but, but,...
I thought BP took "full responsibi­lity.."
or was this only a publicity stunt

BobHelm wrote:Then what was the point of you writing

but, but,...
I thought BP took "full responsibi­lity.."
or was this only a publicity stunt

After I wrote about BP suing other companies??

Or are you now saying that it didn't actually have a point at all???

Now back to the adult discussion about the events...

cookie wrote:I meant that I seemed to remember that BP said that they will take full resposibility

BP profit growth seen weak after disposals
Reuters

By Tom Bergin – Tue Apr 26, 7:09 pm ET

LONDON (Reuters) – BP Plc (BP.L) is expected to post the weakest rise in first-quarter profits among big oil companies on Wednesday, after it was forced to sell assets to pay for the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

A Reuters poll of nine analysts gave an average forecast of $5.70 billion for the company's replacement cost (RC) net income, excluding one-off items, a 1 percent rise on the same period last year.

This compares with a predicted 22 percent rise in profits calculated on the same basis at Royal Dutch Shell Plc (RDSa.L) and a 59 percent rise in net income Exxon Mobil Corp (XOM.N)

RC net income excludes unrealized gains or losses related to changes in the value of oil inventories and so is comparable to net income under U.S. accounting rules.

The meager rise in profits comes despite a 38 percent rise in Brent crude in the quarter compared with the same period last year, due to strong global demand and political upheaval in the Middle East, and a tripling in global refining margins.

BP's production is predicted to have fallen around 12 percent after it sold oil fields to raise money to pay for the spill, which it said in February was likely to cost $40.9 billion to clean up and meet compensation payments and fines.

Investors are hoping the quarter will mark the end of a constant ratcheting up in the estimated cost of the spill.

They will also be watching out for any updates in BP's spat with its Russian partners in TNK-BP (TNBP.MM), which was sparked by a planned share swap and Arctic exploration deal with Russia's Rosneft (ROSN.MM).

BP may also give updates on the planned sales of assets including the Texas City and Carson refineries in the United States.

As the first big oil company to report, BP will also be watched closely as an indicator of performance across the sector. ConocoPhillips (COP.N) reports first-quarter earnings later on Wednesday, followed by Shell and Exxon a day after.

BP last week filed lawsuits against the contractors it employed to help it drill the doomed Macondo well and managers may face questions about this on an analyst call.

BP agrees to $25M penalty for 2006 Alaska spills

BP Alaska deal seen pointing to big Gulf fine

BP's subsidiary in Alaska will pay a $25 million civil penalty under a settlement announced Tuesday that comes five years after more than 200,000 gallons of crude oil spilled from company pipelines on the North Slope.

BP to hand Rosneft deal to TNK-BP


ROBERT BARR | May 6, 2011 03:06 PM EST | AP


LONDON — BP took a big step toward solving a blocked Arctic exploration deal on Friday, when it said it was open to sign the contract with Russia's Rosneft through its unit TNK-BP – giving up on its earlier claim to participate directly.

BP shares were up 2.2 percent at 450.6 pence following the announcement.

BP already draws a quarter of its oil production from Russia. The Rosneft deal would give it access to 125,000 square kilometers (48,000 sq. miles) of the South Kara Sea, an area roughly as large as the North Sea where Britain and Norway struck oil.

BP jumps nearly 4% as partner Moex pays $1.1bn towards Gulf oil disaster

BP is leading the FTSE 100 higher after one of its partners involved in the Gulf of Mexico oil spill agreed to pay the company $1.1bn towards the cost of the disaster.

Moex, a subsidiary of Mitsui, has a 10% interest in the Macondo well and has now agreed with BP and a presidential commission that the accident was due to a number of factors, including the safety management systems of Transocean.

BP will immediately put the $1.1bn into the $20bn trust it established to meet claims relating to the disaster. BP has not yet decided whether to now releases some of its provisions. The two sides have also settled mutual claims against each other.

This comes as a piece of good news for BP at a time when it is spending much management time struggling to settle disputes with its partners in Russia. BP chief executive Bob Dudley said:

We call on the other parties involved in the Macondo well to follow the lead of the Moex and Mitsui parties.

