Titans of Industry category archive

Because the oysters are in decreasing supply:

The refrigerated trucks that deliver Gulf of Mexico oysters to Sam Rust Seafood in Hampton have dwindled from two a week to one – and it’s only half full.

The piles of oysters shucked by Shores & Ruark Seafood in Urbanna have shrunk by as much as 60 percent. And L.D. Amory & Co., a seafood processor on the Hampton waterfront, trucked 35 bushels of oysters last week to a Chicago buyer that normally gets 50.

Seafood operations up and down the Virginia coast hook a large part of their business to the fishing industry in the Gulf. Many have suffered a drop in sales since the BP oil spill led to the shutdown of large fishing areas along the coasts of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida.

Much more at the link.

From the oldie but moldy department, here is a history of BP’s involvement in turning Iran into an enemy of the West.

Short version: BP wanted the oil and, through the British government, using the spectre of Communism, convinced the United States to overthrow the legitimately elected government of Iran.

(In those days, you could say “Communist” to the United States and it would do whatever you asked, then sit on its hindquarters and beg for a doggie bone. Yeah, it was stupid. But there it was.)

BP has not an honorable history. It still breaths the breathe of empire and believes the myths of Kipling.

Most oil companies have skeletons in their closets.

BP has mausoleums in its closet.

So, if they were wiling to foment subversion and overthrow a government, why the heck should we expect them to care about a few dolphins, shrimp, and pelicans. Or fish. Or beaches. Or watermen. Or people. Or societies.

Tradition, baby. BP is all about tradition.

Image via ia Bart Blog.

Family squabbles:

Anadarko Petroleum, which owns a quarter of the ruptured Deepwater Horizon well, refused to accept any blame for the explosion that killed 11 workers and led to the US’s worst environmental disaster.

The company’s chairman and chief executive, Jim Hackett, said in a statement BP’s actions probably amounted to “gross negligence or wilful misconduct”.

BP’s chief executive Tony Hayward, who was grilled about the disaster by Congress for seven hours on Thursday, said he “strongly disagreed” with the allegation and expected the firm’s partners to “live up to their obligations”.

BP seems to think so (emphasis added):

BP Chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg told reporters in Washington: “I hear comments sometimes that large oil companies are greedy companies or don’t care, but that is not the case with BP. We care about the small people.”

The Times-Picayune tries to cut him some slack:

Svanberg is Swedish, and his comments may have been an unintentional slight.

Er, yeah.

If BP’s flacks had a bb gun, they would shoot their eyes out.

They must sit around in a room and brainstorm ideas about how to make the company look bad, badder, baddest.

Via Mithras.

Andy Borowitz reports:

In what is being called a game-changer for the embattled oil company, British Petroleum announced today that it has developed a new technology to convert lies into energy.

At a press conference at corporate headquarters in London, BP CEO Tony Hayward said that environmentalists would embrace the new technology “because lies are a totally renewable resource.”

It’s not British Petroleum. It’s Bullshit Petroleum.

Read more »

From the New Orleans Times-Picayune:

In an effort to ensure that businesses and individuals left idle by the massive Gulf oil spill are compensated, White House officials said Sunday that President Obama will legally demand that the oil giant establish an independently administered escrow account to cover claims being made against the company.

In Utah:

A major spill from a Chevron pipeline blackened Red Butte Creek early Saturday, staining scores of birds, prompting the closure of Liberty Park and sending oil as far west as the Jordan River.

The busted pipeline has been shut down, Chevron spokesman Mark Sullivan said Saturday afternoon, but residual oil still could be leaking.

Note that Chevron was able to turn the valve.

Because they had installed one.

Debarment removes a federal grant from the recipient; it the ultimate penalty for misconduct.

Among the types of grants subject to debarment are mineral rights.

Fresh Air interviews ProPublica investigative reporter Abrahm Lustgarten on his investigation of BPs safety practices. From the website:

His findings, published Tuesday in The Washington Post, indicate that BP was well aware of safety and maintenance issues as early as 2001.

