Why is BP taking all the blame?
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This is turning more and more into a rerun of the McCarthy era, Brit bashing has replaced reds under the bed as the new national obsession. The US needs to look at its own insatiable appetite for oil, currently running at over 20 million barrels per day, Only last year, there was a constant baying for oil production to be ramped up domestically and to drill in the ANWR, off the Californian coast and exploit the oil shale in the Green River formation. I was listening to the BBC radio the other day and it was pointed out that if Americans had European type cars they could save at least 2 million barrels per day effectively negating the need to drill for offshore oil.
As a quid pro quo, I think that the British government should reopen the enquiry into thePiper Alpha - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, which was the total responsibility of Occidental Oil, but they never ever faced criminal charges despite the fact that 167 people died. I predict that the outcome of all this will be an even greater reliance by the USA on foreign oil imports because oil companies will be too afraid to exploit domestic oil resources.
By Richard Pendlebury
Last updated at 9:46 AM on 17th June 2010
Last night Obama bullied BP into setting up a £13bn fund to compensate U.S. oil spill victims. Yet it's American firms that owned the rig AND the safety equipment that failed.
Taking the blame: BP Chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg apologises to the American people yesterday
On Capitol Hill, Washington DC, at 10am local time this morning, the boss of the world's fourth largest company will take his seat before a sub-committee of American congressmen. The inquisition that follows will be beamed around the globe. And if events of past weeks are a guide, BP chief executive Tony Hayward can expect a cross between the Battle of Bunker Hill and a Salem Witch trial.
Anger is understandable. Officially, today's hearing is slated to investigate 'the role of BP in the Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico'. But one word that is likely to be invoked repeatedly with a pejorative tone, and with a cynicism that is in inverse proportion to its actual relevance, is the adjective 'British'.
A decade has passed since the oil-producing giant changed its name from British Petroleum to BP, better to reflect its modern, multinational structure, rather than more parochial origins.
But, listening to President Barack Obama, you would think this wasn't the case. For he seems to have chosen to live in the past, as does his press spokesmen and a number of key Democrat allies. If their public utterances are anything to go by, the company to blame and be held to account for anything up to $34 billion of clean-up and compensation costs is British Petroleum, not BP.
By stressing the word 'British', the Obama administration, whose own role in the oil spill is also subject to critical scrutiny, has chosen to present America's worst environmental disaster as being foreign, specifically British, inflicted.
This week President Obama even compared the spill to the 9/11 attacks, the most recent assault on the American homeland by external enemies. That analogy caused dismay even in the States.
However, close analysis of the parties involved in the accident on the rig on April 20, which claimed 11 lives and continues to pump huge amounts of crude oil into the Gulf, tells a somewhat different story.
More...
- Bullied into a £13bn cave-in: Obama forces BP to set up huge compensation fund for U.S. oil spill victims - and British pensioners will pick up the bill
- DAILY MAIL COMMENT: Time to protect BP
It takes us from the tiny capital of the Marshall Islands in the West Pacific through Japan and Switzerland and the patrician environs of St James's in Central London, an address which has been the focus of Obama's populist politicking.
Last night BP bowed to the intense pressure from the American government and agreed to set aside £13.5 billion ($20bn) to pay U.S. claims for the catastrophe. Yet what is inescapable is how the accident itself was and is very much an American affair.
The United States is the world's biggest and most oil-greedy economy.
With its love of petrol-hungry cars and other energy-greedy symbols of a vibrant consumer culture, it needs the fossil fuel like a newborn infant craves milk.
Every day the U.S. gobbles up 20 million barrels; more than any other country - in fact almost as much as the rest of the top ten consumer nations put together.
Its own reserves cannot cope with such demand. And so, while around two-thirds of domestic oil demand has to be imported, new fields within its own territory are constantly sought. Their discovery and excavation have becomes harder and more specialised. Today, rigs are drilling five miles below the sea-floor, itself 4,000ft below the surface.
The participation of global experts such as BP is vital; indeed, in the U.S. region of the Gulf of Mexico, which produces one-quarter of domestic production, BP is the largest oil and natural-gas producer. We shall come to the reasons later.
