Spill baby spill, slippery politics

@hamburgboy,

Probably for the same reason asphalt highways don't evaporate. The do get pretty soft in the summer, though.

1 Reply

@roger,

evaporate , evaporate , evaporate !!!

there - i said the magic word three times - now go and evaporate .

1 Reply

@hamburgboy,

Did you forget to close your eyes tightly and click your heels together?

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@realjohnboy,

oops - i forgot - must try again ... ...

( a rather sad story imo - and sadly not much on people's mind any more -
now if the price of gas goes up another penny - that grabs people's attention )

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@realjohnboy,

now that we have the DWFTTW powered car - who needs oil anyway - might as well plug up all the oilwells Laughing

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Massive flow of Bullshit continues to gush from BP Headquarters

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@rosborne979,

the one good thing if this spill continues, once the oil rounds the tip of florida, the gulf stream should eventually deposit some of it on England's shores

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@rosborne979,

BP officials must be reading from Obama's teleprompter.

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Did anyone notice that there is now a lot of speculation that BP will go though bankruptcy and get taken over by someone else? The new owners will do what ever they can to limit liability, but given that this thing looks to be headed to criminal court they might not be able to do that.

Anyways, I said weeks ago that BP might not survive this, and it now looks fairly certain that they will not. Good I say, this kind of neglect should kill BP.

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@hawkeye10,

BP lost another 15% of its market cap today, adios assholes, no company deserves to die more than you do....

Quote:

Matt Simmons, chairman emeritus of energy investment banking company Simmons International, said the oil spill will mean the end of BP as evidence mounts that the spill is far worse than first thought.

"There's no way the company can survive this," he said.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100609/ap_on_bi_ge/us_bp_shares_slump

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@hawkeye10,

I did come across an article today, hawkeye, in which a supposedly respected analyst* suggested BP would go into bankruptcy within a month. I am not familiar with the analyst and can't find the article.
I doubt that that will happen. BP made $16Bn last year and is very well capitalized.
President Obama and others are arguing that BP should not pay dividends on its stock ($2.5Bn per quarter). It makes for a good sound bite and BP would certainly take a PR drubbing if it declares a "business as usual" dividend. It will have to make a decision on that in the next couple of weeks.
It has cash on hand and a line of credit to amply cover the costs of the spill, which are now estimated at $5Bn but which could easily rise.
1/7th of all dividends paid out in the UK come from BP. Suspending the dividend would have a pretty devastating effect on pension funds.
40% of the shareholders live in the U.S. I am not one of them.
BP shares tumbled 16% today. Obviously there are investors who are much more concerned about the possibility of a dividend cut or bankruptcy than I am.
* Simmons was the analyst. Thanks!

1 Reply

Republican Congressman Don Young is feeling the full force of grassroots Democrats over his outrageous Sarah Palin-esque comment saying that the Gulf of Mexico oil spill is "not an environmental disaster."

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@realjohnboy,

Quote:

BP shares tumbled 16% today. Obviously there are investors who are much more concerned about the possibility of a dividend cut or bankruptcy than I am.
* Simmons was the analyst. Thanks!

No, they are now convinced that BP is going to face years of criminal litigation, may well lose based upon the information we have, and BP as a corporation has now suffered from so many management failures that it will be impossible for the company to operate under the name BP going forwards. BP was attempting to recover the brand from past neglect, but that project is now hopeless.

BP has to go away, what remains to be seen is how it is done. What America needs to be concerned about is that recovery costs and criminal judgments will get paid, but this is no sure thing.

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@hawkeye10,

All BP has to do is be able to fairly accurately predict their cash liability (including any punitives) from this point on and they can bounce back (Obviously their leadership needs total tossing). Id imagine avisible liability in the neighborhood of 15 to 20 Billion.

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@hawkeye10,

from the NYT : imagining the worst ... ...

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/08/business/08sorkin.html?dbk

Quote:

... ... BP’s costs for the cleanup could run as high as $23 billion, according to Credit Suisse. On top of that, BP could face an additional $14 billion in claims from gulf fisherman and the tourism industry. So while conservative estimates put the bill at $15 billion, something approaching $40 billion is not out of the question. After all, little about this spill has turned out as expected.

