You are in the current Gulf Watchers BP Catastrophe - AUV #432. ROV #431 is here.
Bookmark this link to find the latest Gulf Watchers diaries.
Please RECOMMEND THIS DIARY, the motherships have been discontinued.
Gulf Watchers Diary Schedule
Monday - evening drive time
Wednesday - morning
Friday - morning
Friday Block Party - evening
Sunday - morning
Part one of the digest of diaries is here and part two is here.
Please be kind to kossacks with bandwidth issues. Please do not post images or videos. Again, many thanks for this.
Well, it's official: the National Academy of Engineering --
is pointing fingers mostly at BP - joining the emerging consensus that the oil giant's errors greatly contributed to the explosion and subsequent oil spill.
...
[...I]t's more and more it's clear that BP's decisions at key junctures in the drilling process peeled away layers of safety and compounded the risk of a disaster.
The academy's report noted that John Guide, BP's top manager at the rig, was responsible for both the costs and the schedule of work and that led to costs savings that increased risks.
The report also said that numerous decisions, by BP and other contractors, to move forward in the process "despite indications of hazard ... suggest an insufficient consideration of risk and a lack of operating discipline."
So much for BP's self-proclaimed "culture of safety."
Guide, single-handedly flying in the face of Fred Bartlit's claim that no human being put dollars ahead of safety, was the subject of a late August piece by Bloomberg:
Guide, 52, is emerging as one of the critical decision-makers. According to internal company memos and testimony at recent hearings, it was Guide who vetoed a proposal to install equipment that may have kept explosive natural gas from seeping into the well and jetting up to the floating rig.
...
"To deflect attention away from its potential role in the well blowout, Halliburton has tried to focus the public’s attention on the number of centralizers used by BP in the Macondo well," BP said in a statement. "But the personnel that Halliburton trusted to design and implement the cement job have made one point abundantly clear at the Marine Board of Investigation hearings: They did not deem the cement job on the well to be unsafe even with the use of six centralizers -- nor did they believe there was a risk of a well blowout."
Does Guide bear all that responsibility, or is he the fall guy for BP? The company sure seems eager to point fingers at Guide, and yet Guide's own comments are less than reassuring.
Co-chairman of the Joint Committee Captain Hung Nguyen offered this at the time: "What was interesting to me is that both Mr. Patrick O’Bryan and Mr. David Sims [two of BP's vice-presidents] have pointed at John Guide, the wells-team leader, as decision maker. If that is true, that is a huge responsibility for one position and on one man."
Guide's objections to using the 21 centralizers recommended by Halliburton, rather than the six BP had already installed, was that they were not the kind specified in the well's design, and -- most damning -- that they would have taken ten hours to install.
BP could have put the project on hold to allow time to locate more centralizers and ship them to the rig, [VP] Sims testified.
"I don’t make the ultimate call on that anyway," he said. "It’s John’s decision."
...
When he was asked about the 10-hours reference, Guide said, "I didn’t think it was prudent to take 10 hours to install the wrong pieces of equipment."
Guide told the panel he rejected the recommendation to use 21 centralizers because he was concerned they could be difficult to retrieve from the hole if the pipe got stuck on its way down and had to be removed.
A similar problem had occurred a few days earlier at BP’s Atlantis field in the Gulf, according to a transcript of his testimony.
Atlantis?! Yikes. Be sure to check Thursday's news update (linked below) for the significance of BP's Atlantis rig. You will not be comforted.
*****
That document pulled from the OSC's website last week (see AUV #431) turns out to have been from a piece of "safety critical software" BP was running at the time.
Advanced cement modelling software, provided by BP's cement contractor Halliburton, had highlighted serious stability concerns with the well, saying more centralisers - which are used to provide space around the oil pipe casing as cement is poured in - needed to be added to ensure safety.
