There's been so many facts that have been getting skewed and so many theories and stories... it's all a little much for a lowly landman like me but anyway... a few things I've heard or read about:
1) There's a far-fetched conspiracy theory out there that a North Korean sub left Cuba en route to Venezuela, went off course and north into the Gulf the night before the rig went down. Apparently there was a U.S. led "media blackout" on some events because they don't want to end up at war with them. Sounds pretty ridiculous, I can post that article on here if anybody wants to read it.
2) Everytime you hear someone say "5,000 bbls/day coming out" or read about 5,000 bbls a day... consider that a very RESERVED daily flow estimate. Lots of reports since have pegged the oil flow rate as being MUCH much higher, upwards of 20,000 bbls/day.
3) BP was actually throwing a party on the rig prior to the explosion to celebrate- get this- a superb safety record for the Deep Water Horizon rig.... the irony there is mindboggling.
and to address all the "who's liable" crowd, there are 2 entities that will end up taking it on the chin- at first. That would be BP and Anadarko, who's quietly sitting on the sidelines. You see, this well is actually a BP 75% / Anadarko 25% working interest well, with BP as Operator. These 2 guys would have signed some type of Joint Operating Agreement, which governs all operations and is basically your contract allowing business to proceed.
When you are the "Operator" under an Agreement, you're ultimately liable. Because you're the guy hiring all the service companies to do the work. If there are any questions, the service companies look to- guess who- the Operator- for advice, because they are the supposedly the technical experts. I guess now we can firmly say that BP, even though they likely had 9 or 10 of their shiniest shoe engineers working this project, is a company that perhaps needs to take things a bit more seriously. This isn't their 1st trip down oil spill alley (read about the Alaska pipeline that- if we're being honest, STILL isn't cleaned up!!).
BP can bitch and moan all they want that it was everybody else screwing up, the bad cementing, the terrible TransOcean rig, whatever. It doesn't matter. Liability at the end of the day lands in BP's (and Anadarko at 25%) lap. Maybe when they're done getting sued they can turn around and sue everybody else, but when your Operator, there's not much you can do but bite the bullet.
For everybody saying this will crush BP, I sincerely doubt it. But I could see this being problematic for a company like Anadarko with a market cap a fraction of the size.
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