Gayle in MD
05-11-2010, 08:18 AM
<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Quote:</div><div class="ubbcode-body">WASHINGTON — Oil services contractor Halliburton Inc. says it safely finished a cementing operation 20 hours before a Gulf of Mexico rig went up in flames. In testimony prepared for a congressional hearing Tuesday, Halliburton says it completed work on the well according to accepted industry practice and federal regulators.
Halliburton executive Tim Probert says a pressure test was conducted after the work was finished, and the well owner decided to continue. A copy of the testimony was obtained by The Associated Press.
The cause of the April 20 explosion is under investigation, but lawsuits filed after the disaster claim it was caused when Halliburton workers improperly capped the well – a process known as cementing. Halliburton denies wrongdoing.
</div></div>
<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Quote:</div><div class="ubbcode-body">WASHINGTON — Oil services contractor Halliburton Inc. says it safely finished a cementing operation 20 hours before a Gulf of Mexico rig went up in flames. In testimony prepared for a congressional hearing Tuesday, Halliburton says it completed work on the well according to accepted industry practice and federal regulators.
Halliburton executive Tim Probert says a pressure test was conducted after the work was finished, and the well owner decided to continue. A copy of the testimony was obtained by The Associated Press.
The cause of the April 20 explosion is under investigation, but lawsuits filed after the disaster claim it was caused when Halliburton workers improperly capped the well – a process known as cementing. Halliburton denies wrongdoing.
</div></div>
<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Quote:</div><div class="ubbcode-body">In 2004, the Offshore Operators Committee objected to MMS rules regarding minimum blowout prevention systems, requesting that testing of the devices be reduced from 10 minutes to 5 minutes.
In 2006, BP objected to MMS proposing a "best practice" for cementing techniques in deepwater drilling operations, emphasizing that operators should have "flexibility" when it comes to the critical procedure, which seals up the drilling hole and the gaps between the hole and pipe. As HuffPost has reported, possible flaws in Halliburton's cementing work on the Deepwater Horizon may also be to blame for the accident. As FireDogLake reported on Monday, Halliburton seems to have been aware of the risks posed by faulty cementing work, citing a presentation by the oil services giant last November.
As HuffPost first reported last week, BP, Transocean and other members of the oil industry vigorously objected to new safety regulations proposed by MMS last summer, which would have required them to submit their safety and environmental management programs to an audit every three years.
The industry's objections extended to measures intended to help clean up after an oil spill. Claiming that the petroleum industry had funded the Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund to $1 billion, the American Petroleum Institute wrote a 2000 letter to the Department of Transportatino, stating:
The petroleum industry should not be expected to pay for further OSTLF prevention expenditures for sources outside the petroleum industry, particularly since the petroleum industry's oil spill record has improved so much over the past decade.
</div></div>
<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Quote:</div><div class="ubbcode-body">A common spin in the right wing coverage of BP's oil spill is a gleeful suggestion that the gulf blowout is Obama's Katrina.
In truth, culpability for the disaster can more accurately be laid at the Bush Administration's doorstep. For eight years, George Bush's presidency infected the oil industry's oversight agency, the Minerals Management Service, with a septic culture of corruption from which it has yet to recover. Oil patch alumnae in the White House encouraged agency personnel to engineer weakened safeguards that directly contributed to the gulf catastrophe.
The absence of an acoustical regulator -- a remotely triggered dead man's switch that might have closed off BP's gushing pipe at its sea floor wellhead when the manual switch failed (the fire and explosion on the drilling platform may have prevented the dying workers from pushing the button) -- was directly attributable to industry pandering by the Bush team. Acoustic switches are required by law for all offshore rigs off Brazil and in Norway's North Sea operations. BP uses the device voluntarily in Britain's North Sea and elsewhere in the world as do other big players like Holland's Shell and France's Total. In 2000, the Minerals Management Service while weighing a comprehensive rulemaking for drilling safety, deemed the acoustic mechanism "essential" and proposed to mandate the mechanism on all gulf rigs.
