A US jury ordered oil giant Exxon Mobil to pay $236 million (£154m) to the state of New Hampshire on Tuesday to clean up groundwater contamination from fuel additive MTBE.
Jurors sat through nearly three months of testimony in the longest trial in New Hampshire history.
They said Exxon had been negligent in adding MTBE to petrol, saying it was a defective product.
And they found the company liable for failing to warn distributors and consumers about its contaminating characteristics.
The state says that more than 600 wells in New Hampshire are known to be contaminated with MTBE and an expert witness estimated the number could exceed 5,000.
The jury was shown exhibits dating back to 1984 in which Exxon researchers warned against the additive.
Industry analyst Fadel Gheit said the fine amounted to roughly two days of profit for the oil behemoth – which plans to appeal against the verdict.
MAYFLOWER, Ark. (AP) — The environmental impacts of an oil spill in central Arkansas began to come into focus Monday as officials said a couple of dead ducks and 10 live oily birds were found after an ExxonMobil Corp. pipeline ruptured last week.
“I’m an animal lover, a wildlife lover, as probably most of the people here are,” Faulkner County Judge Allen Dodson told reporters. “We don’t like to see that. No one does.”
Officials are urging people in Mayflower, a small city about 20 miles northwest of Little Rock, not to touch any injured or oiled animals as crews clean up Friday’s spill.
About 12,000 barrels of oil and water have been recovered since ExxonMobil’s Pegasus pipeline sprung a leak, spewing oil onto lawns and roadways and nearly fouling a nearby lake.
Dodson said he expects a few more oily birds to turn up in the coming days. …
Still, the air smells like oil, and area residents say it has for days.
“We live five miles out in the country and we’ve had the smell out there,” Karen Lewis, 54, said outside a local grocery store. Its parking lot, like much of this small city, is teeming with cleanup crews and their trucks.
Meanwhile, in the neighborhood where the pipeline burst, workers in yellow suits waded in an oil-soaked lawn Monday as they tried to clean up part of the area where the spill began.
The pipeline that ruptured dates back to the 1940s, according to ExxonMobil, and is part of the Pegasus pipeline that carries crude oil from the Midwest to refineries in the Gulf of Mexico.
Exxon spokesman Charlie Engelmann said the oil is conventionally produced Canadian heavy crude.
“Crude oil is crude oil,” Dodson said. “None of it is real good to touch.”
Riki Ott, marine toxicologist and Exxon Valdez survivor, talks to Greenopolis TV about the effects of air pollution due to oil spills. Riki says based on air monitoring conducted by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in a Louisiana coastal community, findings show that airborne levels of toxic chemicals like hydrogen sulfide, and volatile organic compounds, now far exceed safety standards for human exposure currently in those areas.
Did ExxonMobil Pay Torturers? The oil giant has long said it has no responsibility for atrocities committed by the government soldiers it hired to protect its plant in Indonesia. Now the issue could be headed to the Supreme Court: here.
Posted By Steve LeVine Sunday, July 1, 2012 – 11:08 AM Share
ExxonMobil confirms that it has filed to bid on a group of Afghanistan oilfields containing an estimated 1 billion barrels of oil and gas, an instant validation of one of the riskiest resource plays on the planet. If the company’s application proceeds, it could set up a battle of colossals, since the state-owned China National Petroleum Corp. and India’s ONGC have also filed to bid, I have been told.
The tender deadline was yesterday to file an expression of interest. Company spokesman Alan Jeffers told me that the filing is among Exxon’s global search for new hydrocarbon opportunities. The filings are to be made official after a government meeting Wednesday at which applications will be vetted.
The Exxon filing is surprising because until now the Afghan natural resource play, while rich, has been perceived as highly speculative, a place for the most daring wildcatters, in addition to regional state-owned companies such as CNPC, which won the first Afghan oil tender last year. The reason is both security — no one knows whether a 30- 40-year project would endure since Afghanistan has been at almost constant war for more than three decades — and the lack of infrastructure. Namely, how do you get the oil and gas to the market? Majors of the scale of Exxon rarely pursue such ventures, preferring for wildcatters to prove them out, then seek to buy in with their deep pockets.