“[The documents are] strikingly consistent, which was the first thing that jumped out to us …” Lustgarten tells Fresh Air’s Terry Gross. “You start to see a couple central themes. And those were: internal criticism for a lack of accountability in the company, lack of support for workers at BP and at BP’s contractors. … [There was also] a consistent emphasis of profits over production over safety and maintenance and environmental compliance, meaning they were putting profits ahead of safety. And finally, a systematic disregard for maintenance of their equipment. It’s a process that they call ‘run to failure’ where they would use the equipment for as long as possible while investing as little effort and money in maintaining it as possible.”

Follow the link to listen to the interview or read lengthy selections from the interview.

Andrew Clark, U. S. Business Correspondent for the Guardian, argues against piling on BP. A nugget:

BP hasn’t done itself many favours. Initially, the company woefully underestimated the scale of the spill. And BP’s chief executive has produced a string of cringeworthy remarks. The company was ill-prepared for such an unprecedented disaster but has finally made some progress in plugging the leak. Yet BP has consistently promised to foot the bill for cleaning up the gulf and to meet all valid compensation claims.

Many will argue that BP deserves to die, and anger is entirely understandable. But critics should be careful what they wish for. America is a nation with a tradition of due process and everybody – even “big oil” – is entitled to a fair trial.

I can get behind the part about a trial.

“It cannot be that the only thing our government is good for any more is war . . . .”

Via TPM.

Via Kiko’s House.

BP’s wild well drowning economy as well as living beings. From Bloomberg:

With tar balls washing up on Pensacola, property sales are being renegotiated and buyers are delaying bids, said Theo Baars of Baars Real Estate Services LLC, whose family has marketed property in the city since 1946.

Tourism is taking a hit, too, with only one-fifth of the usual number of people attending the annual sandcastle contest last weekend, Grover Robinson, chairman of the Escambia County Commission, said at a Monday press briefing. The county includes Pensacola, located about 200 miles east of New Orleans.

Much more at the link.

The Philadelphia Inquirer looks at coverage of BP’s wild well and concludes that, taken all together, news media have done a pretty good job of covering events since the blowout (of course, this does not mean that every news organization has done a good job).

Then it asks

Yes, the media are doing fine now – but where were they when the mistakes were being made?

Roger Cohn, editor of the online eco-magazine Yale Environment 360, says, “One big lapse was to accept this notion that technology of deepwater drilling had been so improved over the years and was now safe. The industry said so, President Obama believed and accepted it, so the media very uncritically accepted it without any evidence.”

Emotions are the fuel of politics, so it should not surprise that, in this ferocious off-year election, the two major parties are battling to take charge of the narrative. Each announcement, each appearance, is a photo-op, a chance to attract votes.

The author then fails to point out that

• almost everyone, not just President Obama, believed that the “technology of deepwater drilling had been so improved over the years and was now safe,” except possibly for a few “enviro-not-so-whackos,”
• that Republicans were and, God help me, are still agitating for drilling here, there, and everywhere,
• that, when President Obama approved some offshore exploration for oil, it was considered to a political concession to–wait for it–Republicans to help smooth passage of Climate Change legislation and that those same Republicans complained that he did not go far enough.

This is all part of the before that the author concedes was not well reported, but which then drops out of the narrative completely. Yet, knowing the before helps us understand the after.

The story then degenerates into a bunch of drivel on current political manoeuvering.

To try to make this all about Obama is to try to make an arson fire all about the fire department and ignore the arsonists.

I’m just back from the vigil to mark the 50th day of BP’s wild well. I’ll post some pictures tomorrow.

We’ll see what it looks like when BP gets through with it.

Vigil tomorrow.

On the Media looks at coverage of the wild well and claims that BP was trying to throttle reporting. From the website:

A handful of media outlets have reported that their reporters were denied access while trying to cover the oil spill in the Gulf, leaving some journalists worried that BP is deciding where they can and can’t go. Times-Picayune photojournalist Ted Jackson recounts his access problems while Lieutenant Commander Chris O’Neil of the US Coast Guard explains that BP is definitely not calling the shots.

A nugget from the transcript:

BOB GARFIELD (from On the Media–ed.): Just the suggestion that BP is making decisions about the movements of journalists caused an outcry, and by midweek the Coast Guard had stepped in to clarify its media policy and to reiterate that BP is definitely not making the rules.

