http://thephoenixsun.com/archives/10266
special thanks to Osha Davidson
CNN: State Dept. says 17 Nations have offered help in oil disaster
http://edition.cnn.com/2010/US/06/14/oil.disaster.foreign.assistance/
Washington (CNN) — The State Department said Monday that 17 foreign countries and four international bodies have offered equipment, expertise and other assistance to respond to the Gulf oil disaster.
Some of the offers accepted so far include two skimmers and 13,780 feet of boom from Mexico in early May, eight skimming systems from Norway in early May, three sets of surface-oil clearing systems from the Netherlands on May 23, and 9,843 feet of containment boom from Canada on June 4, according to a State Department statement.
Other countries to offer help include South Korea, Croatia, France, Germany, Ireland, Japan, Romania, Russia, Spain, Sweden, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom and Vietnam, according to the statement.
State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley issued a separate statement to clarify that the government had only accepted offers of foreign assistance without making any requests.
“We have not issued an appeal for assistance,” Crowley’s statement said.
The U.S. government also has accepted help from the International Maritime Organization in notifying its member states about the crisis, as well as assistance by the European Commission’s Monitoring and Information Centre in coordinating offers of help from EU countries, the State Department said.
“With few exceptions, these international offers of assistance are made on a reimbursable basis, which means that the assistance is provided only if paid for by the recipient,” the statement said.
In addition, oil giant BP has obtained equipment such as skimmers and booms from several nations including Algeria, Australia, Bahrain, Brazil, Canada, China, Denmark, Latvia, Norway, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan and the United Kingdom, the State Department said.
Thanks to Erika Biddle
Wall Street Journal: Chevron Distances Its Ways From BP’s
“A recent incident involved a Chevron pipeline in Utah that leaked what officials estimated was hundreds of barrels of crude oil into a Salt Lake City creek and threatened to contaminate the Great Salt Lake.”
June 14, 2010
BUSINESS JUNE 14, 2010
By BEN CASSELMAN
Chevron Corp. has come out swinging in its fight to continue drilling in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico, arguing that not all oil firms should be tarred with the brush of BP PLC’s Deepwater Horizon disaster.
In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Chevron chairman and CEO John Watson said he accepts the need for tighter drilling regulations in the wake of the spill, which since April has fouled the waters and coastline of the Gulf. But Mr. Watson, 52, called unnecessary the six-month moratorium on deep-water drilling imposed by the Obama administration.
The second-biggest U.S. oil firm by market capitalization after Exxon Mobil Corp., San Ramon, Calif.-based Chevron owns more Gulf of Mexico drilling leases than any other company and is the third-biggest oil producer there, after BP and Royal Dutch Shell PLC. It was considered a growth area for Chevron.
Now, access to deep water may be in jeopardy. In addition to the six-month moratorium on drilling in more than 500 feet of water in the Gulf, President Obama has put on hold plans to expand drilling off the coast of Alaska. Norway, too, has put a temporary halt to new deep-water exploration.
While Mr. Watson wouldn’t directly criticize BP, he said that even before the current disaster, Chevron had in place policies and procedures that might have avoided the oil-well blowout that caused the spill.
“This incident was preventable,” Mr. Watson said.
In the early days of the Gulf disaster, the oil industry mostly presented a united front. But as the crisis has dragged on, companies have begun to distance themselves from BP.
Mr. Watson and the CEOs of several other big oil companies are almost certain to try to draw distinctions when they face questions from a congressional panel on Tuesday.
Chevron shares have fallen nearly 10% since the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig caught fire April 20; though that drop is small compared with the drop in BP’s market valuation has declined 46%.
Mr. Watson said he understood the decision to halt drilling in the immediate aftermath of the disaster, which he called a “humbling experience for the industry.” But he said the industry’s overall safety record is strong, and that both industry and government panels have drawn up new safety recommendations in light of the spill.
“We favor rapid adoption of those recommendations,” Mr. Watson said.
Environmental groups, however, oppose a quick return to drilling.
David Goldston, director of government affairs for the Natural Resources Defense Council, said drilling shouldn’t resume until a presidential commission appointed to investigate the disaster completes its work.
“We don’t really understand a lot about what happened here,” Mr. Goldston said. “We don’t really understand how endemic the problems are, and that all needs to be sorted out before drilling is resumed.”
BP has been criticized by some industry experts for using a risky well design that could have made it easier for natural gas to get into the well and eventually cause the explosion.
Chevron uses a safer well design, said Gary Luquette, who heads North American exploration and production for Chevron.
“I think that if we’d have had best practices employed on this well, we wouldn’t have this situation that we have today,” Mr. Luquette said.
BP has said its well design wasn’t unusual and that its engineers evaluate many different factors in deciding how to drill.
BP spokesman David Nicholas said, “there are detailed investigations ongoing and these will determine the causes of the tragic Deepwater Horizon disaster.”
Many Gulf coast residents and politicians have also accused BP of being unprepared for the spill. Chevron has a “robust” system in place to deal with major spills, Mr. Watson and Mr. Luquette said, but they acknowledged that it, too, would have had difficulty dealing with a disaster of this magnitude.
Congress and President Obama have criticized BP for seeking to shift blame for the Deepwater Horizon disaster onto contractors. Mr. Watson pledged that Chevron wouldn’t do the same in a similar situation.
“These are our wells,” he said.
