Oil Spill

BP has won an agreement from the Justice Department that there will be no penalties on the barrels of crude oil the company was able to recapture during the 2010 Gulf of Mexico spill, effectively cutting the company's potential Clean Water Act fines by as much as $900 million, or even up to $3.5 billion. The volume of oil spilled into the Gulf of Mexico has been a matter of intense dispute, hinging on estimates of flow rates. The government has asserted that the blowout on the Macondo exploration well, which killed 11 people and...

NEW ORLEANS — A former BP engineer charged with deleting text messages about the company's response to its 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico claims that Justice Department prosecutors withheld evidence and should be sanctioned. U.S. District Judge Stanwood Duval Jr. didn't immediately rule Tuesday on whether sanctions are warranted after one of Kurt Mix's lawyers asked him to order prosecutors to turn over any evidence that could be favorable to his defense. Mix's attorney claims...

Judy Smith , D.C.-based crisis manager extraordinaire, is the inspiration, if not the subject, of the ABC drama series "Scandal," debuting April 5. She's played by L.A. babe Kerry Washington . Smith is the show's co-executive producer. Her first book, "Good Self, Bad Self, " debuts this week, too. This is almost beyond belief. For more than two decades, few high-profile people in Washington have been as invisible as Smith. She famously represents the well-to-do who are in high-end contretemps — Monica...

The walls of Interior Secretary Ken Salazar 's office are nearly bare now: He has packed up his photos and most of his books, so only a few paintings remain. But tucked inside a desk drawer is an artifact from his more than four years in office: a small vial of oil recovered on July 14, 2010, from the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. "I'm not sure if I'll take it," Salazar confessed, though he said the federal reforms and restoration funding stemming from the Deepwater Horizon disaster have left the country better off....

The oil spill that was once expected to bring economic ruin to the Gulf Coast appears to have delivered something entirely different: a gusher of money. So many people cashed in that they earned nicknames: "spillionaires" or "BP rich. " Others hurt by the spill wound up getting comparatively little. Many people who got money deserved it. But in the end, BP's attempt to make things right — spending more than $16 billion so far, mostly on damage claims and cleanup — created new divisions and even...

BP paid out $1.1 million worth of shares on Feb. 15 to former chief executive Tony Hayward under a three-year incentive plan, even though Hayward resigned in the wake of the massive Gulf of Mexico oil spill in 2010. Hayward also earned $194,973 in fees in 2011 as a director of BP's TNK-BP joint venture in Russia, according to the company's annual report released Tuesday. The company's stock price is down more than 20 percent since the spill. The London-based oil giant gave...

The 2010 BP oil spill accelerated the loss of Louisiana's delicate marshlands, which were already rapidly disappearing before the largest oil spill in U.S. history , a new study reports. As the oil washed into the marshlands, it coated and smothered thick grasses at their edge. When the grass died, deep roots that held the soil together also died, leaving the shore banks of the marshlands to crumble, said Brian Silliman , the University of Florida researcher who led the new study.

PORT ARTHUR, Tex. — The National Transportation Safety Board blamed multiple corrosion cracks and "pervasive organizational failures" at the Calgary-based Enbridge pipeline company for a more-than-20,000-barrel oil spill two years ago near Michigan's Kalamazoo River. The cost of the spill has reached $800 million and is rising, the NTSB said, making the pipeline rupture the most expensive on-shore oil spill in U.S. history. The pipeline's contents — heavy crude oil from Canada's oil...

Cameron International, the maker of the blowout preventer that failed to stop the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico last year, has agreed to pay $250 million to BP, which says it will put the money into the $20 billion escrow fund to settle claims related to the disaster. Cameron said its insurers would pay $170 million of the $250 million sum. BP would indemnify Cameron from claims related to the Oil Pollution Act and environmental damage, but not against fines, penalties or certain...

Transocean, owner and operator of the drilling rig that caught fire and sank in the Gulf of Mexico last year, has concluded that the oil well's owner, BP, was primarily responsible for the massive spill triggered by the blast. In a report issued Wednesday after an internal investigation, Transocean said BP used a "faulty" well design, failed to check the integrity of cement used to seal the well and chose a plan for temporarily abandoning the well that "created unnecessary risk.

