the nation's environmental laws were as organized and diligent as the crew investigating potential crimes:

A team of federal investigators known as the "BP squad" is assembling in New Orleans to conduct a wide-ranging criminal probe that will focus on at least three companies and examine whether their cozy relations with federal regulators contributed to the oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, according to law enforcement and other sources.

The squad at the FBI offices includes investigators from the Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Coast Guard and other federal agencies, the sources said. In addition to BP, the firms at the center of the inquiry are Transocean, which leased the Deepwater Horizon rig to BP, and engineering giant Halliburton, which had finished cementing the well only 20 hours before the rig exploded April 20, sources said.

If the GOPers take over Congress, they'll prevent this investigation. They'll defund it or use some other gimmick.

I wouldn't be surprised to see BP start turning its (failed) P.R. campaign into a political campaign. And, the Senate GOPers blocked campaign finance reform, so that's really not a joke. It's a possibility. Read More......

GOPers Vitter and Blunt sponsor bills to protect BP by limiting liability

You'd think that the Senator from Louisiana would want to hold BP accountable. Not David Vitter. He wants to pass legislation to protect BP by limiting the company's liability by basing liability on BP's profits (and, as we reported earlier, BP had a $17 billion loss in the last quarter.)

Via Sam Stein:

Instead, the GOP has rallied around a counter-proposal, authored by Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) that would cap an oil company's liability at an amount equal to its profits of the last four quarters. If the company had not made a profit in the past four quarters, it would be liable for $150 million (or twice the current cap).

To be sure, BP still has a chance to turn around its profit margin during the next three quarters. But in terms of net earnings, it is now operating out of a $17 billion hole. If Vitter's version of economic liability legislation were the law of the land, there would be open concern about the damage payments that Gulf residents would end up recouping. As a Democratic operative working on the issue notes:

When Vitter introduced the bill, we pointed out that one of the co-owners of the Deepwater Horizon rig, Andarko, had not made a profit in the last year. But with this news today, if BP doesn't overcome this quarter's losses, next year they could be responsible for a disaster as bad as or worse than the one in the Gulf and they would only be liable for $150 million if Vitter's bill were law.

UPDATE: An astute reader points out that another Senate candidate, Rep. Roy Blunt (R-MO), has sponsored legislation similar to Vitter's in the House.

Vitter and Blunt are two of the GOP's top Senate candidates this year. Protecting BP is a top priority.

And, we're all well aware of Vitter's shady past with prostitutes. Turns out Blunt is a Party Boy -- a big time DC Party Boy. Read More......

BP announces record loss of $17 billion in second quarter

BP has inflicted record losses and immeasurable misery on families and industries across the Gulf states. So, I'm not really feeling bad for BP:

BP announced Tuesday that it lost $17 billion in the second quarter of the year because of the mounting cost of halting and repairing damage from the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

The company also said the executive who has led its spill response effort for the last month, Robert Dudley, would take over Oct. 1 as BP's next chief executive, becoming the first American to run the London-based company.

Dudley, 54, had been widely expected to be chosen to replace outgoing chief executive Tony Hayward, whose dismissal was confirmed after a BP board meeting Monday evening.

It does take a certain skill to have an oil company suffer record losses.

Good riddance, Tony Hayward. Thanks for overseeing the destruction of the Gulf of Mexico. That's quite a legacy.

All that cost-cutting and skimping on safety didn't really pay off. You'd like to think this would be a lesson for other corporations, but don't count on it. Read More......

Poisoning the well — BP buys the professors (and their research too)

Chris in Paris had a piece on this last week, with good coverage from CBS News:

BP has been trying to hire marine scientists from universities around the Gulf Coast in an apparent move to bolster the company's legal defense against anticipated lawsuits related to the Gulf oil spill, according to a report from The Press-Register in Mobile, Ala.

Scientists from Louisiana State University, Mississippi State University and Texas A&M; have reportedly accepted BP's offer, according to the paper.

Now Lawrence O'Donnell, subbing for Keith Olbermann on Countdown, is on it. His interviewee is Dr. Russ Lee, Vice-President for Research at the University of South Alabama in Mobile.

