If Only.......

Commentary By Ron Beasley

Joe Gandelman give us a good run down on criticism of the Obama  administration over the Deepwater Horizon disaster.  Is Obama's panel too little too late?  The question this and all other panels have to answer is - why was BP allowed to drill in the Gulf at all?  Now this is too little too late:

EPA Officials Weigh Sanctions Against BP�s U.S. Operations

Officials at the Environmental Protection Agency are considering
whether to bar BP from receiving government contracts, a move that would
ultimately cost the company billions in revenue and could end its
drilling in federally controlled oil fields.

Over the past 10
years, BP has paid tens of millions of dollars in fines and been
implicated in four separate instances of criminal misconduct that could
have prompted this far more serious action. Until now, the company's
executives and their lawyers have fended off such a penalty by promising
that BP would change its ways.

That strategy may no longer work.

Days ago, in an unannounced move, the EPA suspended negotiations
with the petroleum giant over whether it would be barred from federal
contracts because of the environmental crimes it committed before the
spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Officials said they are putting the talks
on hold until they learn more about the British company's responsibility
for the plume of oil that is spreading across the Gulf.

The EPA
said in a statement that, according to its regulations, it can consider
banning BP from future contracts after weighing "the frequency and
pattern of the incidents, corporate attitude both before and after the
incidents, changes in policies, procedures, and practices."

BP has a long history of putting profits ahead of safety.

In the three instances where BP has had a felony or misdemeanor
conviction under the Clean Air or Clean Water Acts, the facilities where
the accidents happened automatically faced a statutory debarment, a
lesser form of debarment that affects only the specific facility where
the accident happened.

One of those cases has been settled. In
October 2000, after a felony conviction for illegally dumping hazardous
waste down a well hole to cut costs, BP's Alaska subsidiary, BP
Exploration Alaska, agreed to a five-year probation period and
settlement. That agreement expired at the end of 2005.

The other
two debarment actions are still open, and those are the cases that EPA
officials and the company have been negotiating for several years.

In
the first incident, on March 23, 2005, an explosion at BP's Texas City
refinery killed 15 workers. An investigation found the company had
restarted a fuel tower without warning systems in place, and BP was
eventually fined more than $62 million and convicted of a felony
violation of the Clean Air Act. BP Products North America, the
responsible subsidiary, was listed as debarred and the Texas City
refinery was deemed ineligible for any federally funded contracts. But
the company as a whole proceeded unhindered.

A year later, in March 2006, a hole in a pipeline in Prudhoe Bay led to
the largest ever oil spill on Alaska's North Slope � 200,000 gallons --
and the temporary disruption of oil supplies to the continental U.S. An
investigation found that BP had ignored warnings about corrosion in its
pipelines and had cut back on precautionary measures to save money. The
company's Alaska subsidiary was convicted of a misdemeanor violation of
the Clean Water Act and, again, debarred and listed as ineligible for
government income at its Prudhoe Bay pipeline facilities. That debarment
is still in effect.

So why wasn't BP banned from Federal contracts before.  Sure BP has some political clout but I suspect there is even more to it than that.  There is a perception that the US needs the oil, that is another debate.  Deep water oil was seen as the final frontier and Exxon-Mobil and other majors thought it was just too risky and weren't willing to go there.BP thought they could make a go of it by cutting costs .  That has blown up in the face of both BP and the Federal Government.  The EPA may now have no choice.

One person close to the negotiations said he was confounded by what
he characterized as the company's stubborn approach to the debarment
discussions. Given the history of BP's problems, he said, any
settlement would have been a second chance, a gift. Still, the e-mails
show, BP resisted.

As more evidence is gathered about what went
wrong in the Gulf, BP may soon wish it hadn't.

It's doubtful that
the EPA will make any decisions about BP's future in the United States
until the Gulf investigation is completed, a process that could last a
year. But as more information emerges about the causes of the accident
there -- about faulty blowout preventers and hasty orders to skip key
steps and tests that could have prevented a blowout -- the more the
emerging story begins to echo the narrative of BP's other disasters.
That, Meunier said, could leave the EPA with little choice as it
considers how "a corporate attitude of non-compliance" should affect the
prospect of the company's debarment going forward.

We are learning the hard way that deep water exploration and production is simply too complex to be viable.  Generations on the Gulf will pay for that long learning curve.