Bp

Flaws in a cement encasement intended to seal BP's well were most likely the root of last month's deadly explosion on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, according to interviews, government officials, congressional hearing testimony, drilling reports and other company documents. The April 20 accident, which has resulted in millions of gallons of oil being spewed into the Gulf of Mexico, is the subject of multiple investigations that promise to be long and complex. Hearings in the last two weeks offered multiple lines of inquiry into what one engineer calls "a confluence of unfortunate events."

WASHINGTON -- The Obama administration announced that BP North America Inc. has agreed to pay an $8-million fine and install more than $400 million in equipment to cut air pollution from an oil refinery in Whiting, Ind., as part of a settlement over alleged violations of the Clean Air Act.

Failure to manage the risks of a complex well and to learn from an earlier narrowly missed disaster contributed significantly to the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, a panel investigating the BP oil spill said Wednesday. "Numerous decisions" to continue operations despite repeated warnings of problems "suggest an insufficient consideration of risk and a lack of operating discipline," according to a report issued by a committee at the National Academy of Engineering/National Research Council, which was convened at the request of Interior Secretary Ken Salazar.

The British, it seems, are not enamored of British Petroleum, even when it shells out big bucks to support the nation's greatest literary treasure. A group of actors staged their own protest play Monday night before a performance of "The Tempest" at Shakespeare's birthplace, Stratford-upon-Avon, to express their displeasure with a sponsorship deal involving the oil giant. BP is supporting the World Shakespeare Festival, a joint venture between the Royal Shakespeare Co. and the Globe Theatre that is being billed as the biggest Shakespeare festival ever held.

Oil giant BP will unload its Southern California gasoline business, including the huge Carson refinery and its local Arco gasoline operations, as part of a broad overhaul following last year's Gulf of Mexico oil spill. BP said Tuesday that it also would sell its Texas City, Texas, refinery, where a 2005 explosion and fire killed 15 people and injured more than 170 others. The sale of the California and Texas facilities will cut BP's refining capacity in half as it moves to divest $30 billion in assets to pay gulf disaster costs.

London (Reuters) -- Halliburton Co, the oilfield services company that cemented the blown-out Gulf of Mexico well which caused the United States' worst-ever oil spill, Sunday said a BP report into the disaster that laid the blame on the cement job offered a questionable account of events and “erroneous conclusions.” Halliburton, based in Houston, Texas and Dubai, questioned tests BP said it conducted that showed Halliburton's cement had failed, allowing channels to form, through which hydrocarbons could flow up the well and cause the explosion.

The containment cap BP had placed over its blown-out well was removed by an undersea robot vehicle, and the oil company was working to place it again. U.S. Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen, incident commander for the Deepwater Horizon disaster, said BP feared methane hydrates were coming through the pipe leading from the cap to surface vessels, and the cap was removed out of "an abundance of caution." BP also found that one of the vents of the cap had been closed, possibly due to a bump from one of the remotely operated vehicles hovering around the well.

The British, it seems, are not enamored of British Petroleum, even when it shells out big bucks to support the nation's greatest literary treasure. A group of actors staged their own protest play Monday night before a performance of "The Tempest" at Shakespeare's birthplace, Stratford-upon-Avon, to express their displeasure with a sponsorship deal involving the oil giant. BP is supporting the World Shakespeare Festival, a joint venture between the Royal Shakespeare Co. and the Globe Theatre that is being billed as the biggest Shakespeare festival ever held.

Apache Corp. said Tuesday it agreed to buy a handful of BP's oil and natural gas fields throughout North America and Egypt for $7 billion, though the oil giant's Prudhoe Bay, Alaska operations were not part of the deal. Apache Corp., known for purchasing mature oil and gas properties and wringing more value out of them, will scoop up BP properties in Alberta and British Columbia, as well as the Permian Basin of West Texas and New Mexico and Egypt's Western Desert. All told, the Houston oil and gas company will add estimated proved reserves of 385 million barrels of oil equivalent to its portfolio.

Robots using giant hydraulic shears finished cutting away the pipe atop a BP well gushing oil into the Gulf of Mexico, clearing the way for a cap to be placed over the well on Thursday in an effort to contain the 45-day-old spill. Cutting away the riser pipe is "a significant step forward," Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, the national incident commander, said at a briefing Thursday morning. "The challenge now is to seal that containment cap over it." Allen said the shears used in the cutting did not give the clean edges that officials had hoped for, which could make it more difficult to fit the cap tightly over the pipe.