A rather shocking segment — for two reasons, as I'll try to explain. First the interview:



That's the "poisoning the well" part of the story — BP buying academic experts and their courtroom silence. Rachel Maddow on Monday likened it to Tony Soprano's tactic of "contaminating" lawyers.

But what about that other part, the request for two contracts?

It was all in one contract, and it really should have been separated out.

The university was willing to allow BP to "buy" (rent?) the university — AND its grad students' free labor — to do research, so long as the academics could benefit too, by publishing. This is apparently what they do, the other business the university is in.

This may not be news, but I'll say it explicitly. Universities regularly sell (or rent) themselves — their profs, their students, and their facilities — to corporations to further the corporate interest. (In the same way, part of the "business" of a medical practice is to rent their patients to drug companies for research — again, for a fee. I've known nurses for whom selling these patients is full-time work.)

The "school" (at this point they're not purely schools, but some kind of hybrid) gets something — money for sure, and the bennies of doing research. The corp gets a labor force, much of it free, and technical facilities they don't have to build or completely fund. They probably split the proceeds — patent rights, etc. — according to some formula. Corporate "campus" indeed.

So — any doubt who gets the better end of the deal? With all of society starved for money, including universities — and corporations swimming in it — who's got the upper hand?

And for good measure, if it's a state university handing stuff over at a discount, where does part of what's given away come from? Your tax dollars at work.

When the whole town is thirsty, and one guy owns the water — imagine the possibilities, especially if that one guy is conscienceless, a money-driven monomaniac.

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Gulf oil spills much more common than previously reported

Those pesky facts keep getting in the way of a touching love story by friends of Big Oil. Washington Post:

Many policymakers think that the record before the BP oil spill was exemplary. In a House hearing Thursday, Rep. John J. "Jimmy" Duncan Jr. (R-Tenn.) said, "It's almost an astonishingly safe, clean history that we have there in the gulf." Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said the industry's "history of safety over all of those times" had provided the "empirical foundation" for U.S. policy.

But federal records tell a different story. They show a steady stream of oil spills dumping 517,847 barrels of petroleum -- which would fill an equivalent number of standard American bathtubs -- into the Gulf of Mexico between 1964 and 2009. The spills killed thousands of birds and soiled beaches as far away as Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula. Altogether, they poured twice as much as oil into U.S. waters as the Exxon Valdez tanker did when it ran aground in 1989.

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Oil trading company fined for exporting toxic waste to Africa

While the financial penalty sounds light, it is encouraging that finally that industry is being held accountable for the damage inflicted in Africa.

The oil trader Trafigura has been fined ¤1m (£840,000) for illegally exporting tonnes of hazardous waste to west Africa. It is the first time the London-based firm has been convicted of criminal charges over the environmental scandal, in which 30,000 Africans were made ill when the toxic waste was dumped in Ivory Coast.

A court in the Netherlands also ruled today that the firm had concealed the dangerous nature of the waste when it was initially unloaded from a ship in Amsterdam.

Eliance Kouassi, president of the victims' group in Ivory Coast, said: "Finally Trafigura has been called out in a court of law. It's a real victory for us." The fine is, however, only half the amount sought by the Dutch prosecutors.

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Deepwater oil rig alarms turned off prior to crisis

It's important to get your full eight hours of sleep in each night. The last thing anyone needs is some stinking emergency alarm going off warning of potential disaster. What could possibly go wrong?

The revelation that alarm systems on the rig at the centre of the disaster were disabled – and that key safety mechanisms had also consciously been switched off – came in testimony by a chief technician working for Transocean, the drilling company that owned the rig.

Mike Williams, who was in charge of maintaining the rig's electronic systems, was giving evidence to the federal panel in New Orleans that is investigating the cause of the disaster on 20 April, which killed 11 people.

Williams told the hearing today that no alarms went off on the day of the explosion because they had been "inhibited". Sensors monitoring conditions on the rig and in the Macondo oil well beneath it were still working, but the computer had been instructed not to trigger any alarms in case of adverse readings.

