http://sify.com/news/world-must-expect-more-oil-spills-says-scientist-news-scitech-khdpEciedjf.html

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2010-07-03 15:40:00

The world should expect more disasters like the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico as the days of easy oil are over, a scientist says.

“BP and other oil companies have tried to portray this spill as an accident or an aberration, but in fact there are spills on off-shore and on-shore sites around the world, increasingly,” says Bret Gustafson from Washington University in St. Louis.

A rig sank off the coast of Venezuela in May. Last October, a rig spilled oil for two months into the Timor Sea off of Australia. There are recurring spills in virtually every oil region, such as the Peruvian and Ecuadorian Amazon and Nigeria.

“These environmental and public health catastrophes are almost always accompanied by corruption and violence tied to oil activities,” Gustafson says.
In the United States, which is more of a consumer than producer of oil, we are generally ignorant about this reality of oil until something like this comes home to roost.”

“Oil has always been destructive, but it is worsening because the days of easy oil are over,” says Gustafson.

“In combination with weak regulation and intensifying competition, which explains why companies are willing to cut so many corners, oil is in more difficult places, both environmentally, politically and socially.

“The point is that it is only going to get worse, and that the message by some commentators and the oil companies that we should just get on with business as usual is, quite frankly, almost criminal,” Gustafson says.(ANI)

Special thanks to Richard Charter

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2012281543_oilmilitary05.html

Originally published July 4, 2010 at 7:04 PM | Page modified July 4, 2010 at 7:58 PM

Embattled BP still big fuel supplier to U.S. military
The Defense Department has kept up its immense purchases of aviation fuel and other petroleum products from BP even as the oil giant comes under federal and state scrutiny for potential violations of clean-water and oil-spill laws related to the April 20 explosion of the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, according to U.S. and company officials.
By R. Jeffrey Smith

The Washington Post

WASHINGTON – The Defense Department has kept up its immense purchases of aviation fuel and other petroleum products from BP even as the oil giant comes under federal and state scrutiny for potential violations of clean-water and oil-spill laws related to the April 20 explosion of the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, according to U.S. and company officials.

President Obama said last month the company had shown “recklessness” in the Gulf of Mexico that contributed to the disaster and promised that BP will “pay for the damage” it caused. Attorney General Eric Holder said June 2 that Justice Department lawyers were looking at potential violations of civil and criminal statutes, adding that “if we find evidence of illegal behavior, we will be forceful in our response.”

But BP remains a heavy supplier of military fuel under contracts worth at least $980 million in the current fiscal year, according to the Defense Logistics Agency.
In fiscal 2009, BP was the department’s largest single supplier of fuel, providing 11.7 percent of the total purchased, and in 2010, its contracts amount to roughly the same percentage, according to agency spokeswoman Mimi Schirmacher.

“BP is an active participant in multiple ongoing Defense Logistics Agency acquisition programs,” Schirmacher said, without providing details.
BP spokesman Robert Wine said he was aware of at least one “big contract” signed by the U.S. military after the oil rig sank, involving the supply of different fuels for its operations in Europe.

So far, members of Congress have discussed barring BP from future oil- and gas-drilling leases, not from fuel sales to the government. Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., who co-chairs the House Democratic Steering and Policy Committee, said last week he would introduce legislation to shut BP out of such leases for the next seven years as punishment for what he described as its “serial” legal violations.

But Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Mich., who chairs the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee on oversight and investigations, said in a statement that “the U.S. government needs to look at all possible options when it comes to showing BP, or any corporate bad actor, that a continued culture of cost cutting and increased risk taking will absolutely not be tolerated.”
Even before the Gulf debacle, the Environmental Protection Agency had begun probing the potential debarment of BP from all federal contracts – including those reached with the Defense Energy Support Center (DESC), which buys all fuel for the military services.

The EPA plays the lead role in debarment proceedings related to the Clean Water Act and Clean Air Act, and its probe was sparked by BP’s 2006 spillage of oil in Alaska and a 2005 explosion at its refinery in Texas.