Analysts believe the settlement could indeed put pressure on others involved in the well. Richard Griffith at Evolution Securities said:

Anadarko (25%), BP's other partner in the Macondo licence is likely to come under pressure to settle as well now. Perhaps more significantly is the broader recognition that Transocean's safety management systems on the rig were deficient and where this could lead BP and its licence partners to pursue Transocean for compensation thus reducing the overall size of the liability net to BP.

In our target price for BP we had assumed a $25bn to $30bn gross liability to BP. To date BP has paid out $20.7bn pre-tax, pre-partner recovery. Therefore, our estimate of BP's liabilities could start to fall therefore boosting the valuation case further.

Separately analysts at Investec have issued a note calling for the company to split itself into three businesses. Stuart Joyner said:

Today we call for a radical, full demerger of BP to close the acute discount to our view of fair value and upgrade from hold to buy with an unchanged target price of 550p. We think investors should pressure BP to accelerate
the non-core disposals/BRIC entry strategy. If BP does not close the discount, we think the Russians, Chinese or Indians will look hard at the sub 6 times multiple.

We think BP could regain its reputation as the industry thought leader (and the double digit multiple that went with it) by splitting the company in three: a US business (let's call it 'Amoco') listed in New York and containing its US refining and increasingly gassy exploration and production businesses; a UK plus mature market E&P business listed in London ('Britoil'); and most importantly, a growth, BRIC-focused integrated ('BRIC Petroleum' or BP for short) listed in London and Mumbai/Hong Kong. At 10 times forward earnings, our blue sky valuation for BP would
be 750p a share

Time, it appears, for a little perspective. Thirteen months after the disastrous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, Ken Feinberg, the man appointed by President Barack Obama to oversee the compensation fund for victims of the disaster, has revealed that of the $20bn (£12.1bn) put at his disposal he has paid out just $4bn.

That is still a big number and shows that this was a substantial and terrible calamity for the residents of the Gulf Coast states. But for BP it must come as a blessed relief that the actual scale of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill is becoming clearer.

Looking back over the year since disaster struck on April 20, 2010, it is now obvious that the human tragedy of the explosion the death of 11 people who were brothers, sons, husbands and fathers became lost in the klaxon roar of fear that this was an environmental disaster to trump all others. We should take a moment to soberly assess whether some of the wilder claims made at the time were a fair reflection of the facts as we now know them.

At the time of the spill it was argued that BP could be destroyed by a neverending and catastrophic green bill connected to a well that could not be capped in a sea that would never recover.

The share price of the oil giant reacted accordingly, plunging from well above 600p a share to as low as 300p as President Obama demanded that the "British" company be made to pay. It has still only recovered to 460p, although that could have as much to do with the company's problems in Russia (EUREX: OMXR.EX - news) as with any residual downward pressure from the 2010 disaster.

An analysis of the share-price drop by my colleague Damian Reece last year revealed that the fall had left BP shareholders nursing a loss at one point of £49.6bn. At the time just 1,356 "oiled creatures" had been found dead along the affected coast, which roughly equated to $36.6m per animal.

Tony Hayward, the then chief executive of BP, had his critics during the crisis, to put it at its most benign. None more so than when he said: "It is impossible to say and we will mount, as part of the aftermath, a very detailed environmental assessment, but everything we can see at the moment suggests that the overall environmental impact will be very, very modest."

It can now be argued with some justification that Mr Hayward was not as far from the truth as his many bellowing detractors wanted the world to believe. He was certainly closer to it than Mr Obama, who said the BP oil spill was "the worst environmental disaster America has ever faced".

The latest facts on the compensation issue add to a growing body of evidence that could now properly be termed "the case for the defence". In an article in Time magazine last July, geochemist Jacqueline Michel, a federal contractor who was coordinating shoreline assessments in Louisiana, said: "The impacts have been much, much less than everyone feared."

It was a similar story with the Shetland oil disaster when the tanker Braer, carrying 84,700 tonnes of crude oil, ran aground in 1993, releasing all of its cargo. A subsequent assessment by the Scottish Government said: "Monitoring has shown that the impact of the oil spill on the environment and ecology of South Shetland was largely minimal. Adverse impacts did occur, but these were both localised and limited in nature due to the resilience of ecosystems and species populations."