Then, between January and March of 2001, incoming Vice President Dick Cheney conducted secret meetings with over 100 oil industry officials allowing them to draft a wish list of industry demands to be implemented by the oil friendly administration. Cheney also used that time to re-staff the Minerals Management Service with oil industry toadies including a cabal of his Wyoming carbon cronies. In 2003, newly reconstituted Minerals Management Service genuflected to the oil cartel by recommending the removal of the proposed requirement for acoustic switches. The Minerals Management Service's 2003 study concluded that "acoustic systems are not recommended because they tend to be very costly."
The acoustic trigger costs about $500,000. Estimated costs of the oil spill to Gulf Coast residents are now upward of $14 billion to gulf state communities. Bush's 2005 energy bill officially dropped the requirement for the acoustic switch off devices explaining that the industry's existing practices are "failsafe."
Bending over for Big Oil became the ideological posture of the Bush White House, and, under Cheney's cruel whip, the practice trickled down through the regulatory bureaucracy. The Minerals Management Service -- the poster child for "agency capture phenomena" -- hopped into bed with the regulated industry -- literally. A 2009 investigation of the Minerals Management Service found that agency officials "frequently consumed alcohol at industry functions, had used cocaine and marijuana and had sexual relationships with oil and gas company representatives." Three reports by the Inspector General describe an open bazaar of payoffs, bribes and kickbacks spiced with scenes of female employees providing sexual favors to industry big wigs who in turn rewarded government workers with illegal contracts. In one incident reported by the Inspector General, agency employees got so drunk at a Shell sponsored golf event that they could not drive home and had to sleep in hotel rooms paid for by Shell.
Pervasive intercourse also characterized their financial relations. Industry lobbyists underwrote lavish parties and showered agency employees with illegal gifts, and lucrative personal contracts and treated them to regular golf, ski, and paintball outings, trips to rock concerts and professional sports events. The Inspector General characterized this orgy of wheeling and dealing as "a culture of ethical failure" that cost taxpayers millions in royalty fees and produced reams of bad science to justify unregulated deep water drilling in the gulf.
It is charitable to characterize the ethics of these government officials as "elastic." They seemed not to have existed at all. The Inspector General reported with some astonishment that Bush's crew at the MMS, when confronted with the laundry list of bribery, public theft and sexual and financial favors to and from industry "showed no remorse."
BP's confidence in lax government oversight by a badly compromised agency still staffed with Bush era holdovers may have prompted the company to take two other dangerous shortcuts. First, BP failed to install a deep hole shut off valve -- another fail-safe that might have averted the spill. And second, BP's reported willingness to violate the law by drilling to depths of 22,000-25,000 feet instead of the 18,000 feet maximum depth allowed by its permit may have contributed to this catastrophe.
And wherever there's a national tragedy involving oil, Cheney's offshore company Halliburton is never far afield. In fact, stay tuned; Halliburton may emerge as the primary villain in this caper. The blow out occurred shortly after Halliburton completed an operation to reinforce drilling hole casing with concrete slurry. This is a sensitive process that, according to government experts, can trigger catastrophic blowouts if not performed attentively. According to the Minerals Management Service, 18 of 39 blowouts in the Gulf of Mexico since 1996 were attributed to poor workmanship injecting cement around the metal pipe. Halliburton is currently under investigation by the Australian government for a massive blowout in the Timor Sea in 2005 caused by its faulty application of concrete casing.
The Obama administration has assigned nearly 2,000 federal personnel from the Coast Guard, the Corps of Engineers, the Department of Defense, the Department of Commerce, EPA, NOAA and Department of Interior to deal with the spill -- an impressive response. Still, the current White House is not without fault -- the government should, for example, be requiring a far greater deployment of absorbent booms. But the real culprit in this villainy is a negligent industry, the festering ethics of the Bush Administration and poor oversight by an agency corrupted by eight years of grotesque subservience to Big Oil.
