Oil Industry

Days after she was sworn in as governor, Sarah Palin began to clean house at the department of natural resources, firing and demoting several top officials and eventually appointing a new director at the agency that oversees the energy companies that provide the state with 85% of its revenue. The shake-up was an early sign that this newly elected Republican governor was not like any of her predecessors -- she was determined not to cave in to the energy industry, the state's lifeblood.

Occidental Petroleum Corp., the nation's fourth-largest oil company, saw a slight increase in first-quarter profits compared to a year ago and set records in oil and natural gas production, the company said in a news release Thursday. The Westwood-based company said it generated a net profit of $1.56 billion in the first quarter, or $1.92 a share. That compared to the 2011 results of $1.55 billion and $1.90 a share. Sales jumped to $6.27 billion compared to $5.73 billion a year earlier.

Reporting from Atkinson, Neb. Some might have been surprised to hear that plans to build a 1,700-mile oil pipeline through the Midwest to the Gulf Coast — a source of new oil and thousands of jobs — would drive an emotional fault line down the middle of the conservative heartland. But any skepticism would have quickly evaporated here in the noisy bleachers of the West Holt High School gymnasium. The proposed Keystone XL pipeline — the subject of public hearings convened by the State Department last week along the route from Montana to Texas — was alternately described as a plot by a foreign corporation to exploit America, a potentially perilous polluter of the nation's greatest freshwater resource, the answer to America's energy insecurity, a generator of the last great family-wage jobs and, oh yes, a dangerous new instigator of global warming.

WASHINGTON - Two years after the Deepwater Horizon explosion unleashed the worst oil spill in American history, Congress has failed to take meaningful action to prevent a similar disaster, according to a new report from members of a presidential panel. The report cited significant progress by the Obama administration and the oil industry, giving them a B and a C+ grade, respectively, for their efforts to bolster safety, spill response and resources. Congress, however, got a D grade for its inability to "enact any legislation responding to the explosion and spill.

Late last year, Gov. Jerry Brown pushed for a top state regulator to ease key requirements for companies seeking to tap California's oil. The official balked. Relaxing rules on underground injection, a risky method of oil extraction common in the state, would violate environmental laws, wrote Derek Chernow, then head of the Department of Conservation, in a memo obtained by The Times. The process, in which a rush of steam, water and chemicals flushes oil from old wells, had been linked to spills, eruptions and a Kern County worker's death.

Actor Stephen Baldwin is locked in a legal battle with fellow actor and director Kevin Costner over a plan to market an oil-spill fighting technology as the Deepwater Horizon crisis started to unfold in the Gulf of Mexico last year. In a complaint filed in U.S. District Court in New Orleans, Baldwin and a business associate say they were duped into cashing out their shares of Ocean Therapy Solutions, a Louisiana company that leased 32 centrifugal oil separators to BP for an estimated $52 million.

A few years ago, Occidental Petroleum Corp. executive Stephen I. Chazen sounded like a cryptologist out of a Dan Brown novel as he told investors that an oil bonanza awaited any outfit that could "crack the code" of California's seismically fractured underground. Occidental's engineers may have done it. The Westwood company revealed in July that it had found the equivalent of 150 million to 250 million barrels of oil and natural gas in an undisclosed part of Kern County using techniques that the oil company's executives would rather not talk about.

One of the more enduring controversies in California's oil industry--the charge by state and local authorities, independent oil producers and others that "Big Oil" has long conspired to fix prices--refuses to die. In fact, the issue is alive and well as the result of last month's decision by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. It found that California and Long Beach officials had offered sufficient evidence of a 1970s price-fixing conspiracy by Chevron, Unocal, Mobil, Shell, Exxon and Texaco.

Federal investigators are showing increasing frustration at murky or nonresponsive answers from oil industry officials as they parse the causes of the worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history. Since the hearings began in May, three BP officials with intimate knowledge of events leading up to the April 20 explosion on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig have declined to testify before a joint Coast Guard and Interior Department panel, which convened again Wednesday. One repeatedly cited a medical excuse and two invoked their constitutional right not to produce testimony that could incriminate themselves.

The trucks came at night, ferrying load after load of oil-field waste from Alabama to the US Liquids disposal facility in this tiny south Louisiana settlement. For the oil company, it was an easy decision: Exxon's drilling and production waste was classified as hazardous under Alabama law. Its disposal there would cost about $100 a barrel. In Louisiana, however, the chemical waste could be dumped into open pits at a cost of $8 a barrel. The US Liquids plant is across a two-lane highway from Clarice Friloux's property, which backs up to an alligator-filled bayou.

