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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 [...]
Whenever President Obama isn’t talking about cracking down on subsidies for Big Oil, he’s usually hyping all the work his own Administration has done to support domestic oil production. He has a point—U.S. oil production has gone up under Obama. Unlike his predecessor, Obama doesn’t look much like an oil man, but he’s hardly gone [...]
Every day, the world burns through more than 87 million barrels of oil—and every year, that number gets bigger and bigger. We use oil to power our cars, planes and trucks; our tanks, bombers and rockets. Oil is irreplacable, which is why we remain addicted—even though we hate it. And it’s why the oil industry—represented [...]
I have the cover story this week in the dead-tree/living table TIME, on the future of oil (available here to subscribers). Gas prices have dominated the political conversation for weeks—at least until the Supreme Court started its health care hearings—and with the summer driving season just around the corner, the national obsession won’t be lift [...]
Why was President Obama speaking at the small town of Cushing, Oklahoma this morning? Whether or not you know the answer to that questions probably predicts where you stand on energy policy. Cushing is the Pipelines Crossroads of the World—they even have a monument. The town is the central hub for American oil pipelines, feeding [...]
I’m a pretty even-tempered writer by nature. I like to withhold judgement for as long as possible. Even though I’m an environment writer, that attitude sometimes gets me in trouble with environmentalists who want me to come down harder on climate skeptics or the fossil-fuel industry. But I know just how difficult it is to separate [...]
Barack Obama likes to say that as President of the United States, he doesn’t “bluff” when it comes to foreign policy. But when it comes to energy, it looks like Obama might be willing to try the occasional fake out. Yesterday Reuters reported that Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron discussed the possibility of [...]
That’s the net amount of petroleum products that the U.S. exported in 2011, marking the first time since 1949 that the country exported more petroleum products than it imported, according to data from the Energy Information Administration (EIA). Imports fell to 2.4 million barrels per day (bpd)—the lowest level in 11 years—while exports rose to 2.9 [...]
