Green Earth Africa

Counsellors and lawyers are busier than seafarers in Louisiana, as some experts warn that fishing industry will never recover

An oyster boat sails past anchored fishing vessels on a waterway in Yscloskey, Louisiana. Fishermen fear that the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico will cause longterm harm to their industry. Photograph: Patrick Semansky/AP

High tide, and the remains of a late summer storm, and it is hard to tell on this strip of land between the Mississippi and the marsh where land ends and water begins. It was here – in the most southerly reaches ofLouisiana on terrain that is slowly sliding into the sea – that oil from BP’s Macondo well first started coming ashore, about a week after the 20 April explosion on the Deepwater Horizon. Eleven men were killed when the drilling platform blew up.

And it is here where local people will take the most convincing that the worst of the oil spill is behind them and that recovery is under way.

Barack Obama’s point man on the spill, the US Coast Guard’s former commander, Thad Allen, said at the weekend that the well no longer posed any threat to the Gulf. Crews will begin the last few remaining operations needed to abandon the well this week.

People here live and die by the water. On a fine day the docks in Venice empty out, with seaworthy boats and able-bodied crew off to look for oil contamination, at sea and in the marsh grass.

No one, it seems, believes the assurances from the White House or government scientists that the oil is largely gone. And no one really believes BP when oil company executives say they will stay in Louisiana for the long haul.

They have seen one exodus already, just before Tropical Storm Bonnie blew through, about a week after the well was capped in mid-July. BP evacuated work crews and boats; many have not returned.

“Oh, the oil’s out there,” said a captain of one of the air boats chewing through the marsh. When the water is clear the oil pops out like a giant black teardrop. He said the air boats were carrying away up to 3,000 white plastic trash bags of oiled sand from a nearby section of marsh each day. “We’ll be here for at least a year – if they still want us, that is.”

The autumn shrimping season opened on schedule on 16 August and the authorities have steadily been opening up more of the Gulf forfishing. About 83% of US waters in the Gulf are now open for fishing. The first tests on shrimp, swordfish and tuna hauled out of the Gulf showed no traces of oil.

But Acy Cooper, who wears a shrimpers’ white rubber boots even on days when he is not fishing, is possessed by a powerful sense of dread. How can we know for sure that the shrimp is safe from crude or its toxic components? He has seen oil in certain shrimping areas.

“We are only going to get one shot at this. If we don’t do it right, we are going to be in big trouble if any tainted shrimp gets on the market,” he said. “We don’t want to get anything on the market that is going to kill us in the long run.”

Not even the most stringent testing can ensure that fishermen stay out of oiled waters – not when some fishermen have been out of work since late April. “Some people are so hungry they are going to do what they can to survive,” Cooper said.

Already the local economy is being transformed. On noticeboards, cards for mental health services and lawyers offering to sue BP are tacked on top of advertisements for fishing guides. It is getting harder to find a market for fish.

The other day George Barisich, the head of the United Commercial Fishermen’s Alliance, had to drive all the way into Mississippi before he could find a processor who wanted his shrimp. He said he was reduced to selling for just $1.40 (90p) per pound.

Officials from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency have been on local radio shows, such as Talk of the Bayou, trying to persuade fishermen like Cooper they have nothing to fear.

“So far we haven’t seen a bit of evidence the oil is getting real deep in the marsh,” said Jacqueline Michel, a NOAA biochemist.

Only 22 of the 2,000 water samples taken from the Gulf contained traces of oil, and none has permeated deep into the wetlands, which are breeding grounds for shrimp.

The callers were not buying it, and neither was Cooper. He worries that the last few months may have ruined the fisherman’s life for some.

Although local people complain that BP gave too many jobs to outsiders rather than locals for cleanup work, some taken on have become used to earning good money – even when they were waiting around at the marina – on the oil company’s “vessels of opportunity” programme for the cleanup.

Cooper is worried they may give up on shrimping, now that it’s such an uncertain occupation.

“We are on the verge of losing this industry,” he said. “The chain is broken with the vessels of opportunity.”

For Al Sunseri that chain stretches back to 1876 when his family set up the P&J Oyster Company on the edges of New Orleans’ French quarter.

He still turns up for work at 4.30am, but there are no workers shucking oysters on the loading dock. Eleven people have been let go.

Premium oysters are a vanishing commodity. Those oysters not killed by the oil were finished off by the Louisiana government’s decision to flood the Gulf with fresh water to try to keep the oil offshore.

