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.

Read the rest of this entry »

A new lawsuit filed Tuesday in a Washington D.C. federal court challenges the federal government’s decision to accept bids from oil and gas corporations for new drilling leases in the Gulf of Mexico. According to the Center for Biological Diversity, the complaint, brought by a group of conservation organizations, asserts the federal government “dismissed the lessons learned during the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster from its assessment of oil-spill risk for the Gulf of Mexico, the possible size of an oil spill, and resulting damage — all considerations that could help prevent or mitigate a future spill.”

Read the rest of this entry »

She married into a family of scheming oil barons on the television series Dallas, but in real life Victoria Principal is calling for tougher oil drilling regulations while supporting organizations working to prevent another environmental catastrophe like BP’s Gulf oil spill from occurring again. The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and Oceana, two groups that oppose an expansion of offshore oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico and the Arctic, recently announced that Ms. Principal made “extremely generous six-figure donations” to their organizations.

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been little more than a year since BP successfully plugged its blown-out Macondo well, and the effects of that catastrophic oil spill still abound on the Gulf Coast and deep beneath the surface. Years or even decades may pass before scientists finally get a handle on the spill’s impact, but that unfortunate mystery hasn’t stopped BP from acquiring the right to drill another exploratory well in the Gulf much like the Macondo well, only deeper.

Read the rest of this entry »

Michael Bromwich, the nation’s head oil and gas drilling regulator, lashed out at the oil industry Tuesday for spreading what he calls politically motivated lies and distortions about the federal government’s speed in approving new offshore drilling permits in the Gulf of Mexico.

Read the rest of this entry »

A year after BP sealed its blown-out Macondo well, stopping the oil geyser that raged out of control in the Gulf of Mexico for months, a scientist who has been monitoring the seabed around the well says there has been “no improvement at all” to the quality of life in the contaminated region.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

BP’s oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico was successfully capped a year ago, but hundreds of miles of Gulf coast beaches and marshlands are still contaminated by oil from the blown-out Macondo well. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), oil ranging in form from sticky crude to a light sheen covers about 491 miles of Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, and Mississippi coastline. Approximately 1,100 miles of coast have been covered with oil since BP’s Deepwater Horizon platform exploded April 20, 2010.

Read the rest of this entry »

Weatherford U.S. LP, a Swiss oilfield service company that designed parts of BP’s blown-out Macondo well, has agreed to pay BP $75 million to preclude any future claims between the companies. The agreement also stipulates that BP will cover Weatherford for economic and environmental oil-spill damages should the company be named in lawsuits brought by plaintiffs harmed by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

Read the rest of this entry »

The oily substance that has been spotted floating off the Louisiana coastline and washing up onto beaches is indeed oil, not silt from a dredging operation at the mouth of the Mississippi River as the U.S. Coast Guard said it likely was. Tests conducted over the weekend confirmed that the substance is actually Louisiana sweet crude.

Read the rest of this entry »