This is a couple days old, but given the attention we paid last year to the BP oil disaster, I couldn’t let it slip by. From the Telegraph (UK): The lawyer in charge of BP’s $20bn (£12bn) compensation fund is starting to wind down his operations in the Gulf Coast with just a fifth of [...]

Masataka Shimizu, the head of the Japanese utility TEPCO, resigned today after the nuclear accident in the wake of the earthquake and tsunami that hit the country in March. Workers are still trying, with varying degrees of success, to get the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant under control. “I take responsibility for this accident, which has [...]

In addition to being the anniversary of the BP oil disaster, yesterday was a deadline of sorts for lawsuits in the incident to be filed. And BP got theirs in under the wire. BP on Wednesday sued the maker of the device that failed to stop last year’s calamitous Gulf oil spill and the owner [...]

On April 20, 2010, the Deepwater Horizon rig off the coast of Louisiana exploded, causing an oil gusher which spewed over 205 million gallons of oil and 225,000 tons of methane into the Gulf of Mexico. In the ensuing months, a lot of time and money has been invested in selling the idea that the [...]

I’ve heard the American media described accurately at a bunch of 7 year-olds at a youth soccer game. There’s nothing strategic about the game; all the kids chase the soccer ball in a pack. I thought of that when I read a story about enduring sickness in the Gulf of Mexico. It didn’t come from [...]

The Obama Administration approved the first deepwater drilling well permit for the Gulf of Mexico, 11 months after the BP oil disaster. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement announced Monday that it issued a permit to Noble Energy Inc. to continue work on its Santiago well about 70 miles southeast of Venice, [...]

The Presidential Oil Spill Commission has released their final report on the BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. The essential conclusion, if you don’t have the time to read the whole 396-page report, was this: The blowout was not the product of a series of aberrational decisions made by rogue industry or government officials [...]

Ralph Hall (R-TX) is the unassuming new chairman of the House Science and Technology Committee. Like many Americans these days, Hall considers the pinnacle of American advancement in science and technology to be ‘splosions. There’s no way to read his praise of the BP oil spill – that’s not a typo, I wrote “praise” – [...]

BP is aggressively challenging the government’s estimate of the oil spill in the Gulf, because that final number will determine how much they’ll owe in fines: BP’s lawyers are arguing that the government overstated the spill by 20 to 50 percent, staffers working for the presidential oil spill commission said Friday. In a 10-page document [...]

The White House has reversed their position on offshore drilling, opting not to expand on exploration in the Eastern Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Coast, closing off millions of acres. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, who made the announcement, said that the BP oil spill taught them the need to create a more robust regulatory [...]

If there’s one thing Halliburton doesn’t need, it’s a blow to their reputation. They had such a sterling record up to now! Halliburton knew weeks before the fatal explosion of the Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico that the cement mixture they planned to use to seal the bottom of the well was unstable [...]