February 14, 2013

The world’s largest offshore drilling contractor has been sentenced to pay $400 million in criminal penalities
By MarEx

PHOTO: United States Environmental Services workers prepare oil containment booms for deployment following the Deepwater Horizon explosion and subsequent oil spil – April 2010.

Second Corporate Guilty Plea Obtained by Deepwater Horizon Task Force, Second-largest Criminal Clean Water Act Fines and Penalties in U.S. History

Transocean Deepwater Inc. pleaded guilty today to a violation of the Clean Water Act (CWA) for its illegal conduct leading to the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster, and was sentenced to pay $400 million in criminal fines and penalties, Attorney General Holder announced today.

In total, the amount of fines and other criminal penalties imposed on Transocean are the second-largest environmental crime recovery in U.S. history – following the historic $4 billion criminal sentence imposed on BP Exploration and Production Inc. in connection with the same disaster.

“Transocean’s guilty plea and sentencing are the latest steps in the department’s ongoing efforts to seek justice on behalf of the victims of the Deepwater Horizon disaster,” said Attorney General Holder. “Most of the $400 million criminal recovery – one of the largest for an environmental crime in U.S. history – will go toward protecting, restoring and rebuilding the Gulf Coast region.”

“The Deepwater Horizon explosion was a senseless tragedy that could have been avoided,” said Assistant Attorney General Lanny A. Breuer of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division. “Eleven men died, and the Gulf’s waters, shorelines, communities and economies suffered enormous damage. With today’s guilty plea, BP and Transocean have now both been held criminally accountable for their roles in this disaster.”

Transocean’s guilty plea was accepted, and the sentence was imposed, by U.S. District Judge Jane Triche Milazzo of the Eastern District of Louisiana. During the guilty plea and sentencing proceeding, Judge Milazzo found, among other things, that the sentence appropriately reflects Transocean’s role in the offense conduct, and that the criminal payments directed to the National Academy of Sciences and National Fish and Wildlife Foundation are appropriately designed to help remedy the harm to the Gulf of Mexico caused by Transocean’s actions. The judge also noted that the fines and five year probationary period provide just punishment and adequate deterrence.

Transocean pleaded guilty to an information, previously filed in federal court in New Orleans, charging the company with violating the CWA. During the guilty plea proceeding today, Transocean admitted that members of its crew onboard the Deepwater Horizon, acting at the direction of BP’s well site leaders, known as “company men,” were negligent in failing to investigate fully clear indications that the Macondo well was not secure and that oil and gas were flowing into the well.

The criminal resolution is structured to directly benefit the Gulf region. Under the order entered by the court pursuant to the plea agreement, $150 million of the $400 million criminal recovery is dedicated to acquiring, restoring, preserving and conserving – in consultation with appropriate state and other resource managers – the marine and coastal environments, ecosystems and bird and wildlife habitat in the Gulf of Mexico and bordering states harmed by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. This portion of the criminal recovery will also be directed to significant barrier island restoration and/or river diversion off the coast of Louisiana to further benefit and improve coastal wetlands affected by the spill. An additional $150 million will be used to fund improved oil spill prevention and response efforts in the Gulf through research, development, education and training.

Transocean was also sentenced, according to the plea agreement, to five years of probation – the maximum term of probation permitted by law.

A separate proposed civil consent decree, which resolves the United States’ civil CWA penalty claims, imposes a record $1 billion civil Clean Water Act penalty, and requires significant measures to improve performance and prevent recurrence, is pending before U.S. District Judge Carl J. Barbier of the Eastern District of Louisiana.

The charges and allegations pending against individuals in related cases are merely accusations, and those individuals are considered innocent unless and until proven guilty.

The guilty plea and sentencing announced today are part of the ongoing criminal investigation by the Deepwater Horizon Task Force into matters related to the April 2010 Gulf oil spill. The Deepwater Horizon Task Force, based in New Orleans, is supervised by Assistant Attorney General Breuer and led by Deputy Assistant Attorney General John D. Buretta, who serves as the director of the task force. The task force includes prosecutors from the Criminal Division and the Environment and Natural Resources Division of the Department of Justice; the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Louisiana, as well as other U.S. Attorneys’ Offices; and investigating agents from: the FBI; Environmental Protection Agency, Criminal Investigative Division; Environmental Protection Agency, Office of Inspector General; Department of Interior, Office of Inspector General; National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Office of Law Enforcement; U.S. Coast Guard; U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service; and the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality.

