Tom Raftery's Library tagged "deepwater horizon" →  View Popular, Search in Google

Why hasn't the Deepwater Horizon spill, one of the worst ecological disasters in US history, led to a storming of the Bastille of Big Oil? Why aren't the most urgent problems of our time – environmental crises and climate change – being confronted with the same energy, idealism and optimism as past tragedies of poverty, tyranny and war? The current state of the oil industry is reminiscent of the ancien regime on the eve of the revolution.

deepwater horizon bp oilspill deserts solar farms solar energy

Today, the chief executives of the five big oil companies — including BP’s Tony Hayward — are going to testify before the House Energy and Commerce Committee. According to an e-mail released by that Committee yesterday, a BP drilling engineer warned that the Deepwater Horizon oil rig was a “nightmare well” that had caused the company problems in the past. The e-mail came just six days before the well exploded:

bp oilspill deepwater horizon Macondo well Gulf of Mexico nightmare well greennumbers

A Deepwater Horizon rig worker has told the BBC that he identified a leak in the oil rig's safety equipment weeks before the explosion.

Tyrone Benton said the leak was not fixed at the time, but that instead the faulty device was shut down and a second one relied on.

deepwater horizon rig worker leak safety equipment

BP chief executive Tony Hayward will tell US politicians today that he is "deeply sorry" that the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, and admit that the disaster should never have happened.

bp tony hayward oilspill Gulf of Mexico deepwater horizon deeply sorry

Several days before the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, BP officials chose, partly for financial reasons, to use a type of casing for the well that the company knew was the riskier of two options, according to a BP document.

The concern with the method BP chose, the document said, was that if the cement around the casing pipe did not seal properly, gases could leak all the way to the wellhead, where only a single seal would serve as a barrier.

Using a different type of casing would have provided two barriers, according to the document, which was provided to The New York Times by a Congressional investigator.

bp oilspill explosion deepwater horizon casing

Commerce Secretary Gary Locke declared the Gulf of Mexico a national fisheries disaster area this week, citing the havoc wrought on the region’s multibillion-dollar fishing industry by the Deepwater Horizon blowout.

bp oilspill Gulf of Mexico fisheries fisheries disaster deepwater horizon

It doesn't pay to pollute.\n\nThe Gulf of Mexico oil spill disaster is likely to cost BP $23bn (£15bn) and its shares can be expected to lag behind those of its competitors by 5% for the "lasting" future, analysts warned today.\n\nMore than $9bn will come from reputational damage as a result of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill while the total costs are likely to drive up its net equity to debt ratio to 35%, much higher than its peers, according to Barclays Capital.

bp greennumbers oilspill oil spill deepwater horizon Gulf of Mexico

But this whole Gulf of Mexico fiasco sounds a bit like a trailer mash-up between a Jean-Claude Van Damme movie and Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth. Unfortunately, this isn't Hollywood and we've have 5,000 barrels of crude oil bubbling into our ocean every single day--though some are reporting it's closer to 26,000 barrels a day!

greennumbers oil oilspill oil spill Gulf of Mexico bp deepwater horizon 50 Years of Selling America Oil

BP is facing civil legal action and even possible criminal charges in the US over the explosion of an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico, it has been reported.

bp criminal charges civil legal action litigation deepwater horizon oilspill oil spill Gulf of Mexico

A former contractor who worked for BP claims the oil conglomerate broke federal laws and violated its own internal procedures by failing to maintain crucial safety and engineering documents related to one of the firms other deepwater production projects in the Gulf of Mexico, according to internal emails and other documents obtained by Truthout.

atlantis whistleblower Gulf of Mexico deepwater horizon oilspill bp mms truthout oil spill

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is releasing a new map each day forecasting the extent and concentration of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill expected for the following day at 6:00 p.m.

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration noaa oil spill Gulf of Mexico deepwater horizon bp oilspill

The makers of Demotivators created a classy T-shirt to commemorate the hard work of everybody's favorite oil company [BP].

bp oil spill Gulf of Mexico deepwater horizon t-shirt satire

The explosion of the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig that caused a massive crude oil slick in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico will cost billions of dollars for the companies that worked on the rig.

