Wednesday, June 16, 2010

Obama Speech On Gulf Disaster -BP Accountability & Renewable Energy Al Waxman Investigates Big Oil

Rachel Maddow shows proof that Big Oil lies to the public and to governments automatically -the CEOs and PR personnel appear to be reading from the same playbook. They stick to their talking points. IE there haven't been many big oil spills in the last 40 years-this is a lie-

Rachel Maddow Blasts BP COO Doug Suttles: 'Not Even Remotely Believable' Answers In Interview (VIDEO) June 15,2010

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy



Tom Costello interview Doug Suttles: via Huffington Post

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy



And it comes as no real surprise that other oil companies have no effective plan for dealing with oil spill or blow out of a Deepwater well .
They have lied to the US government about their preparations for dealing with such a contingency .

News in Brief: US Oil Firms as Unprepared for Spill as BP, and More ... by Yana Kunichoff via Truthout.org ,June 15, 2010

A number of major oil companies who drill off the US coastline are just as unprepared for a leak or spill as BP, Henry Waxman, the chairman of the Congressional panel on the Gulf oil spill told the House Energy and Commerce Committee. The BBC reported the response plans of Exxon-Mobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips and Shell are identical to BP's.

BP's US chief Lamar McKay and other oil bosses will give testimony at the hearing on deepwater drilling safety amid damning accusations BP took shortcuts. The oil company faces $34 billion in fines, reported The Guardian UK, a significant rise from the previous estimate of $5 billion.

Senators have told BP to deposit $20 billion in a ring-fenced account to cover escalating compensation costs. Following this news, BP stock dived 9 percent. The company is now worth nearly half of what it was prior to the Gulf oil spill.

Meanwhile, efforts to clean up the oil spill have been hampered by the lack of clear authority, reported The New York Times.

President Obama's consistent use of the name "British Petroleum" instead of BP, to which the company officially changed its corporate name, has angered some in Britain, reported Global Post, with a member of Parliament, Lord Norman Tebbit, calling Obama's words “partisan political presidential petulance.”


amazingly: Partial Owner Of Deepwater Horizon Declines To Testify, Receives 'Executive Of The Year' Award Instead by Ryan Grim via Huffington Post, June 15, 2010

Two of the four oil companies on the hook for the Gulf cleanup tab have rejected a Senate request to come testify about their efforts to make residents and businesses whole. The hearing is scheduled for Wednesday.

The CEOs of Anadarko Petroleum and MOEX Offshore have cited scheduling conflicts. Anadarko CEO James T. Hackett, however, does have time this week to be in Houston to accept Oil and Gas Investor's Executive of the Year award, handed out Tuesday.

"Last year this leading Houston-based company generated a 68 percent return to shareholders, while cutting costs and spending during the downturn," reads the announcement of Hackett's award. Cost cutting may have led to significant shareholder returns, but it also is believed to have contributed to the fatal explosion and blowout of the well.

Four parties are legally responsible for the spill: BP, Transocean, MOEX Offshore and Anadarko Corporation.

All four companies were invited to send a senior official to testify before Sen. Tom Carper's Federal Financial Management subcommittee. BP and Transcocean plan to comply. MOEX Offshore and Anadarko Petroleum have so far refused. Both have flown under the media radar as BP has taken the bulk of the blame, with a bit trickling down to Transocean. MOEX and Anadarko would like to keep it that way.

The public may have forgotten the two companies' roles, but investors haven't. Anadarko's stock has been battered since the explosion.


BP Engineer Called Deepwater Horizon 'Nightmare Well' Days Before Blast, Oil Spill via Huffington Post, June 14, 2010


WASHINGTON (AP) -- BP took measures to cut costs in the weeks before the catastrophic blowout in the Gulf of Mexico as it dealt with one problem after another, prompting a BP engineer to describe the doomed rig as a "nightmare well," according to internal documents released Monday.

The comment by BP engineer Brian Morel came in an e-mail April 14, six days before the Deepwater Horizon rig explosion that killed 11 people and has sent tens of millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf in the nation's worst environmental disaster.

The e-mail was among dozens of internal documents released by the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which is investigating the explosion and its aftermath.

In a letter to BP CEO Tony Hayward, Reps. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., and Bart Stupak, D-Mich., noted at least five questionable decisions BP made in the days leading up to the explosion.

"The common feature of these five decisions is that they posed a trade-off between cost and well safety," said Waxman and Stupak. Waxman chairs the energy panel while Stupak heads a subcommittee on oversight and investigations.

"Time after time, it appears that BP made decisions that increased the risk of a blowout to save the company time or expense," the lawmakers wrote in the 14-page letter to Hayward. "If this is what happened, BP's carelessness and complacency have inflicted a heavy toll on the Gulf, its inhabitants, and the workers on the rig."


BP has been low balling the estimation of oil gushing out of the well. They claim it is only 5,000 barrels a day when in fact it is more like 40,000 to 75,000 daily and this may turn out to be a cautious and conservative estimate so it could be much higher

Oil Spill Estimate Increased To 35K-60K Barrels A Day by Sam Stein via Huffington Post June 15, 2010

Just hours before the president addresses the nation from the Oval Office, the White House has sent out findings of a new scientific study which pegs the rate of oil flowing into the Gulf at roughly seven to twelve times the initial estimate.

According to the work of a group of government and independent scientists under the direction of Secretary of Energy Steven Chu and Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar, the amount of oil now being unleashed into the Gulf is between 35,000 and 60,000 barrels per day. This is a vast increase from the early estimates of roughly 5,000 barrels a day. It is also much more than the revised estimates that pegged the flow at a low end of 12,00 barrels, with a high end of 19,000 to 25,000 barrels.

It is a striking reflection of just how much ecological damage has been caused so far and a damaging illustration of how out of touch (or deliberately misleading) the team at BP was in the immediate wake of the spill.

If the oil has been spilling at this rate from the outset, it means that anywhere between 1.96 million and 3.36 million barrels of oil has gushed into the Gulf. In the Exxon Valdez crisis, a total of 250,000 barrels spilled into the waters off the coast of Alaska.

Meanwhile, BP says that it is only collecting between 15,000 and 18,000 barrels a day.


and so it goes,
GORD.

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