But the EPA’s deliberations are suspended until the investigations of the Gulf spill are concluded, according to an EPA spokeswoman. The agency could eventually decide to shut off federal contracts with specific divisions within BP or to the whole company “if it is in the public interest to do so,” it said in May. Any such action would be meant to punish “environmental noncompliance or other misconduct,” it said.

Jeanne Pascal, a former EPA lawyer who until recently was overseeing the review of BP’s possible debarment, has said she initially supported taking such action but held off after an official at the Defense Department warned her that the agency depended heavily on BP fuel for its operations in the Middle East.
“My contact at DESC, another attorney, told me that BP was supplying approximately 80 percent of the fuel being used to move U.S. forces” in the region, Pascal said. She added that “BP was very ‘fortunate’ in that there is an exception when the U.S. is involved in a military action or a war.”

As a result, Pascal attempted to negotiate a settlement allowing continued contracting with BP while forcing the company to elevate an internal office dealing with health, safety and environmental issues within its corporate structure.

She also demanded that the company keep an ombudsman, retired federal Judge Stanley Sporkin, that it had first hired after the Alaska spill but had since sought to let go. BP resisted both, and the talks were stalemated when the Deepwater Horizon rig sank, she said.
A spokeswoman for the Defense Department, Wendy Snyder, gave a different account of the internal debarment discussions. She said the Defense Logistics Agency “informed the EPA that there are adequate procedures and processes to protect the U.S. military missions should EPA determine that BP should be debarred.”

That claim was reinforced by Schirmacher, who said that “none of BP’s current energy contracts are in direct support of operations in Iraq and Afghanistan” and that the agency could meet its requirements without BP fuel. But she indicated the Pentagon had no intention of taking such action in the absence of an EPA decision.
Several other federal agencies besides the Defense Department have continuing contracts with BP, although none worth as much as the Pentagon’s.

Since 2008, the Federal Aviation Administration has contracted to spend at least $2.26 million to station weather, communications and aerial-surveillance devices on several BP’s platforms in the Gulf, including the Atlantis oil-production platform roughly 100 miles from the Deepwater Horizon’s former location.

Critics, including a former BP contractor, have alleged the Atlantis was constructed without proper safety controls, but BP denies it.

FAA spokeswoman Laura Brown said BP’s environmental and legal record was not a consideration in her agency’s contracts. The Atlantis platform was selected “based purely on how it would support air traffic,” she said.

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http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5jG8jK4gBYUEQ4wDEI3XXokLkv4-w

AFP

BP remains key Pentagon supplier
(AFP) – 1 hour ago

WASHINGTON – Despite its role in the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, energy giant BP remains a key supplier of fuel to the Pentagon, The Washington Post reported.
Citing data from the Defense Logistics Agency, the newspaper said BP had contracts with the US Defense Department worth at least 980 million dollars in the current fiscal year.
In fiscal 2009, BP was the Pentagon’s largest single supplier of fuel, providing 11.7 percent of the total purchased, and in 2010, its contracts amount to roughly the same percentage, the report said.

The paper quoted BP spokesman Robert Wine as saying he was aware of at least one “big contract” signed by the US military after the oil rig explosion on April 20 that led to the largest environmental disaster in US history.

An estimated 35,000 to 60,000 barrels of oil per day has gushed from the ruptured well since the BP-leased Deepwater Horizon drilling rig sank on April 22, some 50 miles (80 kilometers) off the coast of Louisiana.

A containment system has captured about 557,000 barrels of oil, but rough seas delayed the deployment of a third vessel that could boost capacity from 25,000 barrels to 53,000 barrels a day.

That means an estimated 1.9 to 3.6 million barrels — or 79.5 to 153 million gallons — of oil has now gushed into the Gulf.
Using the high end of that estimate, the spill has now surpassed the 1979 Ixtoc blowout, which took nine months to cap and dumped an estimated 3.3 million barrels (140 million gallons) into the Gulf of Mexico.

