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LONDON—Anadarko Petroleum Co. agreed to pay BP PLC $4 billion to settle all claims between the two companies arising from the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, a development that reduced uncertainty about the British oil giant's ultimate liability for last year's disaster. Anadarko also will drop its allegations of gross negligence against the oil giant, a move which could increase the pressure on contractors Halliburton Co. and Transocean Ltd. to come to terms with BP. Legal observers say Anadarko's move was seen as likely after a final report by U.S. investigators last month into the causes of the Deepwater Horizon...

Energy Policy: Deep-water drilling will resume in the Florida Strait when a giant, semi-submersible oil rig en route from Singapore arrives later this fall. The bad news is it will not be American. While U.S. oil and energy prices "necessarily skyrocket," as President Obama once said they would under energy policies that have imposed a de facto ban on offshore drilling, a massive Chinese-built semi-submersible oil rig is on its way from Singapore to a drilling position off northwest Cuba perhaps as little as 50 miles from Key West, Fla. The long-predicted move could come as early as November, as...

NEW YORK (MarketWatch) -- The U.S. said Wednesday a 17-month study into the causes of the April 20, 2010 explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig and the leak in the Macondo oil well that triggered the largest maritime oil spill in U.S. history revealed the violation of "a number of federal offshore safety regulations" by BP PLC

More than a year after the largest oil spill in history, perhaps the dominant lingering question about the Deepwater Horizon spill is, "What happened to the oil?" Now, in the first published study to explain the role of microbes in breaking down the oil slick on the surface of the Gulf of Mexico, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) researchers have come up with answers that represent both surprisingly good news and a head-scratching mystery. In research scheduled to be published in the Aug. 2 online edition of Environmental Research Letters, the WHOI team studied samples from the surface oil slick...

CHICAGO — BP wants to stop paying most people affected by the massive 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill for potential future damages because the region has recovered, a document released Friday said. The tourism industry is booming, all federal fishing grounds have reopened, and the shrimp catch has been plentiful, BP said. "The current economic data do not suggest that individual and business claimants face a material risk of future loss caused by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill," BP said in a 29-page document filed with the Gulf Coast Claim Facility, which is handling compensation claims. ... The compensation...

Exxon Mobil Corp. has made one of the largest oil and gas finds in the Gulf of Mexico in a decade, the company announced today. The oil major said it made two oil discoveries and a natural gas discovery in its Keathley Canyon blocks, including an oil discovery in the company’s first exploration well since last year’s moratorium on deep-water drilling. Exxon expects the combined finds to yield more than 700 million barrels of oil equivalent. More than 85 percent would be oil, the company said. Drilling early in 2010 turned up oil and natural gas at the well 250...

For 48 days and nights, the Deepwater Horizon well spewed oil into the Gulf of Mexico, when it could have been shut down. We now know this: It is very likely that if the top kill had been designed to deliver more than 109 bpm of 16.4 ppg drilling fluid below the BOP stack for a sustained period, the Macondo blowout could have been stopped between May 26-28, 2010. Given that the well was successfully shut-in with the capping stack in July, and that the subsequent bullhead (static) kill was successful, certainly a higher rate top kill would have been...

Earlier today I accused Interior Secretary Ken Salazar of a "cynical" approach to issuing deepwater drilling permits for the Gulf of Mexico. I did not realize how right I was. According to Kristen Hays of Reuters: BP Plc, whose Macondo well blowout in the Gulf of Mexico caused the worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history last year, co-owns the well that was granted the first deepwater drilling permit since the disaster. BP is Noble Energy Inc's partner in the well, holding a 46.5 percent interest, BP said. Noble operates the Santiago well that received a permit from U.S....

A federal panel investigating the Deepwater Horizon disaster said Friday that its probe might not be complete until July 27 — 15 months after the well blowout that killed 11 workers and triggered the nation’s worst oil spill. The joint inquiry by the U.S. Coast Guard and the Interior Department had already received one extension and had planned to wrap up work by the end of March. But delays in testing the blowout preventer that failed to stop gushing oil at BP’s doomed Macondo well prompted the government to ask for more time. “The condition of the BOP, as well...

New evidence unearthed by investigators shows that in some key moments before the Deepwater Horizon exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, BP leaders were disengaged from critical tests and recognized major problems, but they failed to communicate their concerns or take corrective action.

