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Click here to visit the new home of Politics Daily!WASHINGTON -- A year after the disastrous Gulf oil spill, the prospect of a major accident in oil's next frontier - the icy waters off Alaska's north coast - has experts even more concerned. Mark Thiessen, AP A fishing boat returns to the harbor Friday in Cordova, Alaska, from Prince William Sound, the site of the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill. With no roads connecting remote coastal towns, storms and fog that can ground aircraft, no deepwater ports for ships and the nearest Coast Guard station about 1,000 miles away - it would be nearly impossible to respond on the scale that was ...
MOBILE, Ala. -- Volunteers from across the country are rebuilding oyster reefs along the Gulf of Mexico's delicate shoreline, hoping to revive oyster beds under assault for decades from overharvesting, coastal development, pollution, and most recently the BP oil spill. The waters harbor much of the world's last remaining productive natural oyster beds, but BP PLC's April 20 oil well blowout dumped millions of gallons of crude into the Gulf and dealt yet another blow to the once bountiful habitat. This weekend, volunteers descended on Mobile Bay with 23,000 bags of oyster shells aimed at ...
WASHINGTON (Sept. 27) -- The Interior Department plans to issue two new oil drilling regulations later this week, signaling that a six-month deepwater drilling moratorium for the Gulf of Mexico may be lifted early, a presidential panel was told here Monday. But Michael Bromwich, director of the newly organized Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, told the Oil Spill Commission that drilling will not immediately resume once the moratorium is lifted. "You are not going to see drilling going on the next day or even the next week," he said. "I haven't talked to the individual operators. I don't ...
(Sept. 19) -- The well is dead - finally. A permanent cement plug sealed BP's well nearly 2.5 miles below the sea floor in the Gulf of Mexico, five agonizing months after an explosion sank a drilling rig and led to the worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history. Retired Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, the federal government's point man on the disaster, said Sunday BP's well "is effectively dead." Allen said a pressure test to ensure the cement plug would hold was completed at 5:54 a.m. CDT. He said the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management Regulation and Enforcement has confirmed that the ...
(Sept. 15) -- Four of five of BP's North Sea oil installations inspected last year were issued warnings for failing to comply with safety rules in case of oil spills -- just months before the Deepwater Horizon disaster. That's according to inspection records and other internal documents obtained through the Britain's Freedom of Information Act, and excerpted today by two newspapers, The Financial Times and The Daily Telegraph. The reports come as BP's outgoing CEO, Tony Hayward, addresses a parliamentary subcommittee today about the risks of deepwater drilling in Britain. The 2009 ...
(Aug. 20) -- The BP spill appears to be capped for good, even though the ultimate solution known as "final kill" has yet to be implemented. But while fresh oil has stopped gushing into the Gulf of Mexico, distrust and resentment continue to flow freely. Many citizens and scientists alike do not believe an inter-agency federal report stating that roughly 25 percent of the spilled oil was collected by processes such as skimming, 25 percent has deteriorated or been consumed by microbes, and 25 percent has dispersed. The remaining "residual amount," the report continues, ". . . is either on or ...
(Aug. 17) -- Two new reports from different groups of academic scientists are providing a counterweight to the government's rosy assertions that the Gulf of Mexico oil spill crisis is drawing to a close. One says that as much as 79 percent of the oil is still loose in the gulf; the other expresses the fear that oil on the ocean floor may not stay there but could resurface at a later time. Researchers at the University of Georgia announced Monday that between 70 and 79 percent of the oil and its toxic byproducts are still present under the surface of the gulf. That finding stands in stark ...
(Aug. 13) -- Analysis of pressure tests on BP's cemented Gulf of Mexico oil well could indicate today that the damaged well is already plugged for good, and that a relief well won't be needed after all. For more than three months, BP has been drilling two relief wells near the Deepwater Horizon disaster, to intercept the damaged well shaft deep under the sea floor and plug it with heavy mud and cement. One of the wells reached within 30 feet of the problem well, before drilling was temporarily called off earlier this week, as a tropical depression swept through the gulf. Now officials say ...
NEW ORLEANS (Aug. 6) -- BP PLC said today it might someday drill again into the same lucrative undersea pocket of oil that spilled millions of gallons of crude, wrecked livelihoods and fouled beaches along the Gulf of Mexico. "There's lots of oil and gas here," Chief Operating Officer Doug Suttles said at a news briefing. "We're going to have to think about what to do with that at some point." The vast oil reservoir beneath the blown well is still believed to hold nearly $4 billion worth of crude. With the company and its partners facing tens of billions of dollars in liabilities, the ...
10:31 AM ET Update: BP says it is pumping cement down blow-out Gulf well in effort to finish 'static kill' (AP) NEW ORLEANS (Aug. 5) -- BP planned to start pumping cement into its blown-out oil well in the Gulf of Mexico on Thursday, following up on a key development in the effort to kill the well when mud that was shoved in successfully held back the flow of crude. After a series of unsuccessful attempts to stem the flow of oil a mile underwater, the tide appeared to be turning in the months-long battle to stop the massive oil spill. BP PLC said Wednesday it was finally able to force the ...
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