Oil began washing up on Louisiana's coast and commercial fishing areas on Friday as shrimpers and fishermen and survivors of the blast flooded courthouses with lawsuits.

"This is a multi-billion dollar event," said Keith Hall, an attorney with the firm Stone Pigman in New Orleans. "There are going to be huge environmental clean-up costs."

oil oilspill deepwater horizon litigation environmental litigation bp Gulf of Mexico lawsuit class action lawsuit

Shares in BP fell nearly 5% this morning after the company warned that the cost of tackling the disastrous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico now exceeds $6m (£4m) per day, and will keep rising as it intensifies its efforts to deal with the accident.

deepwater horizon bp Gulf of Mexico share price greennumbers

The chemicals BP is now relying on to break up the steady flow of leaking oil from deep below the Gulf of Mexico could create a new set of environmental problems.

Even if the materials, called dispersants, are effective, BP has already bought up more than a third of the world’s supply. If the leak from 5,000 feet beneath the surface continues for weeks, or months, that stockpile could run out.

On Thursday BP began using the chemical compounds to dissolve the crude oil, both on the surface and deep below, deploying an estimated 100,000 gallons. Dispersing the oil is considered one of the best ways to protect birds and keep the slick from making landfall. But the dispersants contain harmful toxins of their own and can concentrate leftover oil toxins in the water, where they can kill fish and migrate great distances.

bp deepwater horizon Gulf of Mexico oilspill dispersant

We all could use a little levity this week with all of the horrific news coming out of the Gulf region after BP's disaster, for which, by the way, the President said that they should take full responsibility for and pay for the clean up. Stephen Colbert provides the laughs by leading his audience in a chant of "Drill, Maybe, Drill" and by saying that the spill isn't that big--it's only the size of Rhode Island, which is the smallest state.

"You heard us," Colbert said. "We are not backing down ... despite the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico."

Stephen also imagines the epicurean options made available by perhaps the worst environmental disaster in US history. Blackened catfish, anyone?

colbert stephen colbert bp deepwater horizon oilspill Gulf of Mexico

Not only is the scale difficult to comprehend (3,850 square miles as of 4/30/2010) but, unlike the Exxon Valdez spill, this spill keeps on going at a rate of 1,000-5,000 barrels per day. Burning such large quantities of oil would be a dirty proposition, blackening skies and severely impacting air quality in the Southern US, but wouldn't it be better than letting it coat hundreds of miles of beaches, endangered seabirds, oyster beds, and protective barrier wetlands?

oilspill deepwater horizon bp Gulf of Mexico burning

A huge oil slick caused by an underwater leak continued to creep toward the U.S. Gulf Coast on Monday as the Obama administration pressed energy giant BP Plc to stem the oil gushing from its ruptured offshore well.

obama bp deepwater horizon Gulf of Mexico oilspill

A flickr photo set by GreenPeace of the aftermath of the DeepWater Horizon catastrophe

deepwater horizon bp greenpeace flickr oilspill

President Barack Obama so far has said nothing about the screamingly obvious connection between the spoils of fossil-fuel dependency and the vision of a clean-energy economy that he's been sporadically promoting. Instead he had this tepid statement on the Gulf oil spill Friday morning: "I continue to believe that domestic oil production is an important part of our overall strategy for energy security."

What happened to never letting a crisis go to waste? This mother of a crisis runs straight into our fossil-fuel addiction. It's a prime opportunity for progressives and clean-energy advocates to demonstrate the desperate need for new forms of energy. It's a prime opportunity to pressure the Senate to put a price on carbon pollution and invest in the R&D necessary to jump-start a clean energy economy. It's a prime opportunity to do all this without the corrupting influence of Big Oil, which had a hand in writing the elusive Kerry-Graham-Lieberman energy bill. Executives from BP--the company responsible for this mess--and Chevron and ConocoPhillips were planning to stand in support at the rollout of the KGL bill this week. Now's the chance to move a bill that isn't contorted by concessions to the dirty energy industries.

obama Gulf of Mexico deepwater horizon bp TransOcean Kerry-Graham-Lieberman energy bill