This case was prosecuted by Deepwater Horizon Task Force Director John D. Buretta, Deputy Directors Derek A. Cohen and Avi Gesser, and task force prosecutors Richard R. Pickens II, Scott M. Cullen, Colin Black and Rohan Virginkar.

SOURCE: DOJ
Special thanks to Richard Charter

http://www.islandpacket.com/2013/02/14/2381228/beaufort-mayor-offshore-oil-drilling.html

By BRIAN HEFFERNAN
bheffernan@islandpacket.com
843-706-8142
Published Thursday, February 14, 2013

Talk of offshore drilling strikes some in the Lowcountry as an unnecessary risk to the environment and tourism industry.

“Why would we risk and threaten the golden egg when there is no seeming emergency and when it has a potentially detrimental environmental impact that would kill that golden egg of tourism?” Beaufort Mayor Billy Keyserling said.

Keyserling said he would rather invest in South Carolina’s wind and mainland natural gas industries than expose the coastline to oil-spill disasters like the Gulf Coast has faced.
“I think it poses an undue threat to the quality of life to the people who live here and the people who visit here and those who want to live here,” he said.

Hilton Head Island Mayor Drew Laughlin said he would need more details about the locations of the drill sites and regulations governing them before making up his mind about the issue.

“Experience shows us that there are risks associated with offshore drilling,” he added. “Just ask the people in the Gulf.”

Read more here: http://www.islandpacket.com/2013/02/14/2381228/beaufort-mayor-offshore-oil-drilling.html#storylink=cpy

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http://www.wnct.com/story/21217398/3-govs-seek-reconsideration-of-offshore-oil-gas

WNCT

McCrory among 3 govs that want offshore oil drilling

Posted: Feb 15, 2013 8:35 AM PST
Updated: Feb 15, 2013 8:35 AM PST
By WNCT STAFF – email

RALEIGH, N.C. –
Governor Pat McCrory is teaming up with other governors to begin offshore drilling.

And he’s hoping the federal government will join in.

McCrory made that clear in a letter to President Obama’s administration. Virginia governor Bob McDonnell and South Carolina governor Nikki Haley are both on board.

They want the administration to revise its current policy to one committed to taking advantage of our natural resources, as long as we do it safely.

The governor says energy production off our shores would create 140,000 jobs over the next 20 years.

Special thanks to Richard Charter

Jean Chemnick, E&E reporter
Published: Wednesday, February 13, 2013

Chanting and wearing protest buttons, 43 activists were arrested today after zip-tying themselves to White House gates to oppose approval of the Keystone XL pipeline. The group that gathered in Lafayette Park this morning to press President Obama to reject TransCanada’s permit for the proposed pipeline included leaders of the Sierra Club, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and 350.org, and well-known activists including NASA scientist James Hansen, Robert Kennedy Jr. and actress Daryl Hannah.

Shortly before noon, they moved to the sidewalk in front of the White House to sit on the pavement or chain themselves to the fence, chanting slogans such as “Barack Obama, yes you can/stop the dirty pipeline plan.”

After three warnings, U.S. Park Police began to make arrests.

The mostly middle-aged protesters and their supporters wore buttons printed with “NO KXL” — the O’s featuring the Obama campaign logo of a rising sun.

The protesters said Obama wanted them there, pushing him to make the “right” decision this year to reject the Alberta-to-Texas pipeline, which they said would make the lofty climate-mitigation goals he expressed during last night’s State of the Union address all but impossible to achieve.

“The president’s just starting his second term,” said Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club, which today broke a 120-year tradition of not engaging in illegal protests to take part in the action. “We want to make sure his ambition meets the scale of this challenge.”

Brune said that the president made “a good speech,” but that he needed to take action. “You can’t necessarily solve climate change with a single speech,” he said. “The president has an enormous amount of executive authority that he has not yet utilized.” He urged the president to move quickly on environmentalists’ top two objectives for the second term: an aggressive greenhouse gas rule for existing power plants and rejection of the pipeline permit.

The State Department will make a recommendation on a supplemental environmental impact statement for the pipeline’s new route in the coming months, though Obama will have the final say on whether the project goes forward.

Erich Pica, president of Friends of the Earth, said he was engaging in civil disobedience for the first time.

