BP made the biggest fuck up buying American trash compannies like AMOCO and ARCO. They were trash. They’re only realising what kind of trash now.
Quite possibly quite true…so let’s review:
In Alaska, BP first brought unwelcome attention to itself more than 20 years ago in the aftermath of the Exxon Valdez oil spill. Exxon was BP’s partner in Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay oilfield, the nation’s largest, and shared in the ownership of the trans-Alaska pipeline system, known as Alyeska and headed then by a BP executive who was on loan to the pipeline company. After a series of documents were leaked to news reporters and Congress that showed how Alyeska failed to live up to its promises to contain spills, that executive, James Hermiller, in February 1990 ordered an undercover operation to track down the leaker.
Hermiller’s chief suspect was Chuck Hamel, a former congressional aide and oil broker in Alexandria, Va., who became a conduit between industry whistleblowers and reporters. With Hermiller’s blessing, Alyeska hired Wackenhut Corp., a security company in South Florida, to catch Hamel and identify his whistleblowers. Wackenhut set up a phony environmental law firm and attempted to get Hamel to use it to pursue public interest lawsuits against Alyeska and Exxon. They stole Hamel’s trash, bugged an office he used and hired a beautiful blonde to pretend she was an environmentalist in order to get Hamel to talk.
But the scheme collapsed seven months later when one of the Wackenhut operatives came to believe that it was Hamel who was honorable, not Alyeska, and switched sides, bringing the Wackenhut spies with him.
Well, maybe that one is inconclusive, so let’s move forward:
BP ran afoul of federal environmental laws in Alaska after it was discovered that from 1993 to 1995 a BP contractor, Doyon Drilling, had illegally dumped hazardous materials down oil well shafts on the North Slope, the giant Alaska oil production area bordered by the Brooks Range mountains to the south and the Arctic Ocean on the north. Doyon pleaded guilty in federal court to a felony violation of the Clean Water Act and was fined $3 million. BP was convicted on Feb. 1, 2000, of failing to report the dumping as soon as it learned about it, a felony. BP was fined $500,000, placed on five years probation and ordered to create a nationwide environmental management program that cost the company at least $40 million.
A BP official told the judge, “We are committed to ensuring this never happens again.”
Hmmm, things aren’t looking so rosy for the home team, even before AMOCO and ARCO, so let’s see what’s happned since then:
BP was still on probation when new problems erupted, this time in its North Slope corrosion control program. Despite warnings from a leak detection system, a badly corroded 34-inch-diameter pipeline in Prudhoe Bay lost oil for at least five days before a worker driving down a nearby service road on March 2, 2006, smelled oil and spotted the spill, which covered at least two acres of tundra. At 200,000 gallons, it was the largest ever on the North Slope.
Just five months later, on Aug. 6, 2006, a second spill of about 1,000 gallons was discovered on another line. Subsequent investigation found the line was riddled with corrosion, with 176 places where more than half the original diameter had been eaten away.
Congressional hearings held to probe the spills immediately focused on claims that BP actively discouraged workers from reporting safety and environmental problems. The British-born chief of BP’s corrosion unit, Richard Woollam, who’d moved out of the corrosion unit in 2005, took the 5th Amendment against self incrimination during the hearings, which uncovered a 2004 report by the Houston law firm Vinson & Elkins warning BP that employees faced retaliation for reporting problems.
In 2007, BP pleaded guilty in federal court in Anchorage to another violation of the Clean Water Act for the 2006 spill. This crime was a misdemeanor, but it still cost BP $20 million in fines and restitution and three more years of probation. Prosecutors said the spill occurred because BP was more interested in cutting costs than in maintaining an aging oil field.
A BP vice president told the judge that the corrosion problems were “out of character” for the company. BP had learned its lesson, he said.
But in November last year, 46,000 gallons of oil and water gushed from an over-pressurized BP pipeline on the North Slope, prompting the EPA and the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation to open another criminal investigation of BP. An EPA investigator declined to comment last week on the probe’s status.
Okay, now’s it safe to blame AMOCO/ARCO, 6 years later:
It’s the 2005 Texas City explosion, however, that drew the harshest accusations against BP — from the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board, which issued a 341-page report in March 2007, two years after the blast, and from a separate commission led by former Secretary of Sates James Baker III. Both groups faulted BP’s management at all levels for overlooking problems.
“Warning signs of a possible disaster were present for several years, but company officials did not intervene effectively to prevent it,” the Chemical Safety and Hazard probe concluded. “Cost-cutting, failure to invest, and production pressures from BP Group executive managers impaired process safety performance at Texas City.”
And the beat goes on, and the beat goes on…:
Two BP management officials, who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss internal matters, said budget cuts were largely the reason equipment was not upgraded or repaired, and indicated that much of it has yet to be addressed. BP’s Alaska budget for 2010 is $1 billion, compared with $1.1 billion in 2009 and $1.3 billion in 2008.
Moreover, according to two BP Alaska officials, projects related to “safety and integrity” have been cut by 30 percent this year and BP’s senior managers receive bonuses for not using funds from BP’s designated maintenance budget, a company wide policy implemented by Hayward. Documents show that Hayward also implemented a cost-cutting directive following the oil spills in 2006 in Prudhoe Bay.
When was it that Tony and Friends starting selling and shorting BP stock? Was that before or after they knew about some major problems with DWH?:
BP Plc was struggling to seal cracks in its Macondo well as far back as February, more than two months before an explosion killed 11 and spewed oil into the Gulf of Mexico.
It took 10 days to plug the first cracks, according to reports BP filed with the Minerals Management Service that were later delivered to congressional investigators. Cracks in the surrounding rock continued to complicate the drilling operation during the ensuing weeks. Left unsealed, they can allow explosive natural gas to rush up the shaft.
“Once they realized they had oil down there, all the decisions they made were designed to get that oil at the lowest cost,” said Peter Galvin of the Center for Biological Diversity, which has been working with congressional investigators probing the disaster. “It’s been a doomed voyage from the beginning.”
…
In early March, BP told the minerals agency the company was having trouble maintaining control of surging natural gas, according to e-mails released May 30 by the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which is investigating the spill.
Gas Surges:
While gas surges are common in oil drilling, companies have abandoned wells if they determine the risk is too high. When a Gulf well known as Blackbeard threatened to blow out in 2006, Exxon Mobil Corp. shut the project down.
“We don’t proceed if we cannot do so safely,” Exxon Chief Executive Officer Rex Tillerson told a House Energy and Commerce committee panel on June 15.
On March 10, BP executive Scherie Douglas e-mailed Frank Patton, the mineral service’s drilling engineer for the New Orleans district, telling him: “We’re in the midst of a well control situation.”
Hayward disposed of 223,288 shares of BP stock on March 17…