Sunseri now occupies his time taking orders on a clipboard, trying to mollify the desperate chefs who are his main customer base. He is running dangerously low on shucked oysters.

He asks callers if they could get by with a smaller order. “I am just going to have to tell people I don’t have them and that is not something that I am used to doing,” he said.

The shortage has pushed the price of oysters in the shell up 40% since the spill. That is too rich in the depths of a recession – even for a luxury product. Sunseri also worries that what oysters he can find are of variable quality.

“I know they say about 40% of the oyster growing area is open but as far as productive areas, it is maybe about 15%,” he said. “We don’t have babies, and we don’t have the market-sized ones.”

He moves over to a tabletop display of oyster shells. Those that are being harvested are about half normal size. “These would ordinarily not be harvested for another year,” he said.

“They really should be in there developing. The few little oysters that I am selling right now are really inferior.”

Even industry cheerleader Mike Voisin, who chairs the Louisiana Oyster Task Force, admits it will be three years before the oyster beds resettle. Until then, he says, the harvest will probably fall to half of the usual 113,000 tonne annual take.

The timespan is depressing for Sunseri. He said he is telling his children: “Your daddy does not care if this business fizzles away. Don’t feel the burden of carrying this on.”

For Ryan Lambert, who once counted himself the biggest fishing charter operator around Venice, such acceptance is unthinkable. He is much too angry to be resigned.

The spill left him with a calendar showing week after week of cancelled bookings, gutting a business that once brought in $1.3m a year.

By BP’s reckoning though, his losses were just $66,000. Lambert is furious. He said he has paid his accountant hundreds of dollars to meet BP’s demands for documentation. “I shouldn’t have to fight for the money that is owed me,” he said. “I am not the bad guy here. They are the ones who ruined it for me, not vice versa. For me to have to fight for them to pay me for what they did makes me sick.”

He is also worried sick that the fish will start disappearing, as they did in the years after the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska, and that his business will be dealt a slow, painful death.

He built his company from scratch, starting from his love of bass fishing; now his clients troop into his fishing lodge from all across the country. He rebuilt once before, after Hurricane Katrina. He is not sure he can do it again, or wait for the Gulf to make a full recovery.

“I am 52 years old. I can’t wait 20 years for them to clean things up.”

He feels certain BP will pull out much sooner. “The well will be stopped, and then they will hang around until the oil stops coming up on the beaches, and then they will be gone,” he said.

“Anything they don’t clean will be left to me and the microbes and Mother Nature until all of a sudden we won’t be America’s best fishery any more.

“This will be history some day, and I will still have that problem.”

Voices on the ground

‘On television they are saying all the time that there is no oil. What BP did is that they succeeded in buying off the White House and Congress and most of the senators, and now they are buying off the networks’

Dean Blanchard, shrimp magnate

‘The oil is still very in the coastal areas, it’s still coming up along the beaches, and it’s in the bottom offshore as well as in the bays and estuaries. A lot needs to be addressed before BP says it has all been attended to’

Wilma Subra, chemist

‘The only silver lining that is going to come out of this is that the goverment and the country are going to understand the importance of the Gulf’

George Barisich, president, United Commercial Fishermen’s Association

‘Ironically, this catastrophe may in the end run have more impact on oil leasing programmes than on the Gulf of Mexico … We recognise now that we have something much more like a nuclear reactor on our hands than a wood-burning stove and that is an awreness that is new to the federal government, new ot the public, and new to Congress’

Oliver Houck, environmental law professor at Tulane University

BP will be able to book a $10bn tax credit against the costs of cleaning up the Gulf oil spill, meaning US and UK taxpayers will be picking up part of the bill

Volunteers in Louisiana clean a pelican covered in oil from the BP Deepwater Horizon rig. Taxpayers in the US and UK will now have to bear some of the clean-up costs from the spill Photograph: Reuters

BP is poised to spark fresh controversy after it emerged today that taxpayers on both sides of the Atlantic will be picking up part of the bill for dealing with the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

The cost of the clean-up has plunged BP into the red, meaning that the oil giant will be able to book a $10bn (£6.5bn) tax credit, slashing its tax bill in both the US and UK.

BP announced earlier today that it is making a $32.2bn provision for the cost of the spill caused by the explosion and subsequent sinking of the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig in April.