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Scottish government officials turn down invitation to US Lockerbie hearing

It's understandable why they would decline but still, it's disappointing. Staying at home only makes their decision look even more suspicious though speaking to the Senate has the potential to make matters even worse. What will be interesting is to hear BP's Tony Hayward discuss this issue. BP already confirmed that it did speak with government officials about the Libyan oil fields even though British PM Cameron said that was not the case while in Washington. BBC:

Scottish ministers and officials have turned down a request to attend a US Senate hearing next week over the release of the Lockerbie bomber.

Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill and the Scottish Prison Service's medical chief Dr Andrew Fraser were invited.

Senators also invited Westminster former justice secretary Jack Straw.

BP chief executive Tony Hayward was asked to attend after allegations that Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi's release was linked to an oil deal.

Megrahi was jailed for life for the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 in 1988 which killed 270 people, most of them Americans.

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Seems BP photoshopped a third photo

It seems Joe and I started a bit of a fad.

Washington Post:

The search for doctored BP photos is on. And it's a bit like finding Waldo in the famous game.

On Wednesday, for the second time this week, a blog has identified an altered photograph about BP's oil spill response on the company's Web site.

The Gawker Web site said it received a tip about a BP photo, taken from inside a helicopter, that shows a panorama of vessels working on the sea surface near the damaged well. The view through the windows makes it appear as though the helicopter is in the air.

But the astute tipster noticed a small glimpse of a control tower in a corner of the photograph. A poor Photoshop job left some white space around the shoulder of one of the pilots next to a patch of sea that was a brighter shade of blue than other parts of the gulf. In addition, zooming in on the helicopter's gauges reveals that the helicopter is not in the air at all; the dashboard indicates that the door and ramp are open and the parking brake engaged, Gawker noted. The pilot appears to be holding a pre-flight checklist.

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BP's possible 'industrial homicide'

On Tuesday's Countdown, Lawrence O'Donnell gets right down to it with Bob Cavnar, former oil industry exec. O'Donnell: "Lethal disregard for safety" . . . "industrial homicide":



About time. If this were a novel, there would be a perp.

GP Read More......

Gulf seepage from another well near Deepwater

While it's good news that the failed BP well is not causing more problems, this news does raise the other issue of what is happening with the 27,000 abandoned wells in the Gulf of Mexico. Hearing that it's like oil dripping from an old car is not great news. That scientists can see the oil means that it is more than just a drip here or there.

The seepage detected from the sea floor briefly raised fears that the well was in danger. But Allen said another well is to blame. The seepage is closer to the older well than to the one that blew out, Allen said. Also, he said, "it's not unusual to have seepage around the old wells."

There are two wells within two miles of BP's blowout off the Louisiana coast in the Gulf of Mexico. One has been abandoned and another is not in production. Around 27,000 abandoned wells in the Gulf aren't checked for leaks, an Associated Press investigation showed this month.

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Report of even more warnings ignored by BP prior to disaster

The BP SOP seems to have been ignore warnings and keep costs as limited as possible. Whether it was their outsourcing of the the failed safety device to China or failing to properly report problems to MMS as we are now hearing, BP showed little regard for the negative impact of their actions. Every business is trying to make money but BP consistently has shown little interest in what is best for the safety of its people and the environment. Their cost cutting is now turning out to be a lot more expensive than those costly safety precautions. Regulations are so expensive, aren't they?

Ronald Sepulvado, a BP well site leader, said he had reported a leak on a critical safety device at the rig to more senior company officials, but it seemed his warnings had not been passed on to the government regulating body, the Minerals Management Service.

"I assumed everything was OK, because I reported it to the team leader and he should have reported it to the MMS," he told the hearing. The leak was on a control pod connected to the blowout preventer on the rig, whose failure proved critical in causing the disaster.

A congressional committee in Washington heard testimony from Gale Norton, interior secretary under former president George W Bush. Norton said BP had ignored rules put in place in 2003. "If regulations on the books and industry best practices had been followed properly, there might not have been a blowout," she said. "It appears that BP violated all those regulations that were on the books."

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BP photo update

I just wanted to give people an update on the press coverage of the BP altered photo scandal that we broke yesterday. Here's a sampling of the coverage:

Washington Post
Fast Company
Gizmodo
Associated Press
Geek.com
Daily Mail
Gawker
Toronto Sun
Telegraph
MSNBC
Treehugger
Bild
AOL News
Yahoo News
Le Figaro Read More......