Which brings us back to John Guide... although he wasn't alone in his cavalier attitude:
As the drilling proceeded, Brian Morel, engineer at BP, wrote an email to colleague Brett Cocales, saying: "Who cares, it's done, end of story, we'll probably be fine".
...
Halliburton declined to comment [on the slide in question]. A spokesperson at Transocean, the rig owner, said: "Transocean does not - and did not in connection with the Deepwater Horizon - operate in preference of time or cost over safety." Procedures were "designed and directed by BP's expert personnel on the rig and onshore", the spokesperson said.
...
In a document presented to the OSC this week, experts said blowout preventers must in the future be equipped with "diagnostic tools", similar to black boxes in aircraft. These would be used to "provide more information in the case of a blowout".
Not holding our collective breath here at GW.
*****
Transocean, meanwhile, is being less than cooperative with the DOJ:
Federal investigators examining what caused the Deepwater Horizon disaster are running into major roadblocks as drilling rig workers refuse to testify under oath about the incident and key stakeholders question the inquisitors' jurisdiction.
Although the Chemical Safety Board has successfully probed scores of other industrial accidents, including BP's Texas City refinery explosion in 2005, the independent federal agency's investigators say they are encountering an unprecedented array of obstacles in their Deepwater Horizon inquiry.
"In Texas City, there was some generally good cooperation from the regulator, from BP (and) from the various contractors," said Don Holmstrom, the safety board's investigations manager. "There was no delay in getting interviews" with refinery workers, and even a company-funded personal attorney encouraged the plant manager he was representing "to communicate the full picture."
That isn't happening this time, Holmstrom said.
Of the eight Transocean employees subpoenaed so far, only one has testified under oath, three have refused the subpoenas, and several lawyers for the employees have declined to accept them on behalf of their clients.
In a separate investigation by the Coast Guard and the Interior Department, the Justice Department filed a civil suit against Transocean and accused the company of refusing to turn over two sets of documents related to safety audits on its rigs and safety training for particular workers. The documents were subpoenaed in October by the investigators.
In the Chemical Safety Board inquiry, the company is challenging whether the board even has the authority to conduct its investigation.
Transocean, which owned the Deepwater Horizon rig destroyed in the April 20 blast, insists it has cooperated with the board.
"Any assertion to the contrary is simply not true," company spokesman Brian Kennedy said. "Transocean has voluntarily provided the CSB with volumes of information and is unaware of any unanswered or outstanding requests."
Yeah, I buy that.
What? Too gullible?
*****
The Gulf Coast states are starting to wrangle with how to spend their payouts from BP. With varying results. In Louisiana:
State officials have finalized a plan with BP to distribute $78 million to pay for seafood testing, tourism and seafood marketing after the Gulf oil spill.
...
"Both our tourism — particularly our world-class charter boat fishing — and seafood industries were devastated by the oil spill," Lafourche Parish President Charlotte Randolph said.
Among the payouts, $30 million will be applied to monies related to lost tourism, and another $21 million will be applied to the state's coastal parishes.
"Our tourism and our seafood are inextricably intertwined. The success of one determines the success of the other, and in Louisiana we would have it no other way," said former Lt. Gov. Scott Angelle, now the head of the state’s Department of Natural Resources. "After over 100 days of negative visual coverage, the Louisiana tourism brand was tarnished. Potential vacationers canceled plans, restaurants stopped serving Louisiana seafood and the perception existed that our state was dirty and covered with oil. ... With these funds, Louisiana and its parishes can take the next step toward revitalizing our image to visitors."
The agreement also provides $18 million to the state Department of Wildlife and Fisheries for seafood safety testing and monitoring efforts, allowing the state to continue to sample, monitor and test Louisiana seafood from the Gulf waters off its coast for the next five years.
Since the spill began, more than 300,000 individual shrimp, crab, finfish and oysters have been tested and none have been found to contain oil chemicals at "levels of concern" established by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, though independent scientists have found some evidence of oil in seafood.