To be clear, no one is saying that the Gulf spill was of no or little consequence. The millions of gallons of dispersants used to break up the leaking oil alone are likely to be environmentally damaging. The fact that the accident happened at all and spun out of control in the way it did also raises the most serious of questions about deepwater drilling and the ability of engineering ingenuity to keep up with our desire for supplies of oil by exploring more marginal fields.

What is now emerging, however, is a more nuanced collection of evidence. Of the three matters of substance weighing on BP's share price compensation for the Gulf spill, legal battles over responsibility for the disaster and Bob Dudley's creaking Russia strategy one now, at least, is getting a little lighter.

Chris Hedges' Columns
BP and the ‘Little Eichmanns’


By Chris Hedges

Cultures that do not recognize that human life and the natural world have a sacred dimension, an intrinsic value beyond monetary value, cannibalize themselves until they die. They ruthlessly exploit the natural world and the members of their society in the name of progress until exhaustion or collapse, blind to the fury of their own self-destruction. The oil pouring into the Gulf of Mexico, estimated to be perhaps as much as 100,000 barrels a day, is part of our foolish death march. It is one more blow delivered by the corporate state, the trade of life for gold. But this time collapse, when it comes, will not be confined to the geography of a decayed civilization. It will be global.

Those who carry out this global genocide—men like BP’s Chief Executive Tony Hayward, who assures us that “The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume’’—are, to steal a line from Ward Churchill, “little Eichmanns.” They serve Thanatos, the forces of death, the dark instinct Sigmund Freud identified within human beings that propels us to annihilate all living things, including ourselves. These deformed individuals lack the capacity for empathy. They are at once banal and dangerous. They possess the peculiar ability to organize vast, destructive bureaucracies and yet remain blind to the ramifications. The death they dispense, whether in the pollutants and carcinogens that have made cancer an epidemic, the dead zone rapidly being created in the Gulf of Mexico, the melting polar ice caps or the deaths last year of 45,000 Americans who could not afford proper medical care, is part of the cold and rational exchange of life for money.

The corporations, and those who run them, consume, pollute, oppress and kill. The little Eichmanns who manage them reside in a parallel universe of staggering wealth, luxury and splendid isolation that rivals that of the closed court of Versailles. The elite, sheltered and enriched, continue to prosper even as the rest of us and the natural world start to die. They are numb. They will drain the last drop of profit from us until there is nothing left. And our business schools and elite universities churn out tens of thousands of these deaf, dumb and blind systems managers who are endowed with sophisticated skills of management and the incapacity for common sense, compassion or remorse. These technocrats mistake the art of manipulation with knowledge.

“The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else,” Hannah Arendt wrote of “Eichmann in Jerusalem.” “No communication was possible with him, not because he lied but because he was surrounded by the most reliable of all safeguards against words and the presence of others, and hence against reality as such.”

Our ruling class of technocrats, as John Ralston Saul points out, is effectively illiterate. “One of the reasons that he is unable to recognize the necessary relationship between power and morality is that moral traditions are the product of civilization and he has little knowledge of his own civilization,” Saul writes of the technocrat. Saul calls these technocrats “hedonists of power,” and warns that their “obsession with structures and their inability or unwillingness to link these to the public good make this power an abstract force—a force that works, more often than not, at cross-purposes to the real needs of a painfully real world.”

BP, which made $6.1 billion in profits in the first quarter of this year, never obtained permits from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The protection of the ecosystem did not matter. But BP is hardly alone. Drilling with utter disregard to the ecosystem is common practice among oil companies, according to a report in The New York Times. Our corporate state has gutted environmental regulation as tenaciously as it has gutted financial regulation and habeas corpus. Corporations make no distinction between our personal impoverishment and the impoverishment of the ecosystem that sustains the human species. And the abuse, of us and the natural world, is as rampant under Barack Obama as it was under George W. Bush. The branded figure who sits in the White House is a puppet, a face used to mask an insidious system under which we as citizens have been disempowered and under which we become, along with the natural world, collateral damage. As Karl Marx understood, unfettered capitalism is a revolutionary force. And this force is consuming us.