That pushed BP’s second-quarter results into a record loss of $17bn, compared with a profit last year of $3.1bn.

The company explained, however, that the net impact on BP’s bottom line will only be $22bn because the company will be able to record a $10bn tax credit. BP’s UK tax bill will also be reduced, the firm added.

Both the US and UK governments receive hundreds of millions of dollars from the company in tax payments each year. News that BP will be able to write off against tax the cost of plugging the well, cleaning up the spill and compensating the thousands of people who have been affected, is likely to anger politicians of all political hues.

Only the fines that might be imposed by the US authorities would definitely not be tax-deductible, according to tax experts.

BP paid $8.4bn of tax last year, with roughly £930m going to the UK government. Tax experts reckon it paid a similar amount in US taxes.

Three years ago, airplane manufacturer Boeing ran into a storm of protest when it sought to write off against tax a $615m fine levied by the Department of Justice that settled an investigation into the improper hiring of a Pentagon official and the theft of data from Lockheed Martin Corporation. The fine was levied in order for Boeing to avoid criminal charges. Three Republican senators wrote to the US attorney general at the time to say that allowing Boeing to deduct payments to the government “would be unacceptable”.

Global investments in clean energy companies rose 43% in Q2 on last year, says new Cleantech Group and Deloitte report

Barack Obama administration appeals court ruling blocking six-month moratorium on deep-water drilling in the US

Sigh of relief in Houston this afternoon as U.S. District Judge Martin Feldman ruled that the Obama Administration’s 6-month ban on deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico was unjustified.

The ruling is great news for Hornbeck Offshore Services, which operates a fleet of transport barges in the Gulf, and brought the complaint early this month in the New Orleans court. It also gives confidence to Diamond Offshore Drilling, which has a similar case pending in federal court in Houston. Diamond accuses the feds of illegally “taking” its drilling contracts.

Though the Obama administration says it will appeal the ruling, don’t expect a vigorous argument. In a sense this ruling is a lucky break for the administration. By imposing the ban, the President showed toughness against the oil companies and appeased the environmentalists. Yet an early end to the ban will save an estimated 20,000 jobs in Louisiana alone and get a vital economic driver moving again.

An early lifting of the ban gives Obama some political cover to impose even tougher rules and standards on drilling rigs and to place inspectors on every deepwater rig.

Cold comfort to Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.), a BP gadfly since the blowout began. In a statement this afternoon, he said, “This judge’s decision flies in the face of mounting evidence that there are serious safety risks that must be examined with these 33 deepwater rigs before they start drilling again.”

In truth, the two-month ban was enough to teach oil companies a lesson. Having witnessed the destruction of mighty BP, and jittery in the knowledge that oil spill liability caps are a thing of the past, companies will be doing their drilling by the book.

In a statement this afternoon, Royal Dutch Shell praised the ruling and continued its efforts to differentiate itself from BP:

“Shell remains confident in its expertise and procedures to safely drill and complete deepwater wells. Shell’s global drilling standards, operating procedures and culture of safety are critical elements in its operations.  Shell standards often exceed regulatory requirements, including a rigorous training program for well engineers. Shell contractors are required to take a systematic view of risk in drilling operations and to put management systems and mitigations plans in place before work begins. Those plans include robust, multiple barriers between pressure regimes and the surface. Shell also monitor’s drilling activities from remote monitoring sites. These sites operate in real time from New Orleans and Houston.”

A number of Big Oil thinkers this week have told me they expect Shell to end up swallowing what’s left of BP within two years, primarily because their European cultures would fit together well, and a deal would not face the same political scrutiny as a takeover by the likes of Petrochina

Judgment may allow BP to resume offshore oil exploration

BP is free to resume deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico after a Louisiana judge overturned Barack Obama‘s ban imposed in the wake of the worst environmental disaster in US history.

The company operates at least one of the 33 rigs which have been idle since the moratorium last month, according to industry data.

BP declined to confirm the location of its rigs or whether it intended to resume deepwater drilling in the Gulf.

The ruling could also lead to further legal challenges by the oil industry against the White House’s handling of the crisis. The government has imposed a nationwide ban on issuing offshore drilling permits which could also come under attack in the courts.

Yesterday, Louisiana-based judge Martin Feldman ruled that the federal government’s six-month blanket moratorium in the Gulf was unjustified because it assumed that all deepwater drilling was as dangerous as BP’s.

