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 [...]

Kate Sheppard reports on an independent estimate of the BP oil disaster which again raises the amount of oil spilled into the Gulf: An independent estimate concluded this week that the BP spill dumped 4.4 million barrels of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico. The new study, published this week in Science, is the [...]

BP has released an internal investigation into the Deepwater Horizon rig disaster, which led to the release of five million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. The report and accompanying video basically blames everyone for the disaster, from misreadings of well integrity tests before the explosion, to the failure of the blowout preventer, [...]

BP is basically saying here, in the vernacular, “Nice escrow account you’ve got there, would be a shame if something happened to it.” BP is warning Congress that if lawmakers pass legislation that bars the company from getting new offshore drilling permits, it may not have the money to pay for all the damages caused [...]

The news cycles can be measured in milliseconds these days, therefore this result is not surprising: In Louisiana, despite being at the heart of the spill, voters never showed much ambivalence about drilling. When we polled there in June 77% of voters supported it with 12% opposed for a net +65. Still that margin has [...]

BP has still not completed the “bottom kill” that would permanently seal the well in the Gulf, though it has not gushed oil for over 5 weeks. The main holdup seems to be a broken pipe attached to the blowout preventer. Eventually, BP will complete the task in the Gulf, one hopes. But just a [...]

Like a lazy adolescent with senioritis, BP had been intimating that they might not need to finish up drilling the relief well that would permanently stop the Macondo well in the Gulf, arguing that the heavy drilling mud, cement and other containment strategies are holding. Admiral Thad Allen gave that idea the big no-go today. [...]

A District Court judge has been chosen to deal with almost 300 lawsuits related to the BP oil disaster. While plaintiff’s attorneys are generally pleased with the venue of New Orleans, Judge Carl J. Barbier has come under criticism for past purchases of bonds from Transocean and Halliburton, both of whom were involved in operations [...]

In a sense, this was always the case. BP makes their money from drilling for, and selling, oil, and so their continued viability in running that business affects whether they have the cash available to pay out the $20 escrow fund for compensation to those hit by the oil disaster. But the deal between BP [...]

Boy, BP’s new CEO wasn’t kidding when he said he would scale back the operations in the Gulf: On July 13, the Deepwater Horizon Joint Command was reporting 46,000 responders. On July 23, it was down to 30,000, and the numbers have hovered around the low 30s since. Included in this tally are some Coast [...]

BP has started to cut off the gusher in the Gulf of Mexico through pumping heavy drilling mud into the well, and they believe they have reached static condition on the well, what they call “a significant milestone.” They plan to continue the relief well as a permanent solution, but they do not expect any [...]