Correction: An earlier version of this story misspelled the name of lawyer James Parkerson "Jim" Roy. One of the biggest legal circuses on Earth — the trial of BP over the extent of its responsibility for the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill — is scheduled to open in New Orleans on Monday, featuring 34 leading lawyers in the jam-packed federal court and hundreds of others listening to video feeds in rooms nearby. There will be 400 minutes of opening...

BP has won an agreement from the Justice Department that there will be no penalties on the barrels of crude oil the company was able to recapture during the 2010 Gulf of Mexico spill, effectively cutting the company's potential Clean Water Act fines by as much as $900 million, or even up to $3.5 billion. The volume of oil spilled into the Gulf of Mexico has been a matter of intense dispute, hinging on estimates of flow rates. The government has asserted that the blowout on the Macondo exploration well, which...

The Washington Post named Kevin Merida its new managing editor in charge of news and features coverage on Monday. Merida, 56, who has been The Post's national editor for the past four years, will be the paper's first African American managing editor. He has worked at The Post for 20 years, starting off covering Congress and the 1994 Gingrich Revolution. After contributing to election coverage in 1996, he moved to the Style section. Later, he coordinated The Post's year-long...

Reaching out to people to achieve a resolution What are the leadership qualities that make for a successful mediator? The first is competence. Obviously, you have to have the ability to master the facts, the law and to evaluate the case. You also need doggedness, flexibility and crea­tivity. I often say, "There's always more than one way to get to ‘yes.' " I'm always looking for a different way to get the parties to recognize that compromise can be reached. In my cases, I'm a fiduciary, not an adversary.

The Environmental Protection Agency has suspended BP from bidding on any new federal contracts, including drilling leases, as a result of the company's conduct during the Deepwater Horizon oil rig disaster in 2010 that led to 11 deaths and the largest U.S. offshore spill. The temporary ban came early on the day the Interior Department held a sale of leases on 20 million acres of offshore oil and gas prospects in the western Gulf of Mexico that the department said attracted $133 million in bids.

Few Americans have ever heard of Robert Kaluza and Donald Vidrine. They have spent much of their lives offshore, drilling holes in the seafloor for the oil giant BP. Over many decades in the business, each rose to the rank of well site leader, a job commonly known on a rig as "the company man. " Their lives changed irreversibly on April 20, 2010, a calm, clear day in the Gulf of Mexico. Kaluza and Vidrine took turns supervising the drilling operation on a rig named Deepwater Horizon.

BP will pay an estimated $7.8 billion to settle a lawsuit over the massive 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill with attorneys representing thousands of individual plaintiffs and businesses on the eve of a major trial in a New Orleans federal court, the company said Friday night. BP said it expects to pay the settlement from the money remaining in a $20 billion escrow account, or trust fund, it set up during the spill to resolve individual and business claims without going to court.

A U.S. Coast Guard helicopter crew sent to investigate a report of an oil spill in the Anacostia River said Tuesday that it found nothing amiss. But a hazmat unit of the D.C. Fire Department, which reported the incident a day earlier, insists that something was there. Now, water samples are being tested to find out what, if anything, spilled. The hazmat unit received a call Monday from the office of D.C. Council member Tommy Wells (D-Ward 6), which was alerted to the spill by a constituent that...

It is a relief to see BP finally agreeing to plead guilty to its crimes [front page, Nov. 16], but we mustn't forget the millions of people who should also be held accountable. In the United States, the consumer receives what the consumer desires, and BP and other major drilling companies will continue their search for oil as long as the public demands the product. The charges against BP are a step in the right direction in terms of industry regulation and prevention of oil spills.

Shell completed its drilling season off the Arctic coast of Alaska Wednesday, falling short of its original goal of drilling as many as six exploration wells. The company said it drilled the top portions of two wells, the Burger-A well in the Chukchi Sea and the Sivulliq well in the Beaufort Sea, without attempting to penetrate deeper reservoirs that could hold oil. The company said that the work would "go a long way in positioning Shell for another successful drilling program in 2013.