“An invalid agency decision to suspend drilling of wells in depths of over 500 feet simply cannot justify the immeasurable effect on the plaintiffs, the local economy, the Gulf region, and the critical present-day aspect of the availability of domestic energy in this country,” Feldman said in his ruling, according to the Associated Press news agency.

The ruling represents a victory for the oil industry and for state politicians. Both groups had argued the ban would result in tens of thousands of job losses across Louisiana if it stayed in place. Lawyers representing the oil services companies, who brought the lawsuit against the US federal government in New Orleans, warned a whole “ecosystem of businesses” was at risk.

The White House said last night it would seek an immediate injunction against the ruling. “Continuing drilling at these depths without knowing what happened does not make sense,” said spokesman Robert Gibbs.

But Camilo K Salas III, a New Orleans-based attorney, said Obama may privately welcome the decision. “Now they can say: ‘We did what we had to do but the judge overruled us.’ That way they look good for trying to stop the drilling but the economy is not damaged.”

Obama has faced intense domestic criticism for not taking control of the crisis earlier and putting too much trust in BP’s ineffective attempts to tackle the spill.

BP has made recently huge discoveries of oil and gas in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico which require further drilling and development.

In September last year, it announced that the Tiber well, drilled to a depth of more than 3,050 metres (10,000 feet) in the Gulf, making it the world’s deepest exploration well to date, could hold as much as 3bn barrels of oil and gas. It dwarfs the Macondo prospect, where the Deepwater Horizon rig was drilling, at 1,500 metres and containing about 50m barrels.

Oil companies are likely to wait until the outcome of any appeal is known before resuming deepwater drilling.

Asked about whether BP would resume deepwater drilling in the Gulf, a spokesman said: “We have no comment on this case or decision, as we are not a party to the case.

“Most of the fleet of rigs we have under contract are responding to the spill. We don’t discuss publicly our drilling plans and the disposition of those assets.”

According to the Louisiana Mid-Continent Oil and Gas Association, last month BP had in place one operational rig affected by the moratorium.

Officials from the much maligned and now defunct regulator, the MMS, were reported as saying that BP had two in the Gulf. Shell had the most, at seven, according to the association, while Texas-based Anadarko Petroleum, BP’s partner on the stricken Macondo well, operated three of the 33 affected.

Environmental groups vowed to appeal against yesterday’s ruling. The Sierra Club, one of the groups which gave testimony in Monday’s hearings, said in a statement: “We haven’t even stopped the massive flow of oil yet, let alone begun to respond to the damage it has wrought. It’s like there’s been a car accident and we’re talking about how to get the vehicle on the road again while the victim is still bleeding.”

Interior secretary Ken Salazar imposed the ban on 27 May, more than a month after the accident took place.

He said that the ban was necessary to allow new safety procedures to be implemented and a thorough investigation of what caused the accident to be carried out. But Salazar was forced to apologise after officials said that the seven independent experts brought in to peer review their report into safety practices in the Gulf endorsed the moratorium.

The scientists and engineers argue that shutting down drilling – an operation which led to the explosion on BP’s Deepwater Horizon rig – is actually more dangerous than allowing it to continue.

Following mixed reception to Oval Office address, president to tell executives to set aside billions for oil spill compensation fund

‘Everyone should be prepared for worst-case scenario’, says the head of oil consultancy group

HOUSTON — With each new look by scientists, the oil spill just keeps looking worse.

New figures for the blown-out well at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico show the amount of oil spewing may have been up to twice as much as previously thought, according to scientists consulting with the federal government.

That could mean 42 million gallons to more than 100 million gallons of oil have already fouled the Gulf’s fragile waters, affecting people who live, work and play along the coast from Louisiana to Florida — and perhaps beyond.

It is the third — and perhaps not the last — time the U.S. government has had to increase its estimate of how much oil is gushing. Trying to clarify what has been a contentious and confusing issue, officials on Thursday gave a wide variety of estimates.

All the new spill estimates are worse than earlier ones — and far more costly for BP, which has seen its stock sink since the April 20 explosion that killed 11 workers and triggered the spill. Most of Thursday’s estimates had more oil flowing in an hour than what officials once said was spilling in an entire day.

“This is a nightmare that keeps getting worse every week,” said Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club. “We’re finding out more and more information about the extent of the damage. … Clearly we can’t trust BP’s estimates of how much oil is coming out.”