The company has about $12 billion in cash and short-term investments, but there is already a debate about whether it should cut its dividend out of fear that it could run out of money. Of course, it could sell assets or seek loans, which in this environment is still not that easy.

But all those numbers don’t account for the greatest possible threat: a jury verdict against BP. Such a verdict might push the cost of the spill into the hundreds of billions. If that happened, even BP might buckle.

This outcome might seem far-fetched right now. But on Wall Street bankers have already coined a term for it: “the Texaco scenario.”

In 1987, Texaco was forced to file for Chapter 11 because it could not afford to pay a jury award worth $1 billion to Pennzoil. That award had been knocked down by a judge from a whopping $10.53 billion. (Pennzoil successfully sued Texaco for “jumping” its planned merger with Getty Oil, in part, by moving the case to local court near its headquarters. The jury awarded triple damages.)

just hoping that none of my pension money is invested in BP !!!

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@hamburgboy,

Those numbers are higher than what I had seen! BP does have a line of credit of $15Bn but that plus cash on hand would get drained if the cost were to be the $23Bn mentioned.

1 Reply

@realjohnboy,

i'd say it does look a bit ( ? ) scary .
as the nyt writer said :

Quote:

little about this spill has turned out as expected

( it's not a good story - no matter how i look at it ! )

( $ 23 billion seems to be clean-up costs alone !
how many zeros is that ? )

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@hamburgboy,

On top of that we very well might have punitive damages. It now looks like BP will not be able to get away with blaming the US Government for failure to regulate, some of the stuff they did was so outrageously negligent that they have a very real chance of getting rung up criminally....thinking here about ignoring the pressure tests and removing the mud, using unsafe casings, using a cement process that was known to be tricky and then not testing the job (the contract crew was actually on the rig to run the tests, but BP sent them away), not insuring that there was real time data sent to shore (thus all of the last hours of data is missing), plus there is now reams of documents showing BP routinely operated in callous disregard for the safety of the crew and the environment in the pursuit of more profits.

Another thing to keep in mind is that it now looks like this problem is far worse than advertised. It now appears that the casings of the well have failed, was further damaged by the top fill attempt, and that successfully using the relief wells to solve the problem is now going to be more difficult that it already was going to be. BP can not simply shut down the well now because the well is no longer geologically stable, and everything they do increases the risk that what resistance we now have preventing the entire reservoir from exploding into the gulf will be compromised. Considering that BP never figured out how big this reservoir is our current situation is damn scary.

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Three days after the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico, the Dutch government offered to help.

It was willing to provide ships outfitted with oil-skimming booms, and it proposed a plan for building sand barriers to protect sensitive marshlands.

The response from the Obama administration and BP, which are coordinating the cleanup: “The embassy got a nice letter from the administration that said, ‘Thanks, but no thanks,'” said Geert Visser, consul general for the Netherlands in Houston.

Now, almost seven weeks later, as the oil spewing from the battered well spreads across the Gulf and soils pristine beaches and coastline, BP and our government have reconsidered.

U.S. ships are being outfitted this week with four pairs of the skimming booms airlifted from the Netherlands and should be deployed within days. Each pair can process 5 million gallons of water a day, removing 20,000 tons of oil and sludge.

At that rate, how much more oil could have been removed from the Gulf during the past month?

The uncoordinated response to an offer of assistance has become characteristic of this disaster's response. Too often, BP and the government don't seem to know what the other is doing, and the response has seemed too slow and too confused.

Full story at: http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/business/steffy/7043272.html

1 Reply

@Irishk,

You seem to fail to grasp that in the first days it was decided that removing the oil from the gulf is not the way to go. The plan all along has been to optimize natures ability to deal with the oil. The problem with the plan is that it was all guesswork, they did not know how much oil they were expecting nature to deal with, and they did not have any proof that using the depressants at the sea floor would help nature. Bacteria can not work well in the cold, at it appears that a lot of this oil is trapped deep below the water surface. Scientists are only now trying to figure out what has been done.

1 Reply

Spill baby spill, slippery politics

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