Karl Polanyi in his book “The Great Transformation,” written in 1944, laid out the devastating consequences—the depressions, wars and totalitarianism—that grow out of a so-called self-regulated free market. He grasped that “fascism, like socialism, was rooted in a market society that refused to function.” He warned that a financial system always devolved, without heavy government control, into a Mafia capitalism—and a Mafia political system—which is a good description of our corporate government. Polanyi warned that when nature and human beings are objects whose worth is determined by the market, then human beings and nature are destroyed. Speculative excesses and growing inequality, he wrote, always dynamite the foundation for a continued prosperity and ensure “the demolition of society.”
“In disposing of a man’s labor power the system would, incidentally, dispose of the physical, psychological, and moral entity ‘man’ attached to that tag,” Polanyi wrote. “Robbed of the protective covering of cultural institutions, human beings would perish from the effects of social exposure; they would die as victims of acute social dislocation through vice, perversion, crime, and starvation. Nature would be reduced to its elements, neighborhoods and landscapes defiled, rivers polluted, military safety jeopardized, the power to produce food and raw materials destroyed. Finally, the market administration of purchasing power would periodically liquidate business enterprise, for shortages and surfeits of money would prove as disastrous to business as floods and droughts in primitive society. Undoubtedly, labor, land, and money markets are essential to a market economy. But no society could stand the effects of such a system of crude fictions even for the shortest stretch of time unless its human and natural substance as well as its business organizations was protected against the ravages of this satanic mill.”

The corporate state is a runaway freight train. It shreds the Kyoto Accords in Copenhagen. It plunders the U.S. Treasury so speculators can continue to gamble with billions in taxpayer subsidies in our perverted system of casino capitalism. It disenfranchises our working class, decimates our manufacturing sector and denies us funds to sustain our infrastructure, our public schools and our social services. It poisons the planet. We are losing, every year across the globe, an area of farmland greater than Scotland to erosion and urban sprawl. There are an estimated 25,000 people who die every day somewhere in the world because of contaminated water. And some 20 million children are mentally impaired each year by malnourishment.

America is dying in the manner in which all imperial projects die. Joseph Tainter, in his book “The Collapse of Complex Societies,” argues that the costs of running and defending an empire eventually become so burdensome, and the elite becomes so calcified, that it becomes more efficient to dismantle the imperial superstructures and return to local forms of organization. At that point the great monuments to empire, from the Sumer and Mayan temples to the Roman bath complexes, are abandoned, fall into disuse and are overgrown. But this time around, Tainter warns, because we have nowhere left to migrate and expand, “world civilization will disintegrate as a whole.” This time around we will take the planet down with us.

“We in the lucky countries of the West now regard our two-century bubble of freedom and affluence as normal and inevitable; it has even been called the ‘end’ of history, in both a temporal and teleological sense,” writes Ronald Wright in “A Short History of Progress.” “Yet this new order is an anomaly: the opposite of what usually happens as civilizations grow. Our age was bankrolled by the seizing of half the planet, extended by taking over most of the remaining half, and has been sustained by spending down new forms of natural capital, especially fossil fuels. In the New World, the West hit the biggest bonanza of all time. And there won’t be another like it—not unless we find the civilized Martians of H.G. Wells, complete with the vulnerability to our germs that undid them in his War of the Worlds.”

The moral and physical contamination is matched by a cultural contamination. Our political and civil discourse has become gibberish. It is dominated by elaborate spectacles, celebrity gossip, the lies of advertising and scandal. The tawdry and the salacious occupy our time and energy. We do not see the walls falling around us. We invest our intellectual and emotional energy in the inane and the absurd, the empty amusements that preoccupy a degenerate culture, so that when the final collapse arrives we can be herded, uncomprehending and fearful, into the inferno.

jackspratt wrote:^^ Long on hyperbole, and short on evidence.

