Reuters
08-24-10
Ecuador (Reuters) - A run-down court building that also houses the local casino in this Amazon jungle town is the unlikely venue for the largest environmental damages lawsuit ever tried.
On the first floor, people play for pennies in The Mirage bingo and slot machine parlor. Three stories up, in Sucumbios provincial court, the stakes are $27 billion.
That's what local farmers and indigenous tribes want from U.S. oil giant Chevron Corp to fund cleanup of areas they say were polluted with faulty drilling practices in the 1970s and '80s.
The paint is cracked and peeling in the judge's fourth-storey offices overlooking Lago Agrio, a poor and violent northern Ecuador town near the Colombian border.
Power failures often stop the building's air conditioners, leaving gamblers and court officials to swelter as judge Leonardo Ordonez pours through thousands of pages of evidence. He says a verdict could be reached in 2011 after 18 years of litigation in U.S. and Ecuadorean courts.
As the ruling looms, each side accuses the other of presenting fraudulent evidence while a slew of related legal actions are played out in the United States and Europe.
Reuters
08-24-10
Major oil and gas leaks offshore Britain grew 39 percent last year and serious injuries also rose sharply, the safety watchdog said on Tuesday, warning companies to improve their safety standards.
The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) said provisional figures showed there were 85 significant hydrocarbon releases -- seen as potential precursors to a major incident -- between April 1, 2009 and March 31, 2009, up from 61 the previous year.
There were also 50 major injuries reported in the financial year 2009/10, which ended three weeks before an explosion on a drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico sparked the worst accidental oil spill in history, compared to the average of 42 serious injuries over the previous five years.
The Washington Post
08-23-10
The nation's top oil and gas group has agreed to let the public see dozens of federal offshore drilling rules online for free -- though they'll still have to pay to print them out.
The agreement between the American Petroleum Institute and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement provides a partial fix to a quirk in public disclosure rules when it comes to certain federal regulations. Over several decades, the government has adopted at least 78 API industry standards, word-for-word, in the Federal Register. But to actually obtain the details, citizens had to either purchase them from API or view them in person at either a federal office in Herndon or at the National Archives and Records Administration.
The Colorado Independent
By Andrew Restuccia 8/17/10 8:52 AM
The Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, the federal agency that oversees the country's 2.3 million miles of oil and natural gas pipelines, has adopted as part of its regulations all or parts of at least 29 standards written by the oil and natural gas industry.
The revelation, which comes to light as part of an investigation into pipeline safety by The Colorado Independent's sister site, The Washington Independent, raises significant questions about the relationship between PHMSA and the industry that it regulates. It also feeds into comparisons between the agency and the now-defunct Minerals Management Service, which was in charge of permitting and licensing offshore drilling projects in the run-up to the April 20 Deepwater Horizon explosion and resulting oil spill.
Aug. 17, 2010 6:48 a.m.
By Jeremy Lydic
EAST LIVERPOOL, Ohio -- The Columbiana County Port Authority is using a $200,000 grant from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to move forward on redeveloping brownfields.
The port authority was awarded the assessment grant in April to identify possible sites that are contaminated by petroleum. While its application for a $200,000 hazardous sites grant was rejected, the agency is confident it will be able to use the petroleum grant to leverage those monies later. So says Lawrence Drane, a senior project manager and hydrogeologist with Tetra Tech's office in Pittsburgh.
At its monthly meeting Monday evening, the port authority approved a contract with Tetra Tech NUS Inc. for the company to perform environmental assessments of potential brownfield sites in the county.
Sydney Morning Herald
August 17, 2010 - 4:52PM
Energy giant Chevron has announced one of its biggest gas discoveries in Australia, after exploration success at a well in the Carnarvon Basin.
The US energy company said its Acme-1 exploration well, located 150 kilometres offshore from Onslow in Western Australia, had encountered about 273 metres of net gas pay.
"In terms of net gas pay, Acme-1 is one of our most significant natural gas discoveries in Australia," Chevron vice-chairman George Kirkland said in a statement.
Presented by CleanSkiesNews
August 9, 2010
Clean Skies News talks to Nancy Kinner, Director of the joint University of New Hampshire and NOAA Coastal Response Research Center about the recent NOAA report that says much of the oil from the BP oil spill in the Gulf has dissappeared. Nancy says its not surprising that a large part of the oil evaporated.
Presented by CleanSkiesNews
- The EPA is proposing two rules to ensure that new, large industrial facilities being built will be able to obtain Clean Air Act permits to address their greenhouse gas emissions.
- A government task force on CCS technology says that without a price for carbon pollution, there is no framework for investing in the technology.- Illinois town backs out of the FutureGen project.
- Texas attorney general sues Obama administration over the current offshore drilling ban.
Aug 12, 2010
Paula Dittrick
OGJ Senior Staff Writer
HOUSTON, Aug. 12 -- The US Environmental Protection Agency and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration are considering how to expand and coordinate oil tracking efforts to include Gulf of Mexico coastal state officials and others, a spill response official said.
National Incident Commander and retired US Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen said questions have been raised since NOAA reported 74% of the oil spilled from BP PCL's Macondo well has evaporated or been burned, skimmed, dispersed, and recovered. NOAA's report also called for more research (OGJ, Aug. 9, 2010, p. 28).
"I think what we'd like to do is go out there and make sure we absolutely have a coordinated effort: federal, state, and local," Allen told reporters during an Aug. 11 conference call. "What we'd like to do is create an integrated monitoring system...now that the well is capped."
After BP Disaster, Questions Re-Emerge About Offshore Oil Industry's Struggle With Inexperienced, Over-Stretched Workers
WSJ - August 9, 2010
The oil industry is wrestling with how to address the pervasive problem of undertrained and overstretched workers on deepwater rigs as federal investigators probe those issues in the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe.
As the number of huge, high-tech drilling rigs has soared in recent years, finding and keeping experienced staff has become a growing challenge for the offshore industry, experts say.The world's largest drilling contractor, Transocean Ltd., faced staffing problems long before its Deepwater Horizon rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico in April, according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. The blast killed 11 of the 126 workers aboard.
In recent years, customers in surveys and safety consultants in a report have criticized the company for rising worker turnover and falling competence. In testimony before a federal panel investigating the Deepwater Horizon disaster, Transocean workers have complained that personnel cutbacks have left them shorthanded.
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