BP's financial sponsorship of a cultural institution is once again provoking heated words in the arts community. This time, the World Shakespeare Festival has become the center of attention after a group of British actors launched a protest against the partnership between the oil company and the Royal Shakespeare Co. The World Shakespeare Festival is a global celebration of the Bard's plays coinciding with the Cultural Olympiad in London....

HOUSTON — The Justice Department on Tuesday unveiled the first criminal charges in its investigation of the 2010 BP oil spill: two counts of obstruction of justice filed against a former BP engineer accused of destroying records describing the rate at which oil was flowing from the broken well at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. The engineer, Kurt Mix, was involved in efforts to plug the well as well as internal BP efforts to estimate the amount of oil leaking from it in the first months after the spill.

WASHINGTON -- In the first criminal charges to emerge from the federal probe of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, a former engineer for BP was arrested Tuesday on suspicion of intentionally destroying evidence requested by federal authorities who were investigating the April 2010 explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil platform. Kurt Mix, 50, of Katy, Texas, was charged with two counts of obstruction of justice in a criminal complaint filed in the U.S. District Court's Eastern District of Louisiana and unsealed Tuesday.

HOUSTON - A former BP engineer appeared in federal court Tuesday chained at the wrist and ankles to face criminal charges that he intentionally deleted hundreds of text messages about the amount of oil flowing into the Gulf of Mexico from the company's blown-out well in 2010. Kurt Mix, 50, of Katy, Texas, was charged with two counts of obstruction of justice and released on a $100,000 bond. U.S. Magistrate Stephen Smith asked Mix whether he understood the charges against him and the possible penalties if convicted - a 20-year sentence and $250,000 fine on each count.

The massive civil lawsuit stemming from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, originally scheduled to go to trial Monday in New Orleans, has been postponed for one week to give oil giant BP and lawyers for more than 120,000 plaintiffs time to continue settlement talks. The postponement of the start of the trial to March 5 was announced in a joint statement Sunday from BP, which was in charge of the drilling project, and the group of plaintiffs' attorneys known as the Plaintiffs' Steering Committee, or PSC. "BP and the PSC are working to reach agreement to fairly compensate people and businesses affected by the Deepwater Horizon accident and oil spill," the statement read.

Spill 4.9 million barrels of oil into the ocean, and this is what you get: the lollapalooza, labyrinthine, mega-mother of all lawsuits. It encompasses 72 million pages of documents, 20,000 exhibits and 303 depositions — the collective effort of hundreds of lawyers and legal workers. It involves the Justice Department and about 120,000 plaintiffs: angry fishermen, restaurateurs, state governments and condo owners who say their beach-side property is not worth what it once was. The trial phase, set to begin Feb. 27 in a New Orleans federal courtroom, could go on for nine months.

A cap placed atop a gushing well on the floor of the Gulf of Mexico could allow BP officials to begin pumping oil to the surface later Friday, the Coast Guard admiral leading the response to the disaster said, but he warned that strong winds had sent oil surging to the Florida Panhandle and had split the disaster into several slicks that would strain the resources available to clean them up. "The scope of this thing is starting to extend to...

As BP recruits scientists to assess damage from its massive oil spill and provide expert testimony in lawsuits, a congressional committee is demanding to see all its spill-related research contracts, warning BP America Chairman Lamar McKay against "any effort to muzzle scientists." An investigation by the House Committee on Energy and Commerce and recent media accounts "have raised questions about the potential suppression of scientific data and analysis concerning restoration of the Gulf of Mexico," said a letter to McKay by committee Chairman Henry A. Waxman (D- Beverly Hills)

Toyota Motor Corp. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. were among the biggest gainers in brand image last year after a rough 2010 that saw each of them enmeshed in controversy, according to rankings by online market research firm, YouGov. Toyota's image had been pummeled in 2010 from more than 13 million product recalls in the U.S. related to sudden acceleration, said YouGov, a British firm that tracks brand perception daily. A Los Angeles Times series helped draw attention to Toyota's problems, which led to congressional hearings.