</div></div>
Beginning Of The President's Wise Solution to The Power Of The Corrupt Oil Industry, which was Coddled for eight Year By The Bush/Cheney Oil Cartel In The White House, SEcretly, Behind Closed Doors.
<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Quote:</div><div class="ubbcode-body">WASHINGTON — The Obama administration is proposing to split up an Interior Department agency that oversees offshore drilling, as part of its response to the Gulf Coast oil spill, The Associated Press has learned.
An administration official who asked not to be identified because the plan is not yet public said Interior Secretary Ken Salazar will urge that Congress approve splitting the Minerals Management Service in two. One agency would be charged with inspecting oil rigs, investigating oil companies and enforcing safety regulations, while the other would oversee leases for drilling and collection of billions of dollars in royalties.
Currently, the Minerals Management Service, an arm of the Interior Department, is responsible for collecting more than $10 billion a year from oil and gas drilling and with enforcing laws and regulations that apply to drilling operations.
Some critics have said the two roles are in conflict and are one reason the agency has long been accused of being too cozy with the oil and natural gas industry.
An internal investigation in 2008 described a "culture of substance abuse and promiscuity" by workers at the agency. The investigation by Interior's inspector general found workers at the MMS royalty collection office in Denver partied, had sex with and used drugs with energy company representatives. Workers also accepted gifts, ski trips and golf outings, the report by Inspector General Earl E. Devaney said.
Devaney decried "a culture of ethical failure" and an agency rife with conflicts of interest.
Salazar, who promised aggressive reform when he took over the Interior Department early last year, believes the tragedy aboard the Deepwater Horizon oil rig – and the resulting massive oil spill – has made reform even more urgent, the administration official said.
The Interior Department will move to establish an independent energy inspection agency within the Minerals Management Service "so that the American people know that they have a strong and independent organization holding energy companies accountable and in compliance with the law of the land," the official said.
Salazar is expected to announce the reforms Tuesday in what is likely to be the first of several structural changes he is considering at Interior. At the request of President Barack Obama, Salazar is conducting a 30-day review of offshore drilling. He also has appointed an Outer Continental Shelf Safety Oversight Board to recommend management improvements and closer oversight of offshore drilling operations.
The MMS and U.S. Coast Guard are conducting a joint investigation of the April 20 explosion on the Deepwater Horizon rig and will file a report to Obama. The six-member panel begins two days of hearings Tuesday in Louisiana, the same day Congress begins a series of hearings on the oil rig explosion and oil spill.
Since taking office in January 2009, Salazar has pushed a series of reforms at MMS, including establishment of new ethics standards, termination of a controversial royalty-in-kind program, and increased emphasis on wind and other renewable energy sources.
He also has canceled proposed offshore lease sales in Alaska and the Arctic Ocean and established what he calls a science-based process for determining where offshore drilling is appropriate on the Outer Continental Shelf.
Last week, the Interior Department said it is indefinitely suspending public hearings on the proposed sale of oil and gas leases off the Virginia coast while it focuses on the Gulf oil spill. The department said MMS staff had focused their attention on the Gulf incident and would be unable to conduct the meetings until a later date.
On March 31, three weeks before the Gulf explosion, Obama called for new offshore drilling in the Atlantic Ocean from Delaware to central Florida, plus the northern waters of Alaska. He also said he wants Congress to lift a drilling ban in the oil-rich eastern Gulf of Mexico, 125 miles from Florida beaches.
<span style='font-size: 20pt'>After the oil spill, Obama promised that no new offshore oil drilling leases will be issued unless rigs have new safeguards to prevent a repeat of the explosion. He ordered Salazar to report on what new technologies are needed to tighten safeguards against oil spills from deep water drilling rigs.</span> </div></div>
Just imagine the Bush Administration even considering coming down on the corrupt oil pigs!
LMAO! That would NEVER happen. And here we go again, with Halliburton right in the middle of the F-up!
