BP settles mess they made in Alaska five years ago for 25 million bucks.

The fucks at BP have cut their losses and paid what many will think is a hefty fine for being cheap bastards and refusing to keep the AK pipeline in decent working order. From the WSJ:

On Tuesday, the company agreed to pay a $25 million fine and bolster its Alaska pipeline network as part of a settlement with the U.S. government over two major oil spills in 2006 in Alaska’s North Slope. The settlement is likely to end a 2009 civil lawsuit the Justice Department filed against BP’s Alaska oil-exploration. Click here for the WSJ story; here for the Bloomberg story; here for the NYT story.

The Justice Department said the penalty is the largest per-barrel penalty to date for an oil spill. The fine amounts to nearly $5,000 per barrel.

Of course the DOJ is gonna paint this as a huge deal and lots of money. But it's not. Not when you consider how much money BP saved by letting the AK pipeline rot and spew hundreds of gallons of crude on once pristine land instead of paying workers to keep it in good working condition. 

As I said here and here years ago...they knew the pipes were bad and corroding, they knew they were gonna blow and what they were doing was playing the odds like they always do..and they seem to have won in my humble yet vocal pov. Lets remember what type of land this pipeline crosses, shall we, from the CSM:

"It crosses more than 800 rivers and streams, three mountain ranges, and three major active faults. Three-quarters of it traverses fragile permafrost. It is built in zigzag fashion to allow for expansion and contraction during temperature changes as well as movement from possible earthquakes."

 Yes, I have a case of the ass against BP...for lots and lots of reasons..a total of 25 dead Americans for starters, and all the land, sea and animals they have fucked up over the years whilst they make billions and billions of bucks.

Video: FU BP

Caught this video at C&L this morning. Love it! Took these folks two days and dodging the cops. It's a simple but direct message really made me smile.

How BP values human life.

I wrote about the BP Texas City refinery disaster way back when the lawsuits were humming along and BP was trying to make them and the US government go away. Fifteen employees lost their lives in that explosion most likely because BP housed them in flimsy-assed trailers instead of a building that would be able to withstand such a blast. The Daily Beast  has uncovered a BP document that puts a $ value on the lives of their employees. It ain't pretty sportsfans. From the DB writeup:

The two-page document, prepared by BP’s risk managers in October 2002 as part of a larger risk preparedness presentation, and titled “Cost benefit analysis of three little pigs,” is harrowing:

“Frequency—the big bad wolf blows with a frequency of once per lifetime.”

“Consequence—if the wolf blows down the house then the piggy is gobbled.”

“Maximum justifiable spend (MJS)—a piggy considers it’s worth $1000 to save its bacon.”

“Which type of house,” the report asks, “should the piggy build?”

It then answers its own question: a hand-written note, “optimal,” is marked next to an option that offers solid protection, but not the “blast resistant” trailer, typically all-welded steel structures, that cost 10 times as much.

At Texas City, all of the fatalities and many of the serious injuries occurred in or around the nine contractor trailers near the isom unit, which contained large quantities of flammable hydrocarbons and had a history of releases, fires, and other safety incidents. A number of trailers as far away as two football fields were heavily damaged.

Coon says that during the discovery process, he found another email from the BP Risk Management department that showed BP put a value on each worker when making its Three Little Pigs calculation: $10 million per life. One of Coon’s associates, Eric Newell, told me that the email came from Robert Mancini, a chemical engineer in risk management, during a period when BP was buying rival Amoco and was used to compare the two companies’ policies. This email, and the related Three Little Pigs memo, which has never before been publicly viewed, attracted almost no press attention.

Between the Texas City explosion and the Deepwater Rig explosion, BP has snuffed out a total of 26 lives.....whilst saving money...or to put it bluntly..being cheap-ass mutha fuckas and playing the odds. 

7 most dumbass statements re: Gulf Oil Spill

From Alternet, we get the biggest, most fuckwitted, most outrageous comments from the fuckwads on the right:

7. Rush Limbaugh: Environmentalists probably blew up the oil rig

6. Rep. Taylor Compares Oil Slick to Chocolate Milk

5. Sarah Palin Promotes Offshore Drilling As Massive Oil Leak Continues

4. Bill Kristol Says Offshore Drilling Should be Brought Closer to Land

3. T. Boone Pickens: "All of that will get cleaned up and we'll be back"

2. Tony Hayward, CEO of BP: "What the hell did we do to deserve this?"

1. Rush Limbaugh: "The ocean will take care of this on its own if it was left alone and left out there. It's natural. It's as natural as the ocean water is."

There really is no need to extrapolate on these asinine remarks. They speak for themselves.

BP offering 30 pieces of silver.

These scum sucking carpetbaggers are offering Alabaman's $5 grand if they will sign away their right to sue over the damages that their fuck-up has and will cause along the Alabama coastline. From TPM:

BP has been offering $5000 payments to residents of coastal Alabama areas, in exchange for essentially giving up their right to sue the oil giant over its deadly Gulf Coast spill, according to the state's attorney general.