The state Department of Wildlife and Fisheries will also receive $30 million to promote Gulf seafood with the Louisiana Seafood Promotion and Marketing Board.
Promoting it doesn't make it safer. And there's the rub. The FDA -- the very same agency that lowered its standards for the presence of dispersants -- says there's no evidence of oil... but independent scientists disagree. Who you gonna trust?
"One last piece of the puzzle that will make the Louisiana seafood community whole is the ability to return the perception of our seafood products in the marketplace to the high quality, fresh and available seafood products as it was prior to the spill," said Mike Voisin, member of the Louisiana Wildlife and Fisheries Commission, and owner of Motivatit Seafood in Houma.
In Magnolia Springs, Alabama, they're looking to use what remains of their BP pay-out to save the Magnolia River.
Councilman Brett Gaar said the town’s first priority should be dredging the river.
"It’s horrible," he said. "Where the scouring is occurring, where the erosion is occurring, you really can’t see where sediment’s building up in the river. It’s migrating downstream and it’s eventually going to get to the rocks where the striped bass spawn."
Councilman Ken Underwood said the problem will get worse if not solved now.
"If we don’t tend to it at that location, we’re going to be dealing with it forever," Underwood said.
Gaar said the dredging project might cost $50,000 but that estimate was "a rough guess."
...
Other proposals include a system to test and monitor water quality on the river, at an estimated cost of $40,000, and a "living shoreline" erosion control project at $10,000.
Beats all heck out of trying to persuade people that Gulf seafood is perfectly safe.
Over in Gulf Shores,
[...The] city council this week passed a resolution allowing Mayor Robert Craft to settle with the oil company for roughly $1.8 million.
BP could not immediately provide a date for when the claim to the city would be paid. The Mobile Press-Register reports that the city had sought compensation for losses of tax revenue, royalties, rents and fees caused by the spill.
In Fairhope, Alabama, there's quite a different allocation of funds.
A state senator's tractor company received more than half of the $1.15 million in BP grant money that went to the coastal town of Fairhope after the Gulf oil spill.
The Press-Register of Mobile reports that Pittman Tractor Co. received $639,000 to help deploy oil-blocking boom around Fairhope. The company is owned by Republican state Sen. Trip Pittman of Montrose.
As a legislator, Pittman was responsible for overseeing the use of the BP grant money in the county.
Pittman says he hasn't done anything wrong. A Fairhope resident says he has filed a complaint with the Alabama Ethics Commission alleging improprieties, however.
In Montgomery, Attorney General Troy King has run smack up against Alabama Voters Against Lawsuit Abuse. Seems King wants to hire a lawyer to sue BP on the state's behalf,
[...A]nd most folks see no valid reason.
He claims BP hasn't kept its promise to settle and pay. It has; more than $500 million.
...
He's been reprimanded by the Ethics Commission, caught in a misstatement about personal gain through his elected position and hugely voted out of office for playing fast and loose with trial lawyers. And now he's sabotaged the payment [Governor Bob] Riley's office was crafting with BP. Why?
Well, certainly not for the betterment of Alabama. We needed that money. But when King said he was filing suit against BP, the company said it wasn't going to start paying the state and get sued by it at the same time.
*****
Kenneth Feinberg said about 450,000 emergency claims were filed by Tuesday's deadline. Of those, around 30,000 were filed Monday or later. "That is about four times what I thought there would be," he said.
Many will likely be denied, he said, because they lack documentation. He estimated about 325,000 claims had no or "woefully inadequate" documentation. About 1,000 claims are suspected of being fraudulent.
"A fisherman will apply and say: 'I lost $30,000 during the spill because I couldn't fish, pay me' and he attaches his fishing license with no further documentation," he said.
...
"I hope my lump–sum payment will be sufficiently generous to take into account the unknown future that many claimants will see the wisdom of taking the lump–sum payment and move on with life," he said.