<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Quote:</div><div class="ubbcode-body">BP, Transocean, Halliburton point fingers at each other for spill
By ERIKA BOLSTAD
McClatchy Newspapers
WASHINGTON -- Top executives from three companies involved in the Deepwater Horizon oil rig disaster will face a barrage of questions on Tuesday from angry senators eager to make it clear they intend to hold someone responsible for a blowout that killed 11 and continues to spew 210,000 gallons of oil each day into the Gulf of Mexico
But it's also clear the three companies will have another source of finger-pointing - each other.
In testimony released Monday before the first of Tuesday's two Senate hearings, the executives, from BP America, which owned the well, Transocean Ltd., which owned the rig, and Halliburton, a contractor on the rig, blame other companies for the as-yet-undetermined cause of the explosion.
In his testimony, submitted to the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, Lamar McKay of BP said the company wants to answer two questions at the root of the disaster: What caused the explosion and fire, and why did the blowout preventer fail? He makes it clear Transocean owned the blowout preventer.
"The systems are intended to fail-closed and be fail-safe; sadly and for reasons we do not yet understand, in this case, they were not," McKay is to testify. "Transocean's blowout preventer failed to operate."
That directly counters Transocean CEO Steven Newman's statement.
"Over the past several days, some have suggested that the blowout preventers used on this project were the cause of the accident," Newman is expected to testify. "That simply makes no sense."
Their investigative team has looked at numerous possible causes, Newman will say, but the company's blowout preventers "were clearly not the root cause of the explosion." The well had been sealed with casing and cement, and within a few days, the blowout preventers would have been removed, anyway, he will say. At that point, the cementing and casing were responsible for controlling any pressure, he says in his testimony.
Although Newman does not single out Halliburton for blame, he does make it clear that Halliburton was the cementing subcontractor and as such "is responsible for encasing the well in cement, or putting a temporary cement plug in the top of the well, and for ensuring the integrity of the cement."
Tim Probert of Halliburton has a different take, and points back to BP in his prepared testimony. The well owner is ultimately responsible, said Probert, who is the president of the company's global business lines and its chief health, safety and environmental officer.
"I need to start this section with an important statement of disclosure," he is expected to testify. "Halliburton, as a service provider to the well owner, is contractually bound to comply with the well owner's instructions on all matters relating to the performance of all work-related activities."
"It is also important to understand the roles and responsibilities of the various parties involved in the construction of a well," he added. "The construction of a deep water well is a complex operation involving the performance of numerous tasks by multiple parties led by the well owner's representative, who has the ultimate authority for decisions on how and when various activities are conducted."
Meanwhile, BP is struggling to find a way to stop the flood of oil following its failed effort to place a 78-ton steel and concrete cap the size of a four-story house over the pipe. Company officials on Monday announced engineers would try to put a smaller "top hat" over the main leaking pipe as early as Thursday. If it is successful, the company would pump the captured oil to a barge.
While they continue to look for a solution to stop the oil, government regulators are investigating the incident. President Barack Obama has temporarily halted all new offshore drilling until the Interior Department submits a safety report due May 28.
Regardless of who's to blame for the accident, McKay said in his prepared testimony that he wishes to underscore the company's "intense determination to do everything humanly possible to minimize the environmental and economic impacts of the resulting oil spill on the Gulf Coast ."
Already, the company has mobilized a fleet of 294 response vessels and has recovered more than 97,000 barrels of oil-and-water mix from the sea, McKay said in his statement.
"BP is under no illusions about the seriousness of the situation we face," he said. "In the last three weeks, the eyes of the world have been upon us. President Obama and members of his Cabinet have visited the Gulf region and made clear their expectations of BP and our industry. So have members of Congress, as well as the general public."
Read more: http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/05/11/1623157/bp-transocean-halliburton-point.html#ixzz0nd8JOB1l
</div></div>
Republican Policies: Remove environmental REstrictions for the sake of Corporate Profits, From Regan, to Bush, to Bush the Whacko, who was Cheney's puppet....