AG Troy King last night urged BP to stop the effort, and told Alabamians to be wary. "People need to proceed with caution and understand the ramifications before signing something like that," King said, according to the Alabama press.

A spokesman for BP told a reporter that the waiver clause had now been removed from the contracts, and that the company won't enforce it in contracts that were previously signed. But King, a Republican, isn't satisfied. He said last night he's still concerned that the process could strip people of their right to sue.

Sid Jackson, a Mobile-based lawyer representing a shrimper who last week filed suit against BP, claiming that the spill had already taken a financial toll on his business, told TPMmuckraker that he believed BP would be wise to back down. "I think they kind of drop-kicked that [waiver] clause into the fine print," Jackson said. But, "I think it would backfire" if BP tried to enforce it.

Don't you just love it? The economic and environmental disaster has just begun along the Gulf of Mexico coastline, and BP's biggest concern is circumventing the legal system in order to cover their putrid asses.

Have you ever seen a bird or dolphin dying who is covered in oil? I have as I was a resident of Santa Barbara when the oil spill hit land in 1969. I was a highschool student. I saw all kinds of marine mammals in various stages of dying. Those visions haunted me for decades. The SB oil horror was the beginning of the enviromental movement...it was that horrific.

A little history lesson on oil and marine life:

The oil was so thick upon the water that waves reaching shore reportedly made no sound. The tides brought dead seals and dolphins, whose clogged blowholes caused their lungs to hemorrhage. Countless fish and marine invertebrates perished. Diving birds were soaked with oil while shore birds fled. A massive volunteer effort attempted to rescue oil-soaked birds from beaches and bring them to emergency treatment centers. Even so, less than 30 percent of the birds that were treated survived.

This is what the residents of the Gulf coast have to look forward to. Dead animals and a ruined eco-system.

I will never forget what I saw...and neither will the residents of the gulf coast now. From a post I did on the Santa Barbara oil spill:

I was a highschooler when the Santa Barbara oil spill happened..and I lived in Santa Barbara county. You haven't lived until you have walked on a beach that has oil ten inches thick all fucking over it. You haven't seen nothing until you see birds that are covered in the shit and dying a slow painful death. You haven't experienced shit until you see hundreds of dead fish, seals and dolphins covering the beach.

It is going to happen all over again. I am thankful that I do not live anywhere near the gulf coast. But the nightmares have started all over again for me.

BP's safety history flat out sucks..and people die regularly.

I have blogged ad-friggin- nauseum about BP’s lack of safety in all areas of oil drilling and refining. These fuckers simply do not give a tinkers damn, and consider the fines levied against them the cost of doing business.

Lets recap, shall we?

First, the Alaska pipeline. NBC News had a piece in 2006 about BP having not only knowledge of how bad the state of their pipeline was, but they hadn’t performed normal proactive maintenance procedures for over 15 years. The fact that they poisoned a huge area of Alaska with their oil spill, and didn’t blink an eye over it should tell you what their priority is..money..make it while you can and screw the environment. Some parts of the pipeline are quoted as being “paper thin”. The environmental disaster would be horrific.

Next the explosion at the TX refinery which killed 15 workers in 2005. Four years later, they had major safety issues that still had not been addressed. From the Telegraph article:

BP has been handed a record $87m fine for “outstanding life-threatening safety problems” at its Texas City refinery where an explosion killed 15 workers and injured 170 in 2005.

Hilda Solis, the US Labor Secretary, said authorities had found 439 current “wilful and egregious” safety violations which “if unaddressed could lead to another catastrophe”.

“This administration will not tolerate disregard of our laws,” she added.

The US Occupational Safety and Health Administration visited the refinery 17 times over four years and it claims that 270 notices to correct hazards have not been rectified.

There have been four additional fatal incidents at the Texas City refinery since the 2005 explosion.

One worker was crushed between a lift and a pipe rack, another was electrocuted while working on a light circuit, a third was killed when the top blew off a pressure vessel, and a fourth was hit by a front-end loader.

“There were some serious, systemic safety problems within the corporation and specifically within this refinery,” said Jordan Barab, acting assistant secretary of labor for OSHA. “Just the fact that there are so many still outstanding problems, life-threatening problems, at this plant, indicates that they still have a systemic safety problem.”

As I said, they pay the fines which are usually less than what it would cost them to actually fix the fucking problems. These pigshit mutha fuckas need to be criminally charged for these issues. It will be the only way to wake these bastards up..perp walk the upper echelon of management into federal court on murder charges for starters.

But I ain’t holding my breath..nope. The past and current administrations did not and do not have the balls to do that. A history of not giving a shit will continue, which means people will continue to die and nothing will change. Eleven workers lost their lives in the Gulf Disaster last week…just chalk it up to the cost of doing business….right gents?