The Deepwater Horizon disaster has brought attention to industry’s safety record onshore, too. In recent weeks, there have been several accidents at oil and gas sites on shore, including natural-gas wells that blew out in Pennsylvania and West Virginia and two deadly pipeline explosions in Texas.
A recent incident involved a Chevron pipeline in Utah that leaked what officials estimated was hundreds of barrels of crude oil into a Salt Lake City creek and threatened to contaminate the Great Salt Lake.
Chevron said Sunday that the leak from a pipeline that ruptured two nights earlier has stopped, but clean-up operations continue. “The leak has been stopped,” Chevron spokesman Sean Comey said in an email.”We’re planning to excavate the area of the pipeline were we believe the leak began.”The company said it “takes full responsibility for the incident.”
Write to Ben Casselman at ben.casselman@wsj.com
Thanks to Richard Charter
Anchorage Daily News: BP free to drill with Liberty project
June 14, 2010
http://www.adn.com/2010/06/12/1320536/bp-free-to-drill-with-liberty.html
NORTH SLOPE: Island lease not affected by deepwater restriction.
By ERIC LIDJI
Petroleum News
Published: June 12th, 2010 07:04 PM
Last Modified: June 12th, 2010 07:05 PM
The new federal moratorium on deepwater drilling won’t delay the Liberty project BP hopes to begin drilling this year from an existing island off the North Slope.
“The deepwater moratorium does not apply to this particular project,” said Frank Quimby, spokesman for the U.S. Department of the Interior. “If drilling permit applications are submitted for the project, the Department of the Interior will review them at the appropriate time and determine, based on safety and other considerations, whether the project should move forward with drilling under federal waters.”
On May 27, the Obama administration announced a six-month “pause” in deepwater drilling off the U.S. coast, a response to the April 20 drilling rig explosion that killed 11 workers and triggered the massive Gulf of Mexico oil spill. “Deep water” is defined as being deeper than 500 feet.
The Liberty project would develop an offshore reservoir on federal leases using ultra-extended-reach drilling from one of the man-made Endicott oil field islands in state waters of the Beaufort Sea.
BP plans to apply for drilling permits at Liberty “closer to the first development well spud date, probably by fall,” according to local spokesman Steve Rinehart.
He said BP hopes to have the first oil production by 2011.
Besides the moratorium on deepwater drilling, the Obama administration also cancelled a pending lease sale in the Gulf of Mexico and a planned lease sale off the coast of Virginia, suspended 33 exploratory wells being drilled and, in Alaska, suspended Shell Oil’s plans to drill three wells in the Chukchi Sea and two in the Beaufort this summer. Because of seasonal drilling limitations, this Alaska suspension effectively pushes back Shell’s drilling for one year. Shell was planning to drill in about 150 feet of water.
Special thanks to Richard Charter
USA Today: Oil spills escalated in this decade
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2010-06-07-oil-spill-mess_N.htm
By Alan Levin, USA TODAY
The number of spills from offshore oil rigs and pipelines in U.S. waters more than quadrupled this decade, a trend that could have served as a warning for the massive leak in the Gulf of Mexico, according to government data and safety experts.
The spills – and the amount of oil that leaked – grew markedly worse even when taking increases in production into account, a USA TODAY analysis of federal data shows. The leaks came as the oil industry repeatedly claimed that offshore drilling was never safer.
From the early 1970s through the ’90s, offshore rigs and pipelines averaged about four spills per year of at least 50 barrels, according to the Minerals Management Service (MMS). One barrel is equal to 42 gallons. The average annual total surged to more than 17 from 2000 through 2009. From 2005 through 2009, spills averaged 22 a year.
The company with the most spills from 2000 through 2009 is BP, which leased the well spewing millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf since April 20, according to the data. The oil giant and its affiliated companies reported 23 spills of 50 barrels or more, not including the latest blowout. Oil firm Shell was next with 21, according to MMS spill reports.
Environmental activists and safety experts said the increasing numbers of spills should have been a red flag that the industry needed to tighten safety practices and that federal regulators needed to improve oversight.
A similar trend of increasing leaks and fires occurred at a BP refinery in Texas City, Texas, before a fire and explosion killed 15 people in 2005, said Andrew Hopkins, a professor at Australian National University who wrote a book about the accident. Paying closer attention to the smaller incidents might have prevented the disaster, but BP’s pay system gave employees no incentive to do so, he said.
“I suspect that the same may be going on with offshore oil spills,” Hopkins said.
Richard Charter, a marine expert with the environmental group Defenders of Wildlife, said the smaller spills should have foreshadowed bigger mistakes were on the way.
“Carelessness is usually a sign of impending disaster,” he said.
In the 1980s, an average of about 2,900 barrels of oil and other toxic chemicals spilled a year. That figure rose to more than 4,400 in the 1990s and to more than 6,100 in the 2000s. Offshore oil production increased during that time, but the rate of barrels spilled per barrels produced continued to increase.
The amount of spillage represents a small fraction of that piped out of the ground, according to the American Petroleum Institute, a trade group that represents the oil and gas industry.
MMS did not respond to requests for comment. BP also did not respond to a request for comment.
Richard Ranger, a senior policy adviser with the petroleum institute, acknowledged there have been “too many incidents” in the offshore industry. “The Deepwater Horizon incident compels a much deeper look at this information.”
Special thanks to Richard Charter