Energy Policy: An administration that has no respect for Congress, the courts or the Constitution has been found in contempt for reissuing a drilling moratorium that a U.S. district judge found overly broad. The Obama administration's trouble with the courts has continued with a judge's ruling last week that the Interior Department's reinstating of a drilling moratorium followed by a de facto moratorium via an overly restrictive permitting process constituted contempt. The administration had issued a drilling moratorium in May in waters deeper than 500 feet after the explosion and sinking of the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig off Louisiana that...

Updated 9:48 p.m. Carol Browner, an key adviser to President Obama on energy and environmental issues, plans to leave the White House, an administration official said Monday night. Her departure comes as something of a surprise. Browner had been deeply involved in negotiations over climate legislation, which passed the House but died in the Senate. And she had been a key part of the team helping to deal with and stop the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico last year. The administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency for eight years under President Bill Clinton, she had been...

So much for the environmental Apocalypse of 2010, or whatever it was that the greenies took to calling last April's Deepwater Horizon explosion and subsequent oil spill. First, it turned out that, just four months after the explosion, nearly all the oil that leaked into the Gulf of Mexico -- once estimated at 200 million gallons -- had disappeared with scant ill effect. Now a federally funded field study in the journal Science reports that some 200,000 tons of toxic methane gas from the spill -- which experts once estimated would remain in the gulf waters for as long as...

Deepening its already close ties with Russia, BP PLC unveiled a share-swap agreement with OAO Rosneft, that will give the state-controlled Russian oil company a 5% stake in BP and allow the U.K. oil giant to jointly explore and explore and develop parts of the Russian Arctic. The accord represents one of BP's boldest corporate moves since the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, a disaster that nearly destroyed it. BP will get 9.5% of Rosneft's shares in the transaction and access to an oil-rich swath of Russia's South Kara Sea. The stakes being swapped are each valued at about $8...

• Disaster could have been prevented – White House • Complacency 'could lead to another catastrophe' The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico was an avoidable disaster caused in part by a series of cost-cutting decisions made by BP and its partners, the White House oil commission has concluded.In a preview of its final report, due next week, the national oil spill commission said systemic management failure at BP, Transocean, and Halliburton caused the blow-out in the Gulf of Mexico, and warned that such a disaster would likely recur because of industry complacency.Many of the poor decisions taken on...

Last August, just two days into a research cruise to study methane gas spewed into the Gulf of Mexico by the Deepwater Horizon gusher, Texas A&M University oceanographer John Kessler turned to one of his colleagues and said, "Well, it looks like it might be gone. What do you think?" The huge wallop of methane burped up from deep inside the earth was, in fact, missing. Kessler and his colleagues now report in Science that a huge swarm of gas-gobbling bacteria swelled to consume nearly all of the estimated 200,000 tons of methane dumped into the gulf. ..... Besides providing...

<p>The worst of the explosions gutted the Deepwater Horizon stem to stern.</p> <p>Crew members were cut down by shrapnel, hurled across rooms and buried under smoking wreckage. Some were swallowed by fireballs that raced through the oil rig’s shattered interior. Dazed and battered survivors, half-naked and dripping in highly combustible gas, crawled inch by inch in pitch darkness, willing themselves to the lifeboat deck.</p>

The Great Oil Spill Panic of 2010 will go down in history as mass hysteria on par with the Dutch tulip bubble. The catastrophists were wrong (again) about the Deep Water Horizon oil spill. There have been no major fish die-offs. On the contrary, a comprehensive new study says that in some of the most heavily fished areas of the Gulf of Mexico, various forms of sea life, from shrimp to sharks, have seen their populations triple since before the spill. Some species, including shrimp and croaker, did even better. And meanwhile, the media has greatly exaggerated damage found in...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The oil spill that damaged the Gulf of Mexico's reefs and wetlands is also threatening to stain the Obama administration's reputation for relying on science to guide policy. --snip-- Meanwhile, the owner of the rig that exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, Transocean Ltd., is renewing its argument that federal investigators are in danger of allowing the blowout preventer, a key piece of evidence, to corrode as it awaits forensic analysis. Testing had not begun as of last week, the company says, some two months after it was raised from the seafloor. --snip-- "There are really only...

NEW YORK (MarketWatch) — Shares of Halliburton Co. fell sharply on Thursday after the lead lawyer for a presidential commission to investigate the Deepwater Horizon accident focused on the cement-sealing work, meant to prevent gas leakage from the stricken well that caused the death of 11 workers and the worst oil spill in U.S. history. A letter from the commission’s lawyer also points out that tests of the sealing job were either misinterpreted or not made by well owner BP PLC or Transocean Ltd. , the operator of the Deepwater Horizon rig. Halliburton stock dropped 10% at $30.94 in afternoon...