"The biggest environmental crime in history"

That, my dear reader, is the title of the Independent article I read Sunday evening in my inbox. Somehow, I wasn't surprised to see that it was about British Petroleum..aka BP. It's the description of a Canadian drilling project which environmentalists and people with a modicum of common sense brand BP's method of 'extraction'. From the Indy article:

BP, the British oil giant that pledged to move "Beyond Petroleum" by finding cleaner ways to produce fossil fuels, is being accused of abandoning its "green sheen" by investing nearly £1.5bn to extract oil from the Canadian wilderness using methods which environmentalists say are part of the "biggest global warming crime" in history.

The multinational oil and gas producer, which last year made a profit of £11bn, is facing a head-on confrontation with the green lobby in the pristine forests of North America after Greenpeace pledged a direct action campaign against BP following its decision to reverse a long-standing policy and invest heavily in extracting so-called "oil sands" that lie beneath the Canadian province of Alberta and form the world's second-largest proven oil reserves after Saudi Arabia.

Producing crude oil from the tar sands – a heavy mixture of bitumen, water, sand and clay – found beneath more than 54,000 square miles of prime forest in northern Alberta – an area the size of England and Wales combined – generates up to four times more carbon dioxide, the principal global warming gas, than conventional drilling. The booming oil sands industry will produce 100 million tonnes of CO2 (equivalent to a fifth of the UK's entire annual emissions) a year by 2012, ensuring that Canada will miss its emission targets under the Kyoto treaty, according to environmentalist activists.

For decades, technology has tried to figure out a way to extract the oil from these tar sands. Evidently someone is tired of waiting wouldn't you say? Another precious resource will be sucked up in order to extract this oil:

The oil rush is also scarring a wilderness landscape: millions of tonnes of plant life and top soil is scooped away in vast open-pit mines and millions of litres of water are diverted from rivers – up to five barrels of water are needed to produce a single barrel of crude and the process requires huge amounts of natural gas. The industry, which now includes all the major oil multinationals, including the Anglo-Dutch Shell and American combine Exxon-Mobil, boasts that it takes two tonnes of the raw sands to produce a single barrel of oil. BP insists it will use a less damaging extraction method, but it accepts that its investment will increase its carbon footprint.

BP is lying its collective ass off when it says anything about using a 'less damaging' method of extraction. It would cost them more money and BP is nothing if not cheap when it comes to safety and environmental concerns, judging from their past history of fuck-ups and..ahem..accidents. GreenPeace's climate and energy guru has said this about BP and the tar sand extraction plans:

"It takes about 29kg of CO2 to produce a barrel of oil conventionally. That figure can be as much 125kg for tar sands oil. It also has the potential to kill off or damage the vast forest wilderness, greater than the size of England and Wales, which forms part of the world's biggest carbon sinks. For BP to be involved in this trade not only flies in the face of their rhetoric but in the era of climate change it should not be being developed at all. You cannot call yourself 'Beyond Petroleum' and involve yourself in tar sands extraction."

If none of this pisses you the hell off...consider the logic of BP's PR executive regarding the project:

"These are resources that would have been developed anyway."

Sumbitches.

Take a gander at the remains of the BP plant in texas after BP cut corners on safety and employees were killed because BP knowingly allowed safety problems to go uncorrected in order to pad their...bottom line.

I wrote about the original refinery explosion here which killed 15..count em..15 employees. BP eventually only had to ante up $373 million for the lives of their employees lost in this TX refinery explosion and subsequent coverup. I wrote about that here in October of this year.

Now, the bastards are going to kill an area the size of Wales and England combined..and get paid handsomely to do it. So people can drive their big friggin SUV's and have gas to put in them among other things..

Tags: BP, Tar Sands Oil extraction, Alberta Canada

BP to pay $373mil to make some problems go away..

First off, its complete bs that British Petroleum-BP can do this. There should be criminal charges filed against these mofo's at every level of management my dear reader. Per an AP writeup, they are buying their way out of the following problems:

BP PLC is taking a multimillion dollar broom to sweep away a slew of federal charges linked to energy price fixing, a deadly refinery blast and pipeline leaks and focus on its energy business.

The more than $373 million in settlements announced Thursday are part of the company's attempt to get rid of the problems left over from the stewardship of former chief executive John Browne and move ahead with the recently announced restructuring of Europe's second-largest oil company.

On top of the fines and restitution, four former BP employees were indicted by a federal grand jury in Chicago on 20 counts of mail and wire fraud connected to a scheme to manipulate energy markets.

The bulk of the fines — $303.5 million — aim to punish BP for conspiring to fix propane prices in 2003 and 2004.

Screw 'punishing' them..put their smarmy asses in jail for Christ sakes for the murder of their employees. I know if I commit a crime, I can't buy my way out of it..can you? But this huge corporation can and will. Also..who is going to pay back the citizens that got screwed when these jackasses colluded to fix prices?

This reminds me of the last post I did here ..about fixing the price of natural gas on the commodities market.

Look at this picture of the plant in TX that blew to hell because BP was cutting corners on safety. People died in this explosion. And BP gets to just pay a fucking fine. Amazing.

Tags: British Petroleum, corporate crime, BP