So far, members of Congress have discussed barring BP from any new oil and gas drilling leases, not from fuel sales to the government, The Post said.
However, the Environmental Protection Agency had begun to explore cutting off BP from all federal contracts — including those with the Defense Energy Support Center, which buys all fuel for the military services, the paper noted.

The EPA’s move was sparked by BP’s 2006 oil spill in Alaska and a 2005 explosion at a refinery in Texas, according to the report.
Special thanks to Richard Charter

http://www.propublica.org/documents/item/bp-strategy-presentation-march-2010#document/p38

http://www.propublica.org/ion/blog/item/bps-big-plans-for-deep-wells-deep-profits

A BP presentation from March 2010-a month before the Deepwater Horizon disaster-spelled out the company’s “key sources of growth” beyond 2015. First on the list?
“Expanding deepwater.”

The document also includes a bar graph that proclaims BP as the “leading deepwater company” based on 2009 production numbers. According to the graph, BP produced the equivalent of 150 million more barrels of oil per day than did its closest rival, Shell.

BP’s document also shows that the company spent less on production costs than its competitors. In a June 15 hearing before lawmakers, some of those same oil companies told Congress that BPdid not follow design standards that they considered to be the industry norm.

BP’s Doug Suttles recently joined his industry peers in questioning the administration’s six-month moratorium on deepwater drilling.
“I understand why people might want to put a moratorium in place, but my personal view on this is we need to look very rapidly at what needs to be done that gives you confidence to restart (drilling in deepwater) because the consequences of stopping are also significant,” said Suttles, in comments reported by The Times-Picayune of New Orleans.

The moratorium was lifted last week, when U.S. District Judge Martin Feldman ruled that the rationale behind it was “heavy-handed, and rather overbearing.” Feldman, in 2008 and 2009 financial disclosures, reported owning stock in several oil companies. (Disclosure: Feldman is the same judge who earlier this year dismissed a libel lawsuit against ProPublica.) Interior Secretary Ken Salazar has said the administration may issue a new, narrower moratorium.

In tackling the Gulf disaster, BP has often cited the depth of this well as a primary challenge to containing the gusher. By now, multiple reports-including one in today’s New York Times-document how the technology to drill to greater depths has surged ahead, while the technology to clean up a spill hasn’t been updated for decades.

While other oil company executives assured lawmakers that their companies would have done things differently than BP did in designing the well, they weren’t able to put as much distance between themselves and BP when grilled on their own preparedness for a major oil spill.
At the June 15 hearing, lawmakers pointed out that the major oil giants are using very similar oil spill response plans that contain many of the same mistakes, including references to marine mammals that don’t live in the Gulf as well as contact information for deceased experts. All the plans were prepared by the same consulting group.

“When these things happen, we are not well-equipped to deal with them,” Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson told the House Energy panel.
Special thanks to Richard Charter

http://www.newsweek.com/2010/07/01/katrina-and-the-oil-spill-useful-comparison.html

Those awful FEMA trailers are back, this time as temporary housing for workers responding to BP’s disaster in the gulf. And in bad news for Obama, the public rates his handling of the mess similar to how Bush bungled the hurricane response.

Chris Bickford / The New York Times-Redux
A FEMA trailer in Venice, La., last month.

For its impact on Louisiana residents and the widespread criticism of the federal response, the disastrous Gulf of Mexico oil spill inevitably draws comparisons to Hurricane Katrina. The parallels only intensified as Tropical Storm Alex slammed the gulf and halted BP’s containment effort and The New York Times reported that cleanup workers were being housed in formaldehyde-tainted trailers once provided to hapless Katrina refugees.

The government banned the trailers from being used as long-term homes, then sold them in 2006, the Times reported. Now some cleanup contractors needing to house workers are buying them, even though the Federal Emergency Management Agency says they are not to be used for housing. “The price was right,” one of the contractors told the newspaper.