Question, how many jobs lost, people killed, cancer deaths from Republican removal of environmental regulations, illegal invaders increased after REagans Amnesty, and trillions of dollars wasted ultimately because of Republican Policies which first and foremost portected corrupt corporations, and time lost in facing and attacking our ridiculous dependence on foreign oil???? Too bad they attac k Jimmy Carter, who tried to warn all of us thirty years ago.
G.
Halliburton executive Tim Probert says a pressure test was conducted after the work was finished, and the well owner decided to continue. A copy of the testimony was obtained by The Associated Press.
The cause of the April 20 explosion is under investigation, but lawsuits filed after the disaster claim it was caused when Halliburton workers improperly capped the well – a process known as cementing. Halliburton denies wrongdoing.
</div></div>
<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Quote:</div><div class="ubbcode-body">WASHINGTON — Oil services contractor Halliburton Inc. says it safely finished a cementing operation 20 hours before a Gulf of Mexico rig went up in flames. In testimony prepared for a congressional hearing Tuesday, Halliburton says it completed work on the well according to accepted industry practice and federal regulators.
Halliburton executive Tim Probert says a pressure test was conducted after the work was finished, and the well owner decided to continue. A copy of the testimony was obtained by The Associated Press.
The cause of the April 20 explosion is under investigation, but lawsuits filed after the disaster claim it was caused when Halliburton workers improperly capped the well – a process known as cementing. Halliburton denies wrongdoing.
</div></div>
<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Quote:</div><div class="ubbcode-body">In 2004, the Offshore Operators Committee objected to MMS rules regarding minimum blowout prevention systems, requesting that testing of the devices be reduced from 10 minutes to 5 minutes.
In 2006, BP objected to MMS proposing a "best practice" for cementing techniques in deepwater drilling operations, emphasizing that operators should have "flexibility" when it comes to the critical procedure, which seals up the drilling hole and the gaps between the hole and pipe. As HuffPost has reported, possible flaws in Halliburton's cementing work on the Deepwater Horizon may also be to blame for the accident. As FireDogLake reported on Monday, Halliburton seems to have been aware of the risks posed by faulty cementing work, citing a presentation by the oil services giant last November.
As HuffPost first reported last week, BP, Transocean and other members of the oil industry vigorously objected to new safety regulations proposed by MMS last summer, which would have required them to submit their safety and environmental management programs to an audit every three years.
The industry's objections extended to measures intended to help clean up after an oil spill. Claiming that the petroleum industry had funded the Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund to $1 billion, the American Petroleum Institute wrote a 2000 letter to the Department of Transportatino, stating:
The petroleum industry should not be expected to pay for further OSTLF prevention expenditures for sources outside the petroleum industry, particularly since the petroleum industry's oil spill record has improved so much over the past decade.
</div></div>
<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Quote:</div><div class="ubbcode-body">A common spin in the right wing coverage of BP's oil spill is a gleeful suggestion that the gulf blowout is Obama's Katrina.
In truth, culpability for the disaster can more accurately be laid at the Bush Administration's doorstep. For eight years, George Bush's presidency infected the oil industry's oversight agency, the Minerals Management Service, with a septic culture of corruption from which it has yet to recover. Oil patch alumnae in the White House encouraged agency personnel to engineer weakened safeguards that directly contributed to the gulf catastrophe.
The absence of an acoustical regulator -- a remotely triggered dead man's switch that might have closed off BP's gushing pipe at its sea floor wellhead when the manual switch failed (the fire and explosion on the drilling platform may have prevented the dying workers from pushing the button) -- was directly attributable to industry pandering by the Bush team. Acoustic switches are required by law for all offshore rigs off Brazil and in Norway's North Sea operations. BP uses the device voluntarily in Britain's North Sea and elsewhere in the world as do other big players like Holland's Shell and France's Total. In 2000, the Minerals Management Service while weighing a comprehensive rulemaking for drilling safety, deemed the acoustic mechanism "essential" and proposed to mandate the mechanism on all gulf rigs.