TRIPOLI, Libya - Ahmed Mostafa and his friends paid thousands of dollars among them to get to Libya recently, traveling with gangs of smugglers through Western Africa. It was to be their escape from the sprawling slums of Ghana's capital city, Accra. Mostafa had heard rumors of arbitrary arrests and Libyan lynch mobs during the war last year in which longtime Libyan leader Moammar Kadafi was ousted and killed. But he was counting on luck: "It was not something I really thought about," he said.

WAUKESHA, Wis. -- Just before President Obama gave his scathing critique of the Republican Party on Tuesday, Mitt Romney sought to blunt the impact by accusing him of failing to take responsibility for the rise in gasoline prices. Campaigning at a fast-food restaurant in this Milwaukee suburb on the day of Wisconsin's Republican presidential primary, Romney criticized a television ad that Obama's reelection campaign started airing this week in six White House battleground states.

WASHINGTON — The Senate blocked an effort to end billions of dollars in tax breaks for the oil industry, brushing aside President Obama's argument that the five big oil companies were doing "just fine" while consumers were struggling with painfully high gasoline prices. The measure to kill the industry tax preferences failed on a 51-47 procedural vote Thursday. It needed 60 votes to overcome a Republican-led filibuster that was supported by some Democrats from oil-rich states.

Upset about high gasoline prices? So are the folks in Congress -- they just have a different way of showing it. As Time staff writers Lisa Mascaro and Christi Parsons reported Thursday: “The Senate blocked an effort to end billions of dollars in tax breaks for the oil industry, brushing aside President Obama's argument that the five big oil companies were doing 'just fine' while consumers were struggling with painfully high gasoline prices.”...

As rising gas prices are putting pressure on politicians to act, President Obama called on Congress to vote quickly to eliminate subsidies for the oil industry, returning to a favorite target the president. "I want them to vote on this in the next few weeks, so we can put every single member on record: You can either stand up for the oil companies, or you can stand up for the American people," the president told a crowd gathered at Nashua Community College. The president's push to eliminate the subsidies is nothing new. Obama campaigned on the issue four years ago and has proposed cutting the subsidies repeatedly in his budgets and tax proposals.

Late last year, Gov. Jerry Brown pushed for a top state regulator to ease key requirements for companies seeking to tap California's oil. The official balked. Relaxing rules on underground injection, a risky method of oil extraction common in the state, would violate environmental laws, wrote Derek Chernow, then head of the Department of Conservation, in a memo obtained by The Times. The process, in which a rush of steam, water and chemicals flushes oil from old wells, had been linked to spills, eruptions and a Kern County worker's death.

WASHINGTON — The Senate blocked an effort to end billions of dollars in tax breaks for the oil industry, brushing aside President Obama's argument that the five big oil companies were doing "just fine" while consumers were struggling with painfully high gasoline prices. The measure to kill the industry tax preferences failed on a 51-47 procedural vote Thursday. It needed 60 votes to overcome a Republican-led filibuster that was supported by some Democrats from oil-rich states.

Far-reaching legislation that would impose new environmental safeguards on offshore drilling, repeal oil-industry-friendly provisions of energy policy and hit producers with a new tax to fund conservation programs gained ground in Congress on Thursday. Acting as BP at least temporarily halted the flow of oil from its blown-out well, two House committees advanced legislation from a pile of oil-spill-related bills. One bill, approved by the Natural Resources Committee on a largely party-line vote, would strip the oil industry of royalty relief for deep-water drilling.

The Obama administration has denied a permit for the controversial Keystone XL oil pipeline from Canada, asserting that it did not "have sufficient time to obtain the information necessary to assess whether the project, in its current state, is in the national interest," the State Department announced. The decision is sure to prolong a bitter political fight that has raged for months over the pipeline's fate. For Republicans, the oil industry and the Chamber of Commerce, Keystone has become a one-word campaign slogan: synonymous with many of the themes of government regulatory overreach they have tried over the course of the year to pin on President Obama.

Anywhere else, linking an aromatic cup of coffee and a gooey glob of oil would quickly kill a restaurant. Not so in Taft, Calif., the Taft Crude Coffee House is a popular stop for hot coffee or iced mocha. And in an era when oil spills tend to be environmental disasters, people here are happy to provide directions to the Lakeview Gusher, even though it spewed more than 9 million barrels of oil, nearly twice the amount spilled in 2010 from the Deepwater Horizon, the ill-fated British Petroleum rig in the Gulf of Mexico.