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NEW ORLEANS (AP) — A BP engineer intentionally deleted more than 300 text messages that said the company’s efforts to control the Gulf of Mexico oil spill were failing, and that the amount of oil leaking was far more than what the company reported, the Justice Department said Tuesday. In the first criminal charges related [...]
It was two years ago today that the Deepwater Horizon—a top-of-the-line offshore drilling rig owned by BP and run by Transocean—experienced a sudden burst of gas from a three-mile long well its crew was drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, 40 miles south of the Louisiana coast. The combustible methane rushed up the well and [...]
The Deepwater Horizon oil spill seems to divide people into two categories: those who can’t forget, and those who refuse to remember. In the first camp are Gulf Coast residents and environmentalists who say the region still hasn’t recovered from the worst oil spill in U.S. history, and who are still waiting to be made [...]
Lawyers representing the oil giant BP on one side, and more than 100,000 Gulf Coast residents on the other, were set to show up at the court of U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier on Monday morning. There they would have begun contesting one of the biggest class-action lawsuits in American history, fighting over the responsibility [...]
How serious should the penalties for an oil spill be? In early November, Chevron and its drilling partner Transocean accidentally spilled some 3,000 barrels of oil into the ocean off the coast of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. As oil spill go, it was relatively minor—although it is a sign of how hard offshore drilling [...]
Federal investigators from the Bureau of Ocean Energy Resource Management and Enforcement (BOERME) finally issued their long-delayed report today on the causes of last year’s Deepwater Horizon blowout and oil spill. The results are not very surprising: BP, and to a lesser extent contractors like Transocean and Halliburton, made plenty of avoidable mistakes on the [...]
Amid the fireworks, parades, and hot dogs of this past Fourth of July weekend was that sinking feeling of déjà vu when news broke that yet another oil spill was oozing across once-clean waters. This time, it wasn’t the Gulf of Mexico, it was Montana; and it wasn’t BP, it was ExxonMobil. On Friday, 1,000 barrels [...]
With major oil players enjoying eye-popping profits on the back of high gas prices, there’s a growing political push to eliminate tax incentives for the petroleum industry. Senate Democrats and President Obama are behind a plan to strips billions in subsidies for the five biggest oil companies, with the money going either to clean energy, [...]
April 20, the one-year anniversary of the beginning of the Gulf oil spill, has no shortage of news events. Environmentalists and fishermen along the Gulf coast offered tours of the shoreline, to show the spots where the oil still remained. BP—with its impeccable sense of timing—lodged a $40 billion lawsuit against Transocean, the Swiss drilling [...]
Today marks a year after the Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico blew out, destroying the Deepwater Horizon and beginning the worst oil spill in U.S. history. We’ve worked up a few pieces that look back at the effects of the spill, and look forward on the future of offshore drilling. Click on them [...]