He said there was no guarantee that someone holding out would end up getting more than an upfront lump sum because the damage to the Gulf may turn out to be less than previously thought.
...
"We feel that Mr. Feinberg is preying on the victims at the height of the holidays in an effort to settle this case and absolve his client — BP," [James P. Roy, a member of a lawyers' steering committee for lawsuits against BP,] said. "These claims of being generous are ridiculous."
Roy said he would urge his clients not to settle with BP and keep their legal options open. "We are all in favor of the interim payments."
Feinberg said he was independent. "BP has no check on the way I am doing this."
[Feinberg] attached new strings on Wednesday to provisions for paying final awards.
Kenneth Feinberg's protocol largely matches an early draft circulated to attorneys and lawmakers. But a new section gives BP the right to appeal awards of more than USD 500,000 to a judicial panel set up by the fund and bars victims from disputing any awards under USD 250,000.
...
[David A. Logan, dean of Roger Williams University School of Law in Bristol, Rhode Island] said: "The numbers they chose may be arbitrary, but they're not unreasonable. The law is full of arbitrary dollar limits and cutoff points for determining jurisdiction in court. Above one dollar level you're treated one way; below it you're treated another."
The DOJ is reviewing the process. Says a spokesperson:
"As we have made clear, there are a number of changes that we believe Mr. Feinberg must make to the protocol and release that we hope will better provide relief to the people and communities of the Gulf Coast."
The 14-page protocol also requires that claimants applying for final lump-sum payments after Nov. 23 give up the right to sue BP and other parties if they accept payment, whereas no such strings were attached for emergency payments.
...
Appeals decisions are binding only on BP. Claimants have the right to reject the GCCF appeals judges' decision and pursue a claim in the courts or as otherwise allowed under the Oil Pollution Act of 1990.
The protocol says Feinberg will choose a "distinguished member of the legal profession" who will identify individuals, "e.g., retired federal or state judges, respected legal academics, professional mediators or arbitrators, to serve as impartial GCCF Appeals Judges."
...
"The (appeals) setup shows that the Gulf Coast Claims Facility wants a lot of claims to be eligible for appeals but not all of them," Logan said. "Also I presume the appeals process is being paid by BP. They don't want to offer everyone at every level the ability to appeal."
"There was talk over the summer, at least in academic circles, that BP wouldn't have any right of appeal. So obviously that's changed," he added.
"On the face of it it's not unfair that BP has the right of appeal, unless you think the deck is stacked in their favor."
...
"Feinberg is acting in BP's interest in this situation and not the claimants',"said Brian H. Barr, a partner at Pensacola, Florida's Levin Papantonio Thomas Mitchell Rafferty & Proctor who serves on the executive committee for plaintiffs in the multi-district litigation against BP before a judge in New Orleans. Barr said he expected that the judges on the appeals panel would have a corporate-defense background and be friendlier to BP than to claimants. "To me, the victims' best appeal process is going to court."
In a conference call with reporters on Wednesday, Feinberg said the new appeals process was voluntary and that claimants could choose from multiple avenues to dispute the fund's decisions. "If (claimants) don't like what GCCF is doing, if they haven't heard from GCCF, under law they can appeal to the U.S. Coast Guard," Feinberg said. "If they don't like that (response) they can go to federal court. They do have options."
Jamie Court, president of Consumer Watchdog, a Santa Monica, California-based consumer advocacy group, said he was shocked that the new process allowed BP to dispute claim awards. "I don't believe BP should have the right to appeal any award," he said. "Victims are turning their fortunes over to an employee of BP, Mr. Feinberg, and his judgments in large cases for the victim should not be allowed to be second-guessed by BP."
*****
Meanwhile, BP's global reach extends further into Egypt, Indonesia, and in Pakistan, where BP again demonstrates their willingness to get deep into politics.