Apology: Mr Svanberg, with from left to right BP chief executive Tony Hayward, director Bob Dudley and BP America Inc. chairman Lamar McKay, said he hopes BP can regain the people's trust
Capitol Hill is not just a concerned bystander in all this economic activity. The lease of oil drilling rights in its coastal waters is one of the U.S. Government's most lucrative sources of revenue.
Areas of seabed are auctioned off for tens of millions of dollars a tract by the federal Mineral Management Service (MMS).
It then charges 18.75 per cent royalties on the oil that is recovered. After that, both State and Federal governments will tax the gasoline which is the end product.
The mineral rights for one tract, the 5,700-acre Mississippi Canyon Block 252, were bought by BP in March 2008 in an auction held at the Louisiana Superdome in New Orleans. It was called Lease Sale No 206.
BP beat nine other oil firms to the lease, paying the MMS $34 million. The company subsequently sold 35 per cent of the rights to two other oil firms.
The smaller of BP's two partners, with a 10 per cent stake, is MOEX Offshore 2007 LLC.
This firm's head office is in the U.S. oil capital of Houston, Texas. But, in fact, it is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Mitsui Oil Exploration Co, of Tokyo, Japan. The parent firm is 20 per cent owned by the Japanese government. So far, President Obama has not invoked the December 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour.
BP's other partner in Mississippi Canyon Block 252 is Anadarko Petroleum Corp. It has the remaining 25 per cent stake. The firm is American and its HQ is near Houston.
Log on to the Anadarko website and you will struggle to find any reference to the Deepwater-Horizon disaster or the fact that Anadarko is directly involved. Unsurprisingly, Anadarko is keeping a low profile while BP takes the flak.
All this corporate angst and nationalistic backbiting can, of course, be traced back to what happened at the Macondo Prospect wellhead in Mississippi Block 252, 41 miles off Louisiana, almost two months ago.
BP had started drilling in 2009, but operations had been interrupted by Hurricane Ida. The semi-submersible rig Deepwater Horizon moved into position to resume exploratory operations in February.
Tense talks: BP bosses talk with Barack Obama yesterday
The rig did not belong to BP. Inevitably perhaps, it was owned and operated by Transocean, the largest deepwater oil drilling specialist contractors in the world.
Transocean has relocated its HQ to Switzerland (which has a more favourable tax regime for multinational companies), which is odd given the nature of its expertise and the fact that Switzerland is landlocked.
Transocean (motto 'never out of our depth') is as American as apple pie, able to trace its roots back to 1950s Alabama. There are a handful of Transocean employees based in an office in the Canton of Zug. But they are a fig leaf; the majority of their colleagues - some 26,000 in total - are Stateside.
Much to the chagrin of the American authorities, Transocean has moved its corporate HQ around the world purely to avoid, quite legally, paying tax.
Twenty years ago its registration was transferred from Delaware to the Cayman Islands. Two years ago, it moved to the land of the cuckoo clock, for a corporate tax rate of 17 per cent, down from the U.S. 35 per cent.
The move has apparently saved it some $2 billion, which would otherwise have gone to the U.S. Treasury, prompting a headline 'Transocean: Better at Tax Planning Than Oil Drilling. Transocean's Deepwater Horizon rig was built in South Korea by Hyundai Heavy Industries, ten years ago. The rig's port of register was Majuro in the Marshall Islands - a flag of convenience and just another moneysaving dodge in this tale of blurred national ties.
Transocean was under contract to BP at a rate of $500,000 a day to drill the Macondo Prospect well: an estimated 50 million barrels of oil, five miles below seabed, which is 4,000ft below the waves.
That sounds deep, but it's not the record - the 33,000-ton leviathan once drilled the deepest well in oil industry history.
Aboard the deepwater-Horizon on the evening of April 20 were 126 crew. Only seven were employees of BP; 79 of the others worked for Transocean, including the rig's commander Capt Curt Kuchta. The rest were from a variety of other firms, including Anadarko, Halliburton and M-I Swaco.