Then, between January and March of 2001, incoming Vice President Dick Cheney conducted secret meetings with over 100 oil industry officials allowing them to draft a wish list of industry demands to be implemented by the oil friendly administration. Cheney also used that time to re-staff the Minerals Management Service with oil industry toadies including a cabal of his Wyoming carbon cronies. In 2003, newly reconstituted Minerals Management Service genuflected to the oil cartel by recommending the removal of the proposed requirement for acoustic switches. The Minerals Management Service's 2003 study concluded that "acoustic systems are not recommended because they tend to be very costly."
The acoustic trigger costs about $500,000. Estimated costs of the oil spill to Gulf Coast residents are now upward of $14 billion to gulf state communities. Bush's 2005 energy bill officially dropped the requirement for the acoustic switch off devices explaining that the industry's existing practices are "failsafe."
Bending over for Big Oil became the ideological posture of the Bush White House, and, under Cheney's cruel whip, the practice trickled down through the regulatory bureaucracy. The Minerals Management Service -- the poster child for "agency capture phenomena" -- hopped into bed with the regulated industry -- literally. A 2009 investigation of the Minerals Management Service found that agency officials "frequently consumed alcohol at industry functions, had used cocaine and marijuana and had sexual relationships with oil and gas company representatives." Three reports by the Inspector General describe an open bazaar of payoffs, bribes and kickbacks spiced with scenes of female employees providing sexual favors to industry big wigs who in turn rewarded government workers with illegal contracts. In one incident reported by the Inspector General, agency employees got so drunk at a Shell sponsored golf event that they could not drive home and had to sleep in hotel rooms paid for by Shell.
Pervasive intercourse also characterized their financial relations. Industry lobbyists underwrote lavish parties and showered agency employees with illegal gifts, and lucrative personal contracts and treated them to regular golf, ski, and paintball outings, trips to rock concerts and professional sports events. The Inspector General characterized this orgy of wheeling and dealing as "a culture of ethical failure" that cost taxpayers millions in royalty fees and produced reams of bad science to justify unregulated deep water drilling in the gulf.
It is charitable to characterize the ethics of these government officials as "elastic." They seemed not to have existed at all. The Inspector General reported with some astonishment that Bush's crew at the MMS, when confronted with the laundry list of bribery, public theft and sexual and financial favors to and from industry "showed no remorse."
BP's confidence in lax government oversight by a badly compromised agency still staffed with Bush era holdovers may have prompted the company to take two other dangerous shortcuts. First, BP failed to install a deep hole shut off valve -- another fail-safe that might have averted the spill. And second, BP's reported willingness to violate the law by drilling to depths of 22,000-25,000 feet instead of the 18,000 feet maximum depth allowed by its permit may have contributed to this catastrophe.
And wherever there's a national tragedy involving oil, Cheney's offshore company Halliburton is never far afield. In fact, stay tuned; Halliburton may emerge as the primary villain in this caper. The blow out occurred shortly after Halliburton completed an operation to reinforce drilling hole casing with concrete slurry. This is a sensitive process that, according to government experts, can trigger catastrophic blowouts if not performed attentively. According to the Minerals Management Service, 18 of 39 blowouts in the Gulf of Mexico since 1996 were attributed to poor workmanship injecting cement around the metal pipe. Halliburton is currently under investigation by the Australian government for a massive blowout in the Timor Sea in 2005 caused by its faulty application of concrete casing.
The Obama administration has assigned nearly 2,000 federal personnel from the Coast Guard, the Corps of Engineers, the Department of Defense, the Department of Commerce, EPA, NOAA and Department of Interior to deal with the spill -- an impressive response. Still, the current White House is not without fault -- the government should, for example, be requiring a far greater deployment of absorbent booms. But the real culprit in this villainy is a negligent industry, the festering ethics of the Bush Administration and poor oversight by an agency corrupted by eight years of grotesque subservience to Big Oil.
</div></div>
Beginning Of The President's Wise Solution to The Power Of The Corrupt Oil Industry, which was Coddled for eight Year By The Bush/Cheney Oil Cartel In The White House, SEcretly, Behind Closed Doors.
