US State Department cables released by Wikileaks reveal that the US Government knew months in advance that BP’s worldwide oil and gas operations were a very, very risky business.
Specifically, the US State Department officials wrote memos describing a frighteningly similar incident that occurred in Azerbaijan when a natural gas field in which BP was in charge exploded in a giant fireball 18 months prior to the Deep water Horizon incident. And based on those cables, BP’s secretive and deceitful actions after the gas field explosion in Azerbaijan were remarkably similar to how it operated after the Deepwater Horizon explosion:
Striking resemblances between BP’s Gulf of Mexico disaster and a little-reported giant gas leak in Azerbaijan experienced by the UK firm 18 months beforehand have emerged from leaked US embassy cables.
The cables reveal that some of BP’s partners in the gas field were upset that the company was so secretive about the incident that it even allegedly withheld information from them. They also say that BP was lucky that it was able to evacuate its 212 workers safely after the incident, which resulted in two fields being shut and output being cut by at least 500,000 barrels a day with production disrupted for months.
Other cables leaked tonight claim that the president of Azerbaijan accused BP of stealing $10bn of oil from his country and using “mild blackmail” to secure the rights to develop vast gas reserves in the Caspian Sea region.
BP’s shady business practices, its long history of gross negligence and cutting corners in operating operating its oil and gas wells, was well known. Yet, despite its unsavory record of “doing business” here and around the world, and the State Department’s direct knowledge of how BP withheld critical information from other governments and its own business partners about drilling and operational disasters caused by its own malfeasance, apparently no one in the US Government “could have predicted” that BP would take almost exactly the same approach to operating a deep water well in the Gulf of Mexico, or cover up its own poor judgment and deliberately lie to the US government about the extent of the disaster in the Gulf just as they has 18 months earlier when dealing with the Azerbaijan authorities.
On the Azerbaijan gas leak, acable reports for the first time that BP suffered a blowout in September 2008 …
Written a few weeks after the incident, the cable said Bill Schrader, BP’s then head of Azerbaijan, admitted it was possible the company “would never know” the cause although it “is continuing to methodically investigate possible theories”.
According to another cable, in January 2009 BP thought that a “bad cement job” was to blame for the gas leak in Azerbaijan. More recently, BP’s former chief executive Tony Hayward also partly blamed a “bad cement job” by contractor Halliburton for the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. The blowout in the Gulf led to the deaths of 11 workers and the biggest accidental offshore oil spill in history.
BP was also criticised for not initially sharing all its information with the US authorities about the scale of the Gulf spill. {…]
BP comes in for criticism for allegedly limiting the information it made available about the incident. Another cable records shortly after the incident: “ACG operator BP has been exceptionally circumspect in disseminating information about the ACG gas leak, both to the public and to its ACG partners. […]
The cable continues: “At least some of BP’s ACG partners are similarly upset with BP’s performance in this episode, as they claim BP has sought to limit information flow about this event even to its ACG partners. Although it is too early to ascertain the cause, if in fact this production shutdown was due to BP technical error, and if it continues for months (as seems possible), BP’s reputation in Azerbaijan will take a serious hit.”
Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? BP got lucky that its gas explosion did not result in the deaths of any of the contract employees at its gas field operation, and that this disaster occurred in faraway Azerbaijan so the general public was never informed that its error prone operating standards were likely to lead to further disaster.
But our government knew. BP’s partners in Big Oil knew. They all knew BP was a ticking time bomb just waiting to go off and create a far more significant environmental disaster, possibly in the United States. The only question is why did no one in our government acted to closely monitor BP’s operations in America and the Gulf of Mexico, given its history?
But, of course, that question is a rhetorical one. We all know why. BP and other Big Oil companies own the US government, or enough of it to allow them to get away with murder. From our politicians in Congress to the regulators at the Minerals Management Service, they had already purchased the right to operate without any accountability or oversight. As have all the other large Oil & Gas companies.
Our Government knew ahead of time that BP was bad news. They knew BP cut corners, and dangerously so. They knew BP has a record of shoddy work. They knew BP didn’t play by the rules. They knew BP lied to governments and even its own business partners when “accidents” occurred at any oil or gas site for which it was responsible. They knew and did nothing.
How much more do they know about our other corporate overlords that they are hiding from the American people, secrets that inevitably will come back to bite us all in the ass because our government displays more loyalty to the corporations who fund Congressional and Presidential political campaigns and because they wine and dine and offer jobs to the very regulators who oversee their businesses. Instead, our government that is supposed to be working for us, is beholden to these amoral mega-corporations and the immoral criminals (i.e., senior executives) who run them.
I for one can’t wait to find out what else our government knows about its Corporate “patrons” and has hidden from our view — from Wikileaks.
