Just the facts:

Oil in the Gulf, two months later – June 21 2010 – Oil spill photo gallery, disturbing shots, check it out. A picture is really worth a thousand words, and since they have a lot of them, I’ll save the words.

Gulf oil spill: BP accused of lying to Congress – June 20, 2010

BP has been accused by a senior US politician of lying to Congress to reduce its liabilities, after an internal company document showed that the oil giant’s own worst-case assessment of the size of the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico was 20 times its public estimate.

In the document, BP attempts to put a figure on the rate of oil spewing into the ocean. It notes that if the condition of the well bore deteriorates to the extent that crucial parts fall off, the rate could reach 100,000 barrels a day.

Deepwater Horizon worker claims oil rig leaking weeks before explosion – June 21 2010

An oil worker who survived the BP Deepwater Horizon explosion has claimed that the oil rig’s safety equipment was leaking several weeks before it exploded, triggering the huge spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Tyrone Benton says that he spotted a leak on the rig’s Blowout Preventer (BOP), the device that is meant to shut the well down if there is an accident. He told the BBC’s Panorama programme that both BP and Transocean, who owned the rig, were informed of the leak, and the faulty part – a control pod – was switched off rather than being repaired.

Regulators Failed to Address Risks in Oil Rig Fail-Safe Device – June 21 2010

But the questions raised by the failure of the blind shear ram extend well beyond the Deepwater Horizon.

An examination by The New York Times highlights the chasm between the oil industry’s assertions about the reliability of its blowout preventers and a more complex reality. It reveals that the federal agency charged with regulating offshore drilling, the Minerals Management Service, repeatedly declined to act on advice from its own experts on how it could minimize the risk of a blind shear ram failure.

It also shows that the Obama administration failed to grapple with either the well-known weaknesses of blowout preventers or the sufficiency of the nation’s drilling regulations even as it made plans this spring to expand offshore oil exploration.

Whistleblower: BP Risks More Massive Catastrophes in Gulf – 30 April 2010

A former contractor who worked for BP claims the oil conglomerate broke federal laws and violated its own internal procedures by failing to maintain crucial safety and engineering documents related to one of the firms other deepwater production projects in the Gulf of Mexico, according to internal emails and other documents obtained by Truthout.

The whistleblower, whose name has been withheld at the person’s request because the whistleblower still works in the oil industry and fears retaliation, first raised concerns about safety issues related to BP Atlantis, one of the largest and deepest semi-submersible oil and natural gas platforms in the world, located about 200 miles south of New Orleans, in November 2008. Atlantis, which began production in October 2007, has the capacity to produce about 8.4 million gallons of oil and 180 million cubic feet of natural gas per day.

BP’s Gulf Spill Fuels Australian Opponents to Deepwater Drilling for Oil – June 17 2010

BP Plc’s Gulf of Mexico disaster is generating opposition to deepwater drilling off Australia, where the government is opening new exploration areas less than a year after the country’s third-worst oil spill.

Popular Mechanics – Fighting the Worlds Worst Oil Spill
Google online version of the article about the Ixtoc oil spill (1979) in the Mexican waters of the Gulf of Mexico. Up til now, the world’s worst oil spill. Took about 10 month to stop, using prett much the same ideas BP used on today’s. Somewhat disturbing reading.

Click on the link at the end of each section to get to the next part.

BP engineer’s testimony contradicted by e-mail released by congressional investigators – June 15, 2010

But now, e-mail messages released by congressional investigators paint a different picture of Hafle’s confidence in the troubled well.

They show Hafle expressed concerns in the week before the April 20 disaster on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, calling the Macondo well 5,000 feet below that rig “a crazy well.”

And contrary to Hafle’s testimony that his team worked with the cementing contractor, Halliburton, to analyze models and design a plan “to give us the best chance to have a successful cement job,” the internal e-mail messages now show that BP actually rejected a safer plan that required installing more components because, as well team leader John Guide wrote on April 16, “it will take 10 hours to install them.”

Transocean under fire over US oil spill May 3, 2010

The Swiss-based drilling contractor, Transocean, is starting to feel the heat – along with BP – over the oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.

It is still unclear what caused the explosion on the rig operated by BP and owned by Transocean, but many are beginning to point their finger at the Zug-based company’s blowout preventer (BOP) for failing to work properly.

Bad cement jobs plague offshore oil rigs – May 24, 2010

Yet federal regulators give drillers a free hand in this crucial safety step — another example of lax regulation regarding events leading up to the April 20 explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig.

Federal regulators don’t regulate what type of cement is used, leaving it up to oil and gas companies. The drillers are urged to simply follow guidelines of the American Petroleum Institute, an industry trade group.

Far more stringent federal and state standards and controls exist on cement work for roads, bridges and buildings.

While the chain of failures on Deepwater Horizon is under investigation, rig owner Transocean has singled out cement work as one likely fundamental cause of the blowout.

BP Engineer Called Deepwater Horizon ‘Nightmare Well’ Days Before Blast, Oil Spill – June 14 2010

WASHINGTON (AP) — BP took measures to cut costs in the weeks before the catastrophic blowout in the Gulf of Mexico as it dealt with one problem after another, prompting a BP engineer to describe the doomed rig as a “nightmare well,” according to internal documents released Monday.

The comment by BP engineer Brian Morel came in an e-mail April 14, six days before the Deepwater Horizon rig explosion that killed 11 people and has sent tens of millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf in the nation’s worst environmental disaste

And that’s it for some of the news worth a second look over the past few weeks.

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