Halliburton is one of the world's largest oilfield services suppliers. Yet another Texas-based firm, it made a fortune out of the Iraq war, being one of the U.S. military's prime supply contractors.
Most of the food and fuel trucked into the country from Kuwait was done so by a Halliburton subsidiary. The firm was also given a multi-billion contract to oversee the restoration of the Iraqi oil industry. Such deals caused an international furore because the then U.S. Vice-President dick Cheney, one of the architects of the war, had only recently been a Halliburton executive.
Four Halliburton staff were on the Deepwater Horizon to oversee the cementing of the oil well casing. Once that was finished, they would then plug the wellhead with cement, ready for later oil extraction.
Angry: Mr Obama addresses the media after talks with BP yesterday
The men from MI-Swaco were providing other engineering services. Their employer is another Texas-based multi-national, owned by another oil services giant, Schlumberger, which is itself incorporated for tax reasons in the Netherlands antilles, with an HQ in Houston.
The exact causes of the Gulf of Mexico disaster might never be known, but it is now clear that the rig was destroyed by what is known as a 'blowout.' A bubble of highly inflammable methane gas escaped up the shaft and ignited. A firestorm swept the rig and in a matter of minutes 11 men died and 17 were seriously injured. Nine of those killed worked for Transocean. The other two were employed by MI Swaco. All the dead were local americans.
The Deepwater Horizon sank two days later. Efforts to cap the ruptured pipe failed and as the slick spread ever wider, at a rate of up to 40,000 barrels a day, the blame game began.
BP has attempted to steer a good deal of the blame towards Transocean. Lamar McKay, the American chairman of BP America told a congressional hearing that Transocean had been carrying out the drilling, owned the rig and a crucial piece of safety equipment - the 450-ton blowout preventer - which failed to stop the accident.
The blowout preventer was manufactured and supplied by Cameron International, another Houston-based, American firm.
In turn, Transocean blamed BP and its contractor Halliburton, for a 'catastrophic' failure of the cement in the wellhead.
Cementing of wellheads has been the cause of 18 out of 39 blowouts in the U.S. between 1992 and 2006. At the same time,Transocean has attempted to limit its liability to just $27 million, citing a 159-year-old U.S. maritime law.
This move caused a firestorm of new criticism. a lawyer acting for injured rig workers said: 'Transocean has accepted more than $430 million in insurance proceeds related to the deepwater Horizon explosion and oil spill, but has asked a Houston federal court to limit its liability to only $27 million ... This is a despicable action.
'This dishonors the families of the 11 men who were lost on April 20, but also those who were injured on the rig, and the many more affected by the oil spill.'
Transocean's attempt was thrown out by a judge earlier this week.
For its part, Halliburton has blamed BP for ignoring the advice of its staff on the rig, skimping on safety devices and design in order that further delays, costing $1 million a day, could be saved.
It said it had warned BP the well would have 'severe gas flow problems'. Other documents revealed that a BP employee had reported before the accident that the Mocando was a 'nightmare well'. It has also been alleged that the BP manager in charge of rig operations was not sufficiently experienced.
This week a congressional committee accused BP of a variety of risky corner-cutting decisions regarding the wellhead.
The federal government is also facing questions over its own role leading up to the blowout.
The Mineral Management Service had reportedly exempted BP's Gulf of Mexico drilling operation from a detailed environmental impact study 'after concluding that a massive oil spill was unlikely'.
MMS, which had already been tainted by allegations of kickbacks from the industries it was supposedly supervising - President Obama has called the relationship 'cosy' - is to be broken up. The lease-awarding, revenue collecting and safety maintaining arms will be separated at last.
Liz Birnbaum, director of the MMS, resigned at the end of last month. She obviously felt the 'British' were not entirely to blame.
But how British is BP? The answer is 'not very'.
Its shortened name and considerable presence in U.S. waters is a legacy of its 1998 merger with the American oil giant Amoco, founded as the Standard oil Company (of Indiana) by John D Rockefeller in 1889.
In 2000 the Anglo-American giant then snapped up Arco, another American oil firm.