“I think that with the appointment of Secretary [John] Kerry now at the State Department, things may look good for the cancellation of Keystone XL,” he said. The former senator and ardent climate action proponent took over the top diplomatic post earlier this month. “But having said that, we still have to apply the pressure,” he said. He noted that Canada and the oil industry are both pressing the administration to grant the Keystone permit. The American Petroleum Institute is touting its own research today that it says shows a groundswell of support for the project (see related story).

Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org, an activist group, said that disobedience is an appropriate tool to use.

“Sometimes it’s important to do civil disobedience because it’s the way we underline the moral certainty of the questions that we face,” he said.

Julian Bond, civil rights leader and chairman emeritus of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, said he participated in the action on his own behalf. “All these movements tend to learn from each other,” he said. “They borrow from each other, they learn from each other’s tactics.”

He said he was particularly concerned about the effect climate change might have on the health of residents in poor neighborhoods.

Hannah, dressed in a military-style jacket with an anti-Keystone XL patch embroidered on the shoulder, said the pipeline would allow the high-carbon Canadian oil sands development to expand.

“They can’t put it for sale on the global market unless it gets to a coast somewhere,” she said.

Today was the actress’s fifth arrest for civil disobedience. “It gets people to think deeper about these issues, to look deeper, to do their homework,” she said. “It’s the last stand.”

Special thanks to Richard Charter

Jin Liangkuai/Xinhua, via Associated Press

A deep-water drilling rig in the South China Sea operated by the China National Offshore Oil Corporation, or Cnooc.

By KATE GALBRAITH
Published: February 6, 2013

AUSTIN, Tex. – The oceans deep are a repository of many secrets. Shipwrecks have existed undisturbed for centuries, as have corals and fish of almost unimaginable diversity.

Now, increasingly, the secrets of the seabed are being looked at by companies drilling for oil and minerals. International geopolitics and the environment are getting more muddled as a result.

“Deep-sea drilling is expensive and hard, and the technology wasn’t there until very recently,” said Sheila Smith, a senior fellow for Japan studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in the United States. Now, major powers are vying for drilling rights in places like the East China Sea, where the tussle is between the two largest energy consumers in Asia: China and Japan. Tensions there flared this week when Japan said China had recently aimed military targeting radar at one of its ships near disputed islands.

The drilling industry continues to move toward deeper waters and new deposits. In the Gulf of Mexico, drilling is now occurring beneath as much as 8,000 to 9,000 feet, or about 2,400 to 2,700 meters, of water, according to Mike Lyons, general counsel of the Louisiana Mid-Continent Oil and Gas Association. The Deepwater Horizon rig, by contrast, was drilling in about 5,000 feet of water in the gulf when it exploded after a blowout nearly three years ago.

Technology has accelerated the move toward deeper waters. “A lot of the drilling now in the Gulf of Mexico is done with drill ships, as opposed to conventional drilling platforms that people have used in the past,” Mr. Lyons said. The ships can inhabit deeper waters and be stabilized over a drill site with the aid of sophisticated computers, he said.

Amy Myers Jaffe, executive director for energy and sustainability at the University of California, Davis, said that the industry’s advances into deeper water had been steady but incremental.

With the increased capability comes increased scrutiny, especially after events like the 2010 Deepwater Horizon accident and a 2011 oil leak off of Brazil, as well as a natural gas leak last year at a North Sea drilling platform about 150 miles, or 240 kilometers, off Aberdeen, Scotland.

Ms. Jaffe said that drillers had perhaps viewed deep-water operations as too routine. “I think that we were a little blasé about how hard it is to do,” she said. “And maybe the industry is now grappling with the difference between 2 percent tolerance and 0 percent tolerance” for mistakes. Zero percent may be the new model, especially in places that have recently experienced public outcries over spills, including Australia, Brazil and the United States, she said.

Shell’s difficulty in drilling in Arctic waters off Alaska further illustrates the technological challenges of operating in new, often adverse settings.

The industry is eager to “get access to these fragile and complicated areas” like the Arctic, said Frederic Hauge, president of the Bellona Foundation, an environmental group based in Oslo. But the risks are immense, he said, adding that in Norway, he felt that companies lacked adequate emergency response plans for their far-afield rigs.

As technology helps propel the industry further offshore, geopolitical difficulties are intruding. Many countries have overlapping maritime boundaries. Lebanon and Israel have disputed claims in the natural-gas-rich eastern Mediterranean Sea. The United States and Mexico have also had differences over rights in the Gulf of Mexico, though they signed a cooperation agreement a year ago on drilling.