<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Quote:</div><div class="ubbcode-body">WASHINGTON — The Obama administration is proposing to split up an Interior Department agency that oversees offshore drilling, as part of its response to the Gulf Coast oil spill, The Associated Press has learned.
An administration official who asked not to be identified because the plan is not yet public said Interior Secretary Ken Salazar will urge that Congress approve splitting the Minerals Management Service in two. One agency would be charged with inspecting oil rigs, investigating oil companies and enforcing safety regulations, while the other would oversee leases for drilling and collection of billions of dollars in royalties.
Currently, the Minerals Management Service, an arm of the Interior Department, is responsible for collecting more than $10 billion a year from oil and gas drilling and with enforcing laws and regulations that apply to drilling operations.
Some critics have said the two roles are in conflict and are one reason the agency has long been accused of being too cozy with the oil and natural gas industry.
An internal investigation in 2008 described a "culture of substance abuse and promiscuity" by workers at the agency. The investigation by Interior's inspector general found workers at the MMS royalty collection office in Denver partied, had sex with and used drugs with energy company representatives. Workers also accepted gifts, ski trips and golf outings, the report by Inspector General Earl E. Devaney said.
Devaney decried "a culture of ethical failure" and an agency rife with conflicts of interest.
Salazar, who promised aggressive reform when he took over the Interior Department early last year, believes the tragedy aboard the Deepwater Horizon oil rig – and the resulting massive oil spill – has made reform even more urgent, the administration official said.
The Interior Department will move to establish an independent energy inspection agency within the Minerals Management Service "so that the American people know that they have a strong and independent organization holding energy companies accountable and in compliance with the law of the land," the official said.
Salazar is expected to announce the reforms Tuesday in what is likely to be the first of several structural changes he is considering at Interior. At the request of President Barack Obama, Salazar is conducting a 30-day review of offshore drilling. He also has appointed an Outer Continental Shelf Safety Oversight Board to recommend management improvements and closer oversight of offshore drilling operations.
The MMS and U.S. Coast Guard are conducting a joint investigation of the April 20 explosion on the Deepwater Horizon rig and will file a report to Obama. The six-member panel begins two days of hearings Tuesday in Louisiana, the same day Congress begins a series of hearings on the oil rig explosion and oil spill.
Since taking office in January 2009, Salazar has pushed a series of reforms at MMS, including establishment of new ethics standards, termination of a controversial royalty-in-kind program, and increased emphasis on wind and other renewable energy sources.
He also has canceled proposed offshore lease sales in Alaska and the Arctic Ocean and established what he calls a science-based process for determining where offshore drilling is appropriate on the Outer Continental Shelf.
Last week, the Interior Department said it is indefinitely suspending public hearings on the proposed sale of oil and gas leases off the Virginia coast while it focuses on the Gulf oil spill. The department said MMS staff had focused their attention on the Gulf incident and would be unable to conduct the meetings until a later date.
On March 31, three weeks before the Gulf explosion, Obama called for new offshore drilling in the Atlantic Ocean from Delaware to central Florida, plus the northern waters of Alaska. He also said he wants Congress to lift a drilling ban in the oil-rich eastern Gulf of Mexico, 125 miles from Florida beaches.
<span style='font-size: 20pt'>After the oil spill, Obama promised that no new offshore oil drilling leases will be issued unless rigs have new safeguards to prevent a repeat of the explosion. He ordered Salazar to report on what new technologies are needed to tighten safeguards against oil spills from deep water drilling rigs.</span> </div></div>
Just imagine the Bush Administration even considering coming down on the corrupt oil pigs!
LMAO! That would NEVER happen. And here we go again, with Halliburton right in the middle of the F-up!
<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Quote:</div><div class="ubbcode-body">BP, Transocean, Halliburton point fingers at each other for spill
By ERIKA BOLSTAD
McClatchy Newspapers
WASHINGTON -- Top executives from three companies involved in the Deepwater Horizon oil rig disaster will face a barrage of questions on Tuesday from angry senators eager to make it clear they intend to hold someone responsible for a blowout that killed 11 and continues to spew 210,000 gallons of oil each day into the Gulf of Mexico
But it's also clear the three companies will have another source of finger-pointing - each other.