The government’s bungling of Katrina is never far from President Obama’s mind; he has visited the gulf several times in an effort to avoid criticism that his predecessor faced.

By many measures, Katrina looks like the worse disaster. The oil spill will certainly not take the same human toll as the hurricane, which caused around 1,500 deaths. Eleven workers were killed in BP’s Deepwater Horizon drilling-rig accident, with several deaths also reported among response workers. In addition to the damage Katrina wrought, the hurricane itself triggered one of the largest oil spills in U.S. history, releasing a reported 6.5 million gallons in various locations along its path, not including what may have spilled from fuel tanks in submerged cars or sunken boats. There’s also Katrina’s price tag, which the National Hurricane Center estimated at $84 billion, the largest ever for a hurricane. The economic cost of the gulf spill remains to be seen, not to mention the price to the environment and all the life forms that live in the gulf-which contribute in various ways to the livelihoods and ways of life of many humans.

While we await the final toll of the spill, which is in day 73, Americans have shown levels of frustration similar to what happened after Katrina. On June 7 a poll showed that more Americans had a negative view of the federal response to the oil spill than had a negative view of the much-criticized Katrina response. Worse for the Obama administration, another poll released Wednesday asked responders to compare Obama’s handling of the oil spill with George W. Bush’s handling of Katrina, and nearly six in 10 people said Obama’s response was the same or worse than Bush’s. A poll of Louisiana residents released June 15 drew a similar conclusion. “Obama’s Katrina” isn’t a phrase the White House wants to hear, but it’s one that could gain traction if the polling continues in this vein.

Special thanks to Richard Charter

06/29/2010

Mike Soraghan, E&E reporter

Environmental and liberal groups announced today that they have collected more than 400,000 signatures urging President Obama to reverse his plan to allow drilling in new offshore areas.

“The American public does not want more drills and spills,” said Anna Aurilio, director of the Washington office of Environment America, at a Capitol Hill news conference. “If anything, they want more windmills.”

Aurilio stood in a hearing room with cardboard boxes that bore the names of the eight environmental groups that circulated petitions against the expansion of drilling. Among them were Environment America, Greenpeace, Oceana, MoveOn.org and the Sierra Club. She was joined by Athan Manuel of the Sierra Club and three Democratic House members, Kathy Castor of Florida, John Garamendi of California and Frank Pallone of New Jersey.

“The American people are way ahead of the U.S. Congress on this issue,” Castor said at the event. “We’ve got to fight through Big Oil’s PR campaign. They downplay the risks. They contribute to campaigns.”

The oil industry says the environmental campaign does not prove any groundswell of opposition to offshore drilling.

“Hundreds of thousands of Americans have said they are in favor of offshore drilling,” said Cathy Landry, spokeswoman for the American Petroleum Institute. “And even after the spill, polls indicate the majority of Americans support expanded development.”

The comments solicited by environmental groups were submitted to the Interior Department as part of the process of evaluating the Obama administration’s offshore drilling policy, embodied in a five-year plan released in March. The deadline for comments for this stage of the process is tomorrow.

In releasing the five-year plan, Obama announced what he called an “expansion” of offshore drilling, proposing new drilling off the coasts of Alaska, Florida and Virginia. Most of those proposals have been scaled back, but the environmental groups want Obama to turn more fully away from drilling (E&E Daily, March 31).

As he tried to assert his control over spill response and policy in late May, Obama delayed the proposed oil lease sale off the coast of Virginia and suspended two planned exploration projects by Royal Dutch Shell PLC off the coast of Alaska. He also declared a moratorium that was later lifted by a federal judge (E&E Daily, May 28).

That still allows preliminary exploration activities along the southern Atlantic Coast and could allow the Virginia and Alaska drilling projects to restart in the next five-year plan. The petitions sought to block those possibilities. Each group’s wording was somewhat different, but each stated that new drilling should be stopped.

Special thanks to Richard Charter.