The spill was flowing at daily rate that could possibly have been as high as 2.1 million gallons, twice the highest number the federal government had been saying, U.S. Geological Survey Director Marcia McNutt, who is coordinating estimates, said Thursday. But she said possibly more credible numbers are a bit lower.

The estimate was for the flow before June 3 when a riser pipe was cut and then a cap placed on it. No estimates were given for the amount of oil gushing from the well after the cut, which BP said would increase the flow by about 20 percent. Nor are there estimates since a cap was put on the pipe, which already has collected more than 3 million gallons.

The estimates are not nearly complete and different teams have come up with different numbers. A new team from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute came in with even higher estimates, ranging from 1 million gallons a day to 2.1 million gallons. If the high end is true, that means nearly 107 million gallons have spilled since April 20.

Even using other numbers that federal officials and scientists call a more reasonable range would have about 63 million gallons spilling since the rig explosion. If that amount was put in gallon milk jugs, they would line up for nearly 5,500 miles. That’s the distance from the spill to London, where BP is headquartered, and then continuing on to Rome.

By comparison, the worst peacetime oil spill, 1979′s Ixtoc 1 in Mexico, was about 140 million gallons over 10 months. The Gulf spill hasn’t yet reached two months. The Exxon Valdez, the previous worst U.S. oil spill, was just about 11 million gallons, and the new figures mean Deepwater Horizon is producing an Exxon Valdez size spill every five to 13 days.

On Thursday, President Barack Obama consoled relatives of the 11 workers killed in the oil rig explosion, acknowledging their “unimaginable grief” and personally assuring the families he will stand with them.

One man who lost a son asked Obama to support efforts to update federal law limiting the amount of money the families can collect.

“He told us we weren’t going to be forgotten,” said Keith Jones of Baton Rouge, La. “He just wanted us to know this wasn’t going to leave his mind and his heart.”

Jones’ 28-year-old son, Gordon, was working on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig leased by BP PLC when it exploded April 20 and then sank.

Later in the day, the White House released a letter from Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, who is overseeing the crisis for the government, inviting BP Chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg and “any appropriate officials from BP” to meet Wednesday with senior administration officials. Allen said Obama, who has yet to speak with any BP official since the explosion more than seven weeks ago, would participate in a portion of the meeting.

As the crude continues to foul the water, Louisiana leaders are rushing to the defense of the oil-and-gas industry and pleading with Washington to immediately bring back offshore drilling. Though angry at BP over the disaster, state officials warn that the Obama administration’s six-month halt to new permits for deep-sea oil drilling has sent Louisiana’s most lucrative industry into a death spiral.

They contend that drilling is safe overall and the moratorium is a knee-jerk reaction. They worry that it comes at a time when another major Louisiana industry — fishing — has been brought to a standstill by the Gulf mess.

“Mr. President, you were looking for someone’s butt to kick. You’re kicking ours,” Lafourche Parish President Charlotte Randolph said Thursday.

The oil-and-gas brings in billions of dollars in revenue for Louisiana and accounting for nearly one-third of the nation’s domestic crude production, and it took a heavy blow when the government imposed the moratorium.

“It’s going to put us out of business,” said Glenn LeCompte, owner of a Louisiana catering company that provides food to offshore rigs.

With all sorts of estimates for what’s flowing from the BP well — some even smaller than the amount collected by BP in its containment cap — McNutt the most credible range at the moment is between 840,000 gallons and 1.68 million gallons a day. Then she added that it was “maybe a little bit more.”

But later Thursday, the Interior Department said scientists who based their calculations on video say the best estimate for oil flow before June 3 was between 1.05 million gallons a day and 1.26 million gallons a day. The department mentioned only a cubic meter per second rate from Woods Hole — not a rate that translated into actual amounts — and those numbers only added to the confusion on just how much oil is gushing out.

Previous estimates had put the range roughly between half a million and a million gallons a day, perhaps higher. At one point, the federal government claimed only 42,000 gallons were spilling a day and then it upped the number to 210,000 gallons.

Associated Press writers Tamara Lush, Alan Sayre and Ray Henry in New Orleans, Chris Kahn in New York, Melinda Deslatte in Baton Rouge, Mary Foster in Port Fourchon and Brian Skoloff in Morgan City contributed to this report. Weber reported from Houston, Borenstein from Washington.

US government figures show twice as much oil spewing into the Gulf of Mexico than earlier estimations suggested