In the East China Sea and the South China Sea, disputes continue as China, with its rising energy appetite, clashes with its neighbors over drilling rights and sovereignty claims.
“If these were uncontested regions, I’m sure people would have gone forward already” with drilling, said Ms. Smith of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Should the drilling industry venture into even deeper waters, additional political complications await. The U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea, signed by more than 150 countries – though not by the United States – gives the International Seabed Authority, based in Jamaica, oversight of mineral exploration in waters that lie beyond a country’s so-called exclusive economic zone, which typically extends 200 nautical miles, or 370 kilometers, from shore.

Adam Cook, a marine biologist with the seabed agency, said that while the group had agreed to 17 exploration contracts with companies, most of those companies were looking for minerals like manganese nodules, which are rock formations. So far, none are after oil or natural gas, and the consensus is that there is “unlikely to be any drilling for oil and gas beyond national jurisdiction in the near future,” Mr. Cook said in an e-mail.

A version of this article appeared in print on February 7, 2013, in The International Herald Tribune.

Special thanks to Richard Charter

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2013-02-05/greenhouse-gas-emissions-fall-in-u-dot-s-dot-power-plants-on-coal-cuts

Well, another good reason to oppose fracking.…..DV

By Mark Drajem on February 06, 2013

Natural gas and oil production is the second-biggest source of U.S. greenhouse gases, the government said, emboldening environmentalists who say tighter measures are needed to curb the emissions from hydraulic fracturing.

In its second-annual accounting of emissions that cause global warming from stationary sources, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for the first time included oil and natural- gas production. Emissions from drilling, including fracking, and leaks from transmission pipes totaled 225 million metric tons of carbon-dioxide equivalents during 2011, second only to power plants, which emitted about 10 times that amount.

Gas and oil production “is an area where we have technological answers to our problems,” Michael Levi, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, said in an interview. “We know how to fix many of these problems; we just need to make the decision to do it.”

The EPA yesterday released on its website details of emissions from about 8,000 factories, power plants and refineries. Two coal-fired power facilities owned by Atlanta- based Southern Co (SO). topped the list, followed by one owned by Energy Future Holdings Corp (TXU). of Dallas.

In total, power plants emitted 2,221 million metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2011, down 4.5 percent from 2010, according to the agency. The EPA report showed the benefits of fracking, as it attributed the reduction to cuts in coal use and increased use of gas as fuel by electricity generators. There was also an increased use of power from renewable sources such as solar and wind, the agency said.

Top Emitters
“This report confirms that major carbon reductions from power plants wouldn’t be possible without a reliable and affordable supply of domestically produced natural gas,” Simon Lomax, research director at Energy in Depth, an industry group, said in an e-mail.

The EPA report on oil and gas looked at emissions from basins, or large production areas, not individual wells. Among the top emitters were ConocoPhillips (COP)’ operations in the San Juan basin in New Mexico, and Apache Corp (APA).’s operations in the Permian basin in Texas. Both companies are based in Houston.

“ConocoPhillips continues to seek out ways to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions,” Daren Beaudo, a spokesman for the company said in an e-mail. The company is working to cut methane venting with gas conservation and waste-heat recovery, he said.
Apache has been growing rapidly in the Permian basin, where it’s now the second-largest producer, Bill Mintz, a spokesman for the company, said in an interview. “We have done some infrastructure projects that improved our emissions performance in 2012.”

Proposed Regulations
The EPA has already proposed regulations to curb emissions from new power plants, setting a standard that would preclude the construction of new coal-fired facilities that don’t capture and sink underground the carbon coming from their smokestacks. Once those rules are finished in the coming weeks, the EPA must move to establish similar rules for existing power plants.

Environmental groups have asked the agency to establish standards to prevent methane leakages from the drilling, fracking and transport of oil and gas. The boom in that production in states such as Pennsylvania and North Dakota means that those rules are necessary, according to environmental groups. Methane’s lifetime in the atmosphere is much shorter than carbon dioxide, but it’s more efficient at trapping radiation, making its short-term impact 20-times greater than carbon dioxide, according to the EPA.

“Reducing fugitive methane emissions is a top priority because they are so powerful” a force for global warming, said Mark Brownstein, managing director of the Environmental Defense Fund in New York. “You want to make sure the goose is laying what approximates golden eggs.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Mark Drajem in Washington at mdrajem@bloomberg.net

Special thanks to Richard Charter