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Politics : President Barack Obama -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (78785)	6/24/2010 6:28:21 PM
From: tejek	Respond to of 149317

Louisiana's unified voice against drilling ban State's biggest industry gets support from all corners, including fishermen By Russ Britt, MarketWatch GRAND ISLE, La. (MarketWatch) -- The BP oil spill has fouled the waters and devastated the fishing community on this island at the very tip of Louisiana, but it's hard to find anyone here who favors a moratorium on deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. Oil companies and fishing vessels have peacefully co-existed in the Gulf for decades. And even though the spill threatens the livelihoods of most Grand Isle residents, it seems few -- if any -- favor pulling the plug on what is the state's biggest source of revenue. "It will trickle down; the economy will get even worse," said Perry Clement, a local who serves as a deck hand on several fishing boats, and is struggling for income. "It's the delicate balance we have, with the oil and the fishing." Dean Blanchard has lost a lot more, and yet he feels the same way. His Dean Blanchard Seafood Co. is the region's biggest shrimper. This year was supposed to be a bonanza, hauling in $100 million in product, he says. Now, Blanchard may have to start fishing off Costa Rica in order to maintain his business. But he nixes the idea of a moratorium on drilling. "We've been living together a long, long time," Blanchard said of the oil drillers. "They closed the wrong thing down. They should have closed the government down." Indeed, it's hard to find anyone in the state of Louisiana that favors President Barack Obama's plans to put a cap on deepwater drilling in an attempt to deal with safety issues arising from the BP spill. Not even the industry most damaged by it, fishing, is in favor of the ban. While the state's fishermen have provided the nation with a third of its seafood and kept New Orleans' renowned restaurants stocked with plenty of product, Louisiana and its offshore fields lead domestic oil production and the industry is the state's biggest job generator. It's also put many a patron at the table in those restaurants, locals say. Partner, not polluter Fishermen here don't look at the oil industry as a potential polluter. They look at it as a partner. The rigs in the Gulf are not eyesores to them; instead the subsea structures on which they rest act as artificial reefs that are potentially rich with products they can sell. Hundreds of offshore platforms and rigs in the waters off Louisiana provide the state with 30% of its gross domestic product, says Michael Hecht, president of the trade group Greater New Orleans Inc. Each deep-water rig employs roughly 300 people averaging nearly $100,000 a year in income. With roughly four other workers directly supporting each rig worker, that translates to 22,000 jobs that could be lost with the ban. The loss of the large income of these workers is expected to create a huge ripple effect throughout Louisiana. Hecht and other civic leaders, including Louisiana Democratic U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu, have been pleading with the Obama administration to rethink the moratorium. They say the BP spill is an anomaly, as drillers have been operating in deep water for more than two decades without major problems. This week, U.S. District Court Judge Martin Feldman, who presides in New Orleans, ordered that the drilling ban be lifted. But the Obama administration has vowed to appeal, and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar has said he may issue another, modified drilling ban that addresses Feldman's concerns. The plan to keep a lid on deepwater drilling could be fatal for numerous companies and an economy that's just getting revitalized five years after Hurricane Katrina swept through the region and flooded three-fourths of New Orleans. Katrina added jobs, spill takes away Hecht and others say that Katrina's economic impact ended up being positive; the region added jobs in construction and reformulated its way of doing business. The rebuilding effort helped the area ride out the 2009 recession better than any other area, as New Orleans' unemployment remained at a low 3%. The spill, and the subsequent impact on fishing and the oil business, will kill jobs, Hecht says. While it could easily go longer, even if the ban lasts exactly six months, it will take another 12 to 18 months for drilling to get back into full swing. "You're talking about impoverishing Louisiana," he said. "It's an extremely inelegant solution to a complicated problem." marketwatch.com

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (78785)	6/25/2010 3:05:01 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 149317

BP’s Demise Would Threaten U.S. Energy Security By Stanley Reed June 24 (Bloomberg) -- Oil spill aside, U.S. energy security will suffer if BP Plc goes under or is significantly reduced in size. With public anger off the charts over BP’s role in the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster, there’s not much sympathy about the financial burden the London-based company faces from future legal claims and cleanup costs. BP says it’s considering asset sales to help cover the cost of a $20 billion escrow fund President Barack Obama demanded the oil producer set up to handle U.S. claims. The company’s survival may also be in doubt if the financial hit from the Deepwater Horizon rig explosion approaches $100 billion, as some analysts suggest is possible. Such a scenario would have implications for U.S. energy policy at home and abroad -- and mostly bad ones, Bloomberg Businessweek reports in its June 28 issue. Obama recognized as much when he said on June 16 that “BP is a strong and viable company, and it is in all of our interests that it remain so.” The company’s demise would be disruptive to the American oil industry, given that BP is the largest oil and gas producer in the U.S., with about 1 million barrels per day of production. Some 7,000 of BP’s 23,000 U.S. employees work in the Houston area, many in a suburban office park just off the Katy Freeway. ‘Highly Compensated’ From there the company runs its Gulf of Mexico offshore operations with a phalanx of engineers, geologists, and computer scientists. “These are highly compensated people,” says J. Robinson West, chairman of Washington-based consultants PFC Energy. Until the Deepwater Horizon accident, BP’s Gulf activities were viewed by the U.S. government as a big plus for U.S. energy security interests. Since the mid-1990s, the British company has been the leader in Gulf exploration, pushing into deeper water and drilling farther into the earth. Its projects were key to the 7 percent growth in production the U.S. achieved last year, reversing an 18-year decline in output. BP’s skill at negotiating access to new energy resources, especially in strategically important regions, has also served U.S. interests. The company opened up Azerbaijan, a major producer in the Caspian Sea region, for oil development. It has developed two oil and gas fields there, as well as the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan crude oil pipeline through Turkey that opened in 2004 and offers a counterweight to Russian dominance in the region. Libya, Iraq In 2007, BP signed an agreement with the investment arm of the Libyan government to explore for gas along an offshore tract the size of Belgium. BP’s most daring move has been last year’s $20 billion deal in Iraq to add almost 2 million barrels per day in production to the country’s prized oil field in Rumaila. That attracted deals with other companies, greatly improving Iraq’s economic prospects. “BP was bold in going in first and opening up the way for the rest of them,” says Toby Dodge, an Iraq scholar at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. BP is starting to identify the $10 billion or more in assets it might sell to fund the costs of the Gulf spill, says Managing Director Robert Dudley, who has taken over day-to-day oversight of the cleanup from Chief Executive Officer Tony Hayward. “We have to sharpen the portfolio to pace ourselves for what has happened in the U.S.,” Dudley says. Bankruptcy Risk A person familiar with BP’s investment plans says it may need to raise as much as $50 billion to cover costs related to the disaster. Oppenheimer & Co. oil analyst Fadel Gheit thinks BP could end up in bankruptcy if costs exceed $100 billion, a possibility if partners in the stricken well, such as Anadarko Petroleum Corp., manage to pin full legal responsibility for the oil spill on the U.K.-based producer. If so, BP may have to part with some prized assets, and Chinese and Russian oil companies less sympathetic to U.S. interests could step in as buyers and change the geopolitics of the oil industry. “Companies will be interested in buying assets in Azerbaijan, Angola, Brazil, and potentially also Norway,” says Gudmund Halle Isfeldt, an analyst at DnB Nor ASA in Oslo, Norway’s largest bank. To contact the reporter on this story: Stanley Reed in London at sreed13@bloomberg.net Last Updated: June 24, 2010 00:01 EDT