Today, while its HQ remains in London, BP's corporate statistics are weighted towards the United States.
The board of 12 directors is split evenly between British and American nationals. But almost 23,000 of its other employees are American, compared to only 10,000 Brits. BP has 7,000 staff in Houston alone.
CEO Tony Hayward may be English, but BP chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg, who met President Obama yesterday, is Swedish. Ownership of BP is split evenly between Yanks and Brits; around 40 per cent of BP's shares are held on either side of the atlantic. More than $4 billion of BP's now disputed dividend was due to be paid to American pensioners and investors this year. Oil and politics are both dirty, reckless businesses.
While global oil reserves decline, the great maw that is the U.S. economy must still be fed. Where it comes from doesn't matter much.
Until things go wrong. In times of domestic political woe, pinning the blame on foreign interests is one of the oldest, most cynical tricks in the book. This week, congressmen have found that the disaster plans of all the big Gulf oil firms are as bad as each other. America's President has taken short-term advantage of the fact that the one involved in Deepwater Horizon used to have 'British' in its name.
But ultimately this transatlantic 'blame game' won't wash and it will be American jobs and pensions most at stake if he forces BP under.
Hold on to your knickers, Tom, but I have to agree. The One is kicking up as much dust as he can to keep the light off himself that he'd even throw his own children under the bus to do so.
I do think BP has a huge portion of the blame, but for the Obama Apologists and the few who still are cheering on the sidelines for this disaster of a president, it's beyond embarrassing. Talk about not being able to own your $hit. Obama has tanked in a major way and now he's trying to squirm out of it.
I hear your retirement system over there could implode since so much was invested in BP. Is this true?
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yes, I am aware... watching it in my office... that second goal with a couple minutes left really hurt. The way the US is playing they do not deserve to win.
That said... as bad as the US team is... we still tied almighty England
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Gordon Bennett, I almost had a bad turn there. Yes, I believe that around 13% of share income and dividends is derived from BP, so it it would have a very bad effect especially on top of all the other stuff that's happened already.
http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/pensions/article.html?in_article_id=505516&in_page_id=6
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yes, I am aware... watching it in my office... that second goal with a couple minutes left really hurt. The way the US is playing they do not deserve to win.
That said... as bad as the US team is... we still tied almighty England
You've just got one back, so there's hope for you yet.
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almost got another one there...
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sweet, I'll catch the kickball highlights on sports center.
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They are looking better, but it's not over yet.
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yeah.... just don't get sloppy again like the end of the first half...
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we just got ripped.... he was not offsides...
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No, it wasn't offside, still could have been worse just ask Germany.
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yet its BP who got all the violation and who paid all the fines...
your willful ignorance and defense of the indefensible is pathetic here tom
Oh Noze! If they do that then they can't force the US into a draw they should have won! Clearly this is the Corporation Formelry Known As British Petroleum's fault. !
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Not only was it a phantom call, the ref missed the blatant bear hug the Slovanian had on Bradley
Dixie - In Memoriam
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Tom, the people who will push BP into bankruptcy, are the very same liberals you have been cheerleading for the past 8 years or so. I hate to say it, but you're being killed and devoured by the very monster you created. They are now proposing we ban ALL deep water drilling, to go along with bans on drilling in shallow water, ice water, and no water. The liberals don't want us to drill anywhere for oil, because they figure if we have to buy foreign oil, the cost will rise and we will use less. These are the morons YOU support politically! Not ME, I am part of that "drill, baby, drill" crowd. I am also a capitalist, and I think it's stupid beyond belief to be actively attempting to bury BP over this. I'm with you on that, and I think at least some of the blame goes to the government for failing to properly monitor BP, as the laws were established. It's not a lack of regulation, it's a failure of government to do their job and enforce the regulations already on the books. But YOUR liberals are going to use this as an opportunity to push for more government control, more regulations, more red tape, more bans and moratoriums on drilling, and more assault on capitalist corporations like BP.
It's the government's fault for not preventing BP from violating regulations/laws? Is this defense open to all criminals or just the super rich ones, Ditzy?