In testimony released Monday before the first of Tuesday's two Senate hearings, the executives, from BP America, which owned the well, Transocean Ltd., which owned the rig, and Halliburton, a contractor on the rig, blame other companies for the as-yet-undetermined cause of the explosion.
In his testimony, submitted to the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, Lamar McKay of BP said the company wants to answer two questions at the root of the disaster: What caused the explosion and fire, and why did the blowout preventer fail? He makes it clear Transocean owned the blowout preventer.
"The systems are intended to fail-closed and be fail-safe; sadly and for reasons we do not yet understand, in this case, they were not," McKay is to testify. "Transocean's blowout preventer failed to operate."
That directly counters Transocean CEO Steven Newman's statement.
"Over the past several days, some have suggested that the blowout preventers used on this project were the cause of the accident," Newman is expected to testify. "That simply makes no sense."
Their investigative team has looked at numerous possible causes, Newman will say, but the company's blowout preventers "were clearly not the root cause of the explosion." The well had been sealed with casing and cement, and within a few days, the blowout preventers would have been removed, anyway, he will say. At that point, the cementing and casing were responsible for controlling any pressure, he says in his testimony.
Although Newman does not single out Halliburton for blame, he does make it clear that Halliburton was the cementing subcontractor and as such "is responsible for encasing the well in cement, or putting a temporary cement plug in the top of the well, and for ensuring the integrity of the cement."
Tim Probert of Halliburton has a different take, and points back to BP in his prepared testimony. The well owner is ultimately responsible, said Probert, who is the president of the company's global business lines and its chief health, safety and environmental officer.
"I need to start this section with an important statement of disclosure," he is expected to testify. "Halliburton, as a service provider to the well owner, is contractually bound to comply with the well owner's instructions on all matters relating to the performance of all work-related activities."
"It is also important to understand the roles and responsibilities of the various parties involved in the construction of a well," he added. "The construction of a deep water well is a complex operation involving the performance of numerous tasks by multiple parties led by the well owner's representative, who has the ultimate authority for decisions on how and when various activities are conducted."
Meanwhile, BP is struggling to find a way to stop the flood of oil following its failed effort to place a 78-ton steel and concrete cap the size of a four-story house over the pipe. Company officials on Monday announced engineers would try to put a smaller "top hat" over the main leaking pipe as early as Thursday. If it is successful, the company would pump the captured oil to a barge.
While they continue to look for a solution to stop the oil, government regulators are investigating the incident. President Barack Obama has temporarily halted all new offshore drilling until the Interior Department submits a safety report due May 28.
Regardless of who's to blame for the accident, McKay said in his prepared testimony that he wishes to underscore the company's "intense determination to do everything humanly possible to minimize the environmental and economic impacts of the resulting oil spill on the Gulf Coast ."
Already, the company has mobilized a fleet of 294 response vessels and has recovered more than 97,000 barrels of oil-and-water mix from the sea, McKay said in his statement.
"BP is under no illusions about the seriousness of the situation we face," he said. "In the last three weeks, the eyes of the world have been upon us. President Obama and members of his Cabinet have visited the Gulf region and made clear their expectations of BP and our industry. So have members of Congress, as well as the general public."
Read more: http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/05/11/1623157/bp-transocean-halliburton-point.html#ixzz0nd8JOB1l
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Republican Policies: Remove environmental REstrictions for the sake of Corporate Profits, From Regan, to Bush, to Bush the Whacko, who was Cheney's puppet....
Question, how many jobs lost, people killed, cancer deaths from Republican removal of environmental regulations, illegal invaders increased after REagans Amnesty, and trillions of dollars wasted ultimately because of Republican Policies which first and foremost portected corrupt corporations, and time lost in facing and attacking our ridiculous dependence on foreign oil???? Too bad they attac k Jimmy Carter, who tried to warn all of us thirty years ago.
G.