Beasley, Allen, Crow, Methvin, Portis & Miles, P.C.

Priding itself on “making things right” in Gulf of Mexico and coastal communities hard-hit the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, BP says it has big plans for expanding its operations in the United States. The announcement wasn’t supposed to comfort residents and businesses still struggling to recover in the BP spill’s oily aftermath, but to reassure investors that it doesn’t intend to hold back on its push to find and extract more oil and gas from U.S. lands and waters, despite the ongoing destruction of Gulf ecosystems and frustration of people who depend on them for a living.

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BP levied some hefty accusations against Halliburton Energy Services in court Monday, claiming the company intentionally destroyed cement samples, test results, and computer models that would have demonstrated the contractor’s culpability in the massive Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

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The typical oyster season in Louisiana, which starts in September, produces an average of 25o million pounds of oysters – about one-third of the nation’s oyster supply. This year, however, thanks to the BP oil spill and the Mississippi River floods in May, water salinity levels will cause oyster production to plummet to half its usual volume. Moreover, the 2012 harvest is expected to be about just 35 percent of the average yield.

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Ever since the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded and sank in the Gulf of Mexico, BP, its partners, and its contractors have been at odds with one another, ensconced in legal efforts to share liability and mitigate hefty financial losses. This week, the feud escalated between BP and Deepwater Horizon owner Transocean, with both companies trying to gain possession of the failed blowout preventer (BOP) that federal investigators will release back into private hands. Transocean owned and had leased the Deepwater Horizon rig and its blowout preventer to BP for exploratory drilling since 2007.

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Faced with ongoing cleanup costs and widespread ecological damage, the U.S. Justice Department filed a lawsuit today against BP and eight other companies involved in the massive Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

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The United Kingdom’s Health and Safety Executive (HSE) has warned the nation’s offshore oil and gas industry about its safety record after the latest statistics revealed significant increases in serious injuries and unexpected hydrocarbon releases. The announcement reflects an ongoing trend in the UK and the United States, interpreted by many critics as a worsening state of safety and environmental protections.

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Andarko Petroleum Corp., one of the world’s largest independent oil exploration and production companies, says that it is not going to contribute anything toward the cleanup and containment of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, despite federal law, because it’s all BP’s fault.

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Kate Sheppard, a Washington-based journalist who covers energy and environmental politics in Mother Jones’ Washington bureau, recently came across an August 2008 article in BP’s magazine Frontiers in which the company boasts of its cutting-edge technological abilities to measure oil flow.

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For more than 6 weeks, many residents of the Gulf Coast have become impromptu BP employees, cleaning up a toxic oil spill that threatens to ruin their communities and their livelihoods. Because most of the cleanup workers are not intimately familiar with the dangers of crude oil, the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has created a safety guide and fact sheet, which it is distributing by the thousands to workers throughout the Gulf Coast.

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BP’s Gulf of Mexico oil spill has been compared to the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska’s Prince William Sound ever since the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded and sank to the bottom in April. Additionally, BP’s cleanup and containment efforts in the Gulf have invited comparisons to the botched cleanup efforts in Alaska 20 years ago, which, as it turns out, weren’t managed by Exxon at all, but by BP.

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