Pakistan's biggest listed firm, the Oil and Gas Development Co. Ltd. (OGDCL), is mulling a joint bid for BP's assets in Pakistan and has a Dec. 6 deadline to make an offer, sources close to OGDCL said on Thursday.
BP announced its plans to sell its upstream assets in Pakistan in July, as part of a $10 billion global asset sale aimed at raising cash to pay for its Gulf of Mexico oil spill.
...
OGDCL already has some stakes in BP's Pakistan assets . OGDCL declined to comment and officials at PPL , the country's second-largest listed firm by market value, were not immediately available.
A BP spokeswoman declined to elaborate, saying that the transaction is expected to be completed by the end of the year. "The process is underway and when something happens we will announce it. That's all actually we are going to share," she said. BP's upstream assets and related operations, which it plans to divest, include nine producing and exploration onshore blocks and four offshore exploration blocks in the Arabian Sea, the sources said.
They contribute about 14 percent of Pakistan's total oil production and 6 percent of its domestic gas production.
BP's Pakistan assets are valued at around $690 million. And it's regarding the OGDCL deal where BP's political reach demonstrates the extent of their grasp.
Former Pakistan Petroleum Minister Usman Aminuddin has revealed that then President Pervez Musharraf and ex-Premier Shaukat Aziz had been forcing him to not to resist the British Petroleum (BP) deal for buying Occidental Petroleum' shares in Badin field, whose assets were being sold at a throwaway price in 2002.
However, instead of bowing down to the pressure, Aminuddin told the 'top men' of the country that if they would keep insisting on doing this wrong thing, he would tender his resignation as the Petroleum Minister, The News reported.
He made these revelations while commenting on the petition filed in the Supreme Court by former Jamaat-e-Islami chief Qazi Hussain Ahmed, questioning the concerned BP deal.
In his petition, Ahmed had questioned the BP deal with Occidental Petroleum, and called for taking serious notice of those involved in 'compromising the national interest over vested interest by selling Occidental Petroleum's shares to the BP at a throwaway price'.
Aminuddin said that everybody in Musharraf's team, including Shaukat and privatisation minister Salim Altaf, had personal interests in the deal.
...
"The assets include a substantial part of the proven oil and gas reserves which were sold to the BP at a controversial price if not at throwaway price in 2002.
Interestingly, in the wake of the financial crunch the BP is confronting, it has planned to sell out its assets in Pakistan, and OGDCL and other relevant bodies are "facilitating" the BP to sell them on much higher price. Therefore, the new deal would cause a loss of 800 million dollars to the national exchequer.
*****
Please be sure to see the Thursday News Update for a number of important stories we're sure to be following in the coming months.
PLEASE visit Pam LaPier's diary to find out how you can help the Gulf now and in the future. We don't have to be idle! And thanks to Crashing Vor and Pam LaPier for working on this!
Previous Gulf Watcher diaries:
11-24-10 06:01:01 Gulf Watchers Wednesday - Critical Commission Document Pulled - BP Catastrophe AUV #431 - peraspera
11-22-10 04:21:52 Gulf Watchers Monday - Change in Oil Spill Fund Rules: Will BP Benefit? - BP Catastrophe AUV #430 - shanesnana
11-21-10 09:35:21 Gulf Watchers Sunday - New Charges Against BP; Barton Eyes Energy Chair - BP Catastrophe AUV #429 - Yasuragi
Gulf Watchers Block Party - Traveling Boomers - ursoklevar
Gulf Watchers Friday - Criminal Negligence - BP Catastrophe AUV #428 - Lorinda Pike
Gulf Watchers Wednesday - BP Bribes Schools to Brainwash Kids & NOAA Helps - BP Catastrophe AUV #427 - peraspera
Gulf Watchers Monday - Afternoon Edition - BP Catastrophe AUV #426 - shanesnana
The last Mothership has links to reference material.
Previous motherships and ROV's from this extensive live blog effort may be found here.
Again, to keep bandwidth down, please do not post images or videos.