An essay is a piece of writing which is often written from an author's personal point of view. Essays can consist of a number of elements, including: literary criticism, political manifestos, learned arguments, observations of daily life, recollections, and reflections of the author.

shows the connection between extremely powerful corporations (as BP) and unrestricted capitalism,
he explains how unrestricted capitalism, will lead to extremely powerful corporations ( BP and Co.) that will control the government which will help the corporation in rigging the market to their advantage

BP, which made $6.1 billion in profits in the first quarter of this year, never obtained permits from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The protection of the ecosystem did not matter. But BP is hardly alone. Drilling with utter disregard to the ecosystem is common practice among oil companies, according to a report in The New York Times. Our corporate state has gutted environmental regulation as tenaciously as it has gutted financial regulation and habeas corpus. Corporations make no distinction between our personal impoverishment and the impoverishment of the ecosystem that sustains the human species. And the abuse, of us and the natural world, is as rampant under Barack Obama as it was under George W. Bush.

arjay wrote:Was Tony Hayward right that BP's Gulf of Mexico oil disaster was 'modest'?

Disasters
Transocean: Coast Guard report on oil spill flawed

Published June 08, 2011

| Associated Press



The owner of the oil rig that exploded in the Gulf of Mexico last year said Wednesday that a Coast Guard report that faults the company for a poor safety culture and other shortcomings that preceded the disaster is full of errors.

Transocean said in a 112-page response submitted to the U.S. government that the April 22 draft report should be corrected. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management Regulation and Enforcement is expected to release a joint final report with the Coast Guard by late next month.

Switzerland-based Transocean insists the blast did not result from poor upkeep, that the blowout preventer was properly maintained and that the general alarm on the rig did not fail to operate automatically. It also said the engines on the rig did not fail to shut down upon detection of gas.

"When a report of this importance purports to reach conclusions and makes findings so at odds with the evidence, questions must be raised about the fact-finding process and whether an agenda, rather than evidence, served as the report's foundation," Transocean said in its response.

A spokeswoman for the joint federal investigation team declined to comment.

Multiple government and independent investigations have blamed a cascade of failures by several companies, including Transocean.

The Coast Guard said in its report that decisions made by workers aboard the rig "may have affected the explosions or their impact," such as failing to follow procedures for notifying other crew members about the emergency after the blast. It also said electrical equipment that may have ignited the explosion was poorly maintained, while gas alarms and automatic shutdown systems were bypassed so that they did not alert the crew. And, the report said, rig workers didn't receive adequate training on how and when to disconnect the rig from the well to avoid an explosion.

The April 2010 explosion aboard the Deepwater Horizon rig killed 11 workers and sparked the worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history. BP PLC was leasing the rig from Transocean and owned a majority stake in the well a mile beneath the sea. According to government estimates, some 206 million gallons of oil were released by the well before it was capped three months after the explosion.

Hundreds of miles of Gulf shoreline were stained with oil, fishermen and business owners lost their livelihoods, and new regulations were imposed as the offshore drilling industry was put under a microscope. BP has spent tens of billions of dollars cleaning up the mess and compensating victims, and it is seeking to recoup some of its losses from its partners on the rig.

Transocean report: BP didn’t assess risks properly before blowout *update*
Posted on June 22, 2011 at 7:11 am by Tom Fowler in Accidents, Gulf Oil Disaster



BP failed to properly assess, manage and communicate risks, didn’t adequately test cement and misinterpreted a key pressure test prior to the deadly blowout on the Deepwater Horizon rig, according to a report released by drilling contractor Transocean this morning.

BP failed to properly assess, manage and communicate risks, didn’t adequately test cement and misinterpreted a key pressure test prior to the deadly blowout on the Deepwater Horizon rig, according to a report released by drilling contractor Transocean this morning.

The accident was a “result of a succession of interrelated well design, construction, and temporary abandonment decisions,” mostly made by BP in the weeks before the spill, the report concludes, but the immediate cause of the accident was the failure of the final cement seal in the well.

BP’s well design led to a cement job design that was risky, but those risks and the failure to adequately test the integrity of the cement was not communicated properly to the rig crew or others by BP, Transocean said.

The final well completion and abandonment plan also wasn’t approved by regulators, the report notes, because of the constant stream of last-minute changes.

The report also faults cement contractor Halliburton for not adequately testing the cement or communicating the risks of the mix.