Potential for a mining boom splits factions in Afghanistan: here.
Afghanistan aid conference signals indefinite foreign occupation: here.
Dozens of men and women took to the streets of Kabul today to protest against the recent public murder of an Afghan woman accused of adultery whose killing was captured on video: here.
Afghan authorities are investigating former Afghan Surgeon General Zia Yaftali after reports of patient abuse at a U.S.-backed military hospital in Kabul, a senior Pentagon official said Tuesday: here.
An Afghan prison chief was jailed for 16 years on Tuesday for raping a teenage girl, a rare show of justice for women in a country where they are suffering increased violence and offered scant protection from the law: here.
Afghan Women’s Shelters, A Lifeline For Many, Face Uncertain Future: here.
The ship, which was involved in one of the worst US oil spills and is now known as the Oriental Nicety, entered Indian waters last week and was headed for Gujarat, when the Supreme Court gave its order.
It was bought recently by an Indian shipbreaking firm and was being taken to the coastal town of Alang, the hub of the country’s shipbreaking industry, for dismantling.
After the court’s orders, Gujarat maritime authorities and the state’s pollution control authorities withdrew the permission they had granted to the company to anchor the ship.
The tanker has had five name changes since the spill, with ownership changing repeatedly, apparently to keep the ship in use while distancing it from the disaster.
The Indian court cited a UN convention that calls for decontamination in a ship’s country of export.
India has one of the world’s largest ship-breaking industries and workers are expected to process the ship to salvage metal parts.
Exxon Makes $104 Million In Profit Per Day So Far In 2012, While Americans Are Stuck With A Higher Gas Bill
Apr 26, 2012 at 10:08 am
Last year, ExxonMobil, one of the world’s most profitable companies, earned $1,300 in profits per second. As consumers paid record-high springtime gas prices, Exxon posted first quarter profits of $9.45 billion.
Oil bosses rake in record profits as US economy stalls
29 April 2011
Exxon-Mobil, the world’s biggest and most profitable corporation, raked in a staggering $10.7 billion in profits during the first quarter of 2011, the company reported Thursday. The figure was a 69 percent increase over the same quarter last year, and the highest quarterly profit since 2008, the last time oil prices topped $100 a barrel.
The company’s total revenues hit $114 billion in the first quarter, making it likely that in 2011 it will break its 2008 record of $458 billion, and could become the first oil company to reach half a trillion dollars in revenue. Exxon-Mobil’s revenues exceed the Gross Domestic Product of all but 18 of the 194 countries listed by the World Bank.
The profit figure for Exxon-Mobil was only the most obscene of a flood of multi-billion-dollar earnings reports from the major oil companies. Shell’s profits rose 22 percent to $6.9 billion, while the profits of ConocoPhillips rose 44 percent to $3 billion.
One year after the Gulf oil disaster, BP posted a first-quarter profit of $7.1 billion, an increase of 17 percent. Occidental Petroleum saw its profits soar 46 percent to $1.55 billion in the first quarter, while Apache Corporation netted $1.1 billion, an increase of 51 percent.
Contrary to the free-market mythology embraced by the Obama administration, the Democratic and Republican parties, and the corporate-controlled American media, the record oil profits were not a reward for superior performance in the production of petroleum and its derivatives.
Nearly all the major oil companies actually produced and sold less oil and gas in the first three months of 2011 than in previous quarters, but they charged far higher prices. Exxon-Mobil was the only major firm reporting Thursday whose output actually rose, largely because of its acquisition of the natural gas producer XTO.
Shell’s oil and gas output was down 3 percent, output by ConocoPhillips was down 7 percent and BP output down 11 percent. Apache’s production remained flat: its 24 percent increase in revenues exactly matched the 24 percent increase in crude oil prices during the same period.
