Its most likely mud not oil...hot off the presses

Rachael Maddow right now.. which would be good news.. coming out of pipe

thing.. it blew in the gulf in 1979..

it's eerie.

Estimated 3.5 million barrels spilled in that 1979 incident. In today's oil market ($70 per barrel), that would be worth $245 million just in spilled oil. I really hope the government requires BP to pay for lost royalties on this stuff. I work in the industry and deal with federal wells quite a bit. The royalty rate is a lot more generous for the industry with federal leases than it is with fee leases (regular citizens). Citizens usually ask for 20-25%, sometimes even higher. The government just asks for 12.5%. But 12.5% of whatever BP is spilling is still a hell of a lot of lost revenue. And this of course doesn't take into account their punitive damages for ruining the fishing industry in the Gulf and destroying the ecology of it.

thank goodness my company doesn't fiddle around with offshore drilling. BP is big enough to survive something like this, but there are some independent companies involved in offshore drilling that would be literally sunk by this situation. Devon Energy comes to mind. I work for an independent in West Texas. We only have around 280 employees, so we are tiny compared to the likes of BP or even Devon.

But also multipliers applied to those penalties for extenuating circumstances. Multipliers could apply because of the sensitivity of the receiving environment, the cause of the spill (accident vs stupidity vs negligence vs whatever), or any shenanigans like covering up or failing to report the spill in a timely manner.

We were extremely careful to make certain the volume of oil spilled in every case (every case involving crude oil, which is the case where revenue penalties apply) but the decisions on what (if any) multipliers would be used was generally discussed at a fairly high level. By that I mean a political level and the inner workings of those discussions were NOT availalbe to peons like myself.

In the current case, an accurate volume estimate is going to be rather difficult. Lawyers on both sides are going to have a lot of fuzzy to work with. And we'll never really know how accurate the estimate was anyhow.


It was most common that the company in question would negotiate with my higher-ups. Generally speaking the oil companies would offer a sort of alternative payment to simply paying a penalty. They'd make a generous "donation" to some state or local project. My belief (which I can not substantiate) is that this served several purposes. The state got a lot of money for some projects, and some of them were good projects. The oil company got to make a "donation" which I believe (but can't prove) was tax-deductable and got a lot of good publicity, which helped offset the bad publicity of having the spill in the first place.

Sorry to speak in generalities.

:)

Maybe it will hold long enough for them to drill the relief wells.. :)

But what the hell...

K and R!!!



:kick:

You get full credit for this one.

Miley cyrus did!

:rofl:

I shit you NOT!

warning

graphic

color

pierced

uvula

image

below

the

fold

fold---------------------------------------------

Say "Ahhhhh".