But by that point, a few journalists had already been running in circles, including Times-Picayune photojournalist Ted Jackson, trying to do a routine flyover. Jackson had hired a seaplane to get aerial shots of the spill.

TED JACKSON (news photographer–ed.): Typically, you call the FAA and request permission to get below the temporary flight restriction, and the flight restriction that day was 3,000 feet, which is way too high to make a picture. So we requested to be able to fly lower than that, and the authority asked who was on the flight. And he said, I have the Times-Picayune photographer. And the answer was immediately, no then, you cannot have this exemption.

The seaplane company owner asked him, can I get your name so I can put your name in the file of people who were denying this request? He told him his name, and he said that he was a BP contractor hired to handle aviation requests. And that was just very disturbing to think that I was being denied access from a BP representative.

Follow the link to listen or read the transcript or listen here:

Brendan is getting Buccaneer Petroleum’s press releases, sub rosa, as ’twere.

You can’t make this stuff up. But BP can.

Bookmark Brendan Calling, sign up for the RSS feed, have a drink or four (I recomment four or more), and enjoy the science fiction.

It makes the Cthullu Mythos seem prosaic.

The Guardian editorializes. A nugget (emphasis added):

Ever since the formerly government-owned corporation went entirely private in 1987, and especially under the 12-year reign of John Browne from the mid-90s, BP has adopted a business manner that could politely be described as gung ho. Its American rival Exxon is fierce about keeping to high technical standards, Shell prides itself on its solid engineering – but BP has long been about outsourcing vital operations (the Deepwater Horizon rig that exploded was owned and operated by another firm), doing big deals (taking over Amoco, for instance) and trading. It is, in short, an oil company that acts like a particularly brash bank.

The results have often been horrific. Not just Deepwater, but the explosion of the Texas City refinery in 2005 and the fractures in its Alaskan pipelines in 2006-07. This particular crisis is also comparable with the sub-prime meltdown, in that the laxity of American regulation led to disaster.

Karoli at C&L discusses nuking BP’s wild well.

The idea gives me the willies from the git-go. I’m not a physicist, though I know a little bit about physics and a lot about history. Blowing stuff up is seldom an effective choice, though it appeals to the macho and the frustrated and especially the frustrated macho. Blowing it up is their alternative to getting it u–never mind.

A nugget from Karoli’s post:

As I understand it, the goal with any explosive device is to cause the hole to collapse on itself. According to some experts, the problem with conventional explosives is the same problem other solutions are bumping against: this well is so deep and subject to such severe pressure that there’s no empirical evidence available to support or refute the claim conventional explosives would succeed. If they didn’t succeed, the problem might be made even worse.

This is an incredibly frustrating problem, not only because of the draconian measures needed to stop the spillage, but because we’re being asked to take so much on faith when it comes to the steps needed to stop the leak and clear the oil.

• We’re told dispersants are non-toxic but hazmat suits are needed and the manufacturer’s own instructions recommend they not come in contact with bare skin.
• We haven’t been told what kind of impact dropping all that mud has, particularly when mixed with oil.
• We have no idea how long it will take the microbial agents to eat the oil and clear the water.
  We have absolutely no clue as to whether a nuclear device will work and if it does, whether it will do so at the expense of all living things for years to come.
• Worst of all, no one has any faith in the information we’re receiving from BP, because they have not been forthright with us and appear to be acting in their best interests rather than our own.

I wasn’t a rocket scientist in school, but common sense tells me the nuclear option may not be the best one.

Via Bob Cesca.

Addendum, a cup of coffee later:

Leonard Pitts.

A team of top federal prosecutors and investigators has taken the first steps toward a formal criminal investigation into oil giant BP’s actions before and after the drilling rig disaster off Louisiana. The investigators, who have been quietly gathering evidence in Louisiana over the last three weeks, are focusing on whether BP skirted federal safety regulations and misled the U.S. government by saying it could quickly clean up an environmental accident. The team has met with U.S. attorneys and state officials in the Gulf Coast region and has sent letters to executives of BP and Transocean Ltd., the drilling rig owner, warning them against destroying documents or other internal records.

I hope they have computer and physical forensics folks on call, because I find it extremely unlikely that DEL keys ain’t clickin’ and shredders ain’t shreddin’.

Via Intoxination.