The price of crude oil has risen steadily since the beginning of the year, spurred on by increasing demand from China and other Asian countries, and by the mounting conflicts in the Middle East, which have cut off oil exports from Libya entirely, and sporadically threatened output at smaller suppliers, including Egypt, Sudan and the Persian Gulf sheikdoms.
An additional factor is the declining value of the dollar, since most oil market transactions are conducted in the US currency. The value of the US currency fell 68 percent during the eight years of the Bush administration. Since Obama took office less than two and a half years ago, it has fallen a further 43 percent. The dollar prices of many commodities are soaring as a result: gold is over $1,500 an ounce, silver nearly $48 an ounce, and oil topping $120 a barrel in the spot market.
Speculation in the oil futures markets is a colossal contributing factor in this price run-up, although one largely downplayed by the US government and media. One recent analysis by the investment bank Goldman Sachs—which knows something about manipulating markets—estimated that speculative bidding had pushed the price of a barrel of oil to a point $27 above its “natural” market price.
With world oil production nearly 90 million barrels a day, this speculators’ “tax” would amount to $2.4 billion a day skimmed off by the financial swindlers, or a staggering $876 billion a year. The figure is a useful one to recall, the next time right-wing advocates of austerity budgets claim that there is “no money” to meet social needs like education, healthcare and pensions.
In the United States, the rapid rise in the price of gasoline, now over $4 a gallon in many areas, acts as an enormous drag on the economy, particularly in slowing down consumer spending. The Energy Information Agency said this week that gas prices across the country averaged $3.88 a gallon, up 81 cents a gallon since the year began.
Tens of millions of workers have no alternative but to drive long distances to their jobs, given the size of the country and the absence of public transportation. The additional money they must spend on gasoline is not available to provide other necessities for their families.
According to one report, “Rising gas prices are draining most of the extra money that Americans are receiving this year from a Social Security payroll tax cut. That’s a major reason why consumer spending cooled off in the January-March quarter. Consumers boosted spending at a 2.7 percent pace, down from the previous quarter’s 4 percent pace and the weakest since last summer.”
USA: Rep. Tim Scott (R-SC) defends giving billions in tax subsidies to Exxon: “Fair is a relative word”: here.
USA: Dem Senators Defend Big Oil Against Own Party: here.
The dirty energy money behind the Senate move to dismantle the EPA: here.
Life is so hard for Oil bigwigs. How ever will they make it without their oil subsidies? Here.
It’s not just [US] Republicans who flip-flop on climate change or who simply don’t want to talk about it: here.
Mark Provost | Why the Rich Love High Unemployment. Mark Provost, Truthout: “Christina Romer, former member of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors, accuses the administration of ‘shamefully ignoring’ the unemployed. Paul Krugman echoes her concerns, observing that Washington has lost interest in ‘the forgotten millions.’ America’s unemployed have been ignored and forgotten, but they are far from superfluous. Over the last two years, out-of-work Americans have played a critical role in helping the richest one percent recover trillions in financial wealth”: here.
Britain: While the big oil companies and the government collude to get more offshore oil rigs up and running, scientists are busy warning us of the dangers to human health and wellbeing of the pollution that inevitably comes with offshore drilling: here.
A controversial new Middle East oil law could lead to the “disintegration” of Iraq as a nation state. Two of the region’s most respected commentators, including the co-author of the new Iraq Oil Law and a former oil minister, have each expressed their “gravest concern” at what they believe could happen within their country if the law is approved in its current form. The claims are made in a hard hitting documentary on Aljazeera International’s People & Power investigative current affairs series, presented by Samah El-Shahat.
In two separate cases, oil giant ExxonMobil and PacificCorp, a major electric utility, recently pleaded guilty to killing eagles and other migratory birds, and will pay fines that will be used to support a wildlife rehabilitation center in Colorado, and to fund raptor research and conservation projects in Wyoming, Utah, Idaho, and Montana: here.
Exxon oil deal linked to looming civil war in Iraq: here.
Exxon Mobil Corporation paid more than $1 billion to settle state and