The blowout preventer on the rig was properly maintained, according to Transocean, but was overcome by the force of the blast and was unable to seal the well completely. A video animation showing how the blowout preventer failed can be seen here.

The two-volume report and accompanying documents can be found here.

BP said in a statement the report “cherry picked” facts to fit Transocean’s legal strategy. You can read the full text of BP’s statement and other reactions here.

A key driver behind many of BP’s risky decisions was the concern over whether the pressure of heavy drilling mud from the rig would be more than the pressure from the formation and lead to fractures that would lead the company to have to permanently abandon the well, Transocean says.

The well design BP used increased the risk, but rather than changing the well design, BP chose a technically complex nitrogen foam cement mix for the final cement job.

That cement mix left relatively little room for error and a just a small quantity of the cement was used. BP and Halliburton did not test it adequately before or after the cementing, the report says, and didn’t report the risks of those decisions to others properly.

The final test on the cement job, the negative pressure test, “was inadequately set up because of displacement calculation errors, a lack of adequate fluid volume monitoring, and a lack of management of change discipline when the well monitoring arrangement was switched during the test,” the report says.

The results were misinterpreted, the report says, but the results were accepted by BP officials who then decided to move forward with temporary abandonment of the well.

Both the final cement barrier failed and the float collar – a Weatherford built device that was supposed to prevent backflow up the well casing – “likely failed” the report says.

“None of the individuals monitoring the well, including the Transocean drill crew, initially detected the influx,” the report says.

In a conference call with reporters Transocean officials said they do not believe complacency on the part of their workers was a reason for the accident.

“After looking at the evidence we disagree with the idea that there was a sense of complacency on the rig,” said Bill Ambrose, Transocean’s director of North American operations.

Data from the rig’s instrumentation indicates the drilling crew was “very closely monitoring the well in the last hour” although the question remains if they were reading the data correctly, Ambrose said.

There have been reports from some BP workers that Transocean workers tried to explain away the odd negative pressure test readings as a phenomenon called “the bladder effect.” But Ambrose said no one on the rig that was interviewed by Transocean had ever heard of the term.

New Orleans court dismisses BP raketeering allegations
telegraph

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Harry Wilson, 0:47, Saturday 16 July 2011

BP has scored a duo of legal successes as a US court yesterday rejected claims the energy company had defrauded regulators and put on hold another lawsuit.

The New Orleans court dismissed allegations that BP had broken anti-raketeering law by defrauding US regulators in relation to the safety standards of its drilling operations.

Judge Carl Barbier told the court that the case brought by a group of Gulf residents and businesses had failed to prove a "causal" link between the alleged fraud and last year's explosion and subsequent oil spill.

"In order for plaintiffs to prevail on their theory of causation, they must rely on this particular domino effect steeping from BP's alleged fraud," said Judge Barbier, adding that the link was "too remote".

In a separate action, Judge Barbier also put on hold a lawsuit brought against BP by Anadarko Petroleum Corp, one of the company's partners in its Gulf of Mexico drilling operations.

Anadarko owned a 25pc stake in the Macondo well that exploded last year killing 11 men working on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig.

In its lawsuit, Anadarko asked the court to rule that it was not responsible for any of the damages and clean-up cost resulting from the disaster.

Judge Barbier said Anadarko would have to take its claim to arbitration so that it and BP can argue over the separation of costs.

"Anadarko has not met its burden to overcome the presumption in favor of arbitration. Accordingly, Anadarko's claim against BP must be stayed pursuant to the arbitration clause" in the joint operating agreement between the parties," said Judge Barbier in his ruling.

The rulings came as BP said it planned to adopt "enhanced" drilling standards in the US, as it attempts to repair damaged relations in the country in the wake of the Gulf oil spill.

The oil giant will more closely oversee the work of outside contractors and only use blow-out preventers (BOP) with twin sets of shears which could slice through drill pipes. The Macondo spill was caused by a BOP failure. BP also said it would produce an enhanced oil spill response plan.

"BP's commitment in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon incident is not only to restore the economic and environmental conditions among the affected areas of the Gulf Coast, but also to apply what we have learned to improve the way we operate," said Bob Dudley, chief executive of BP.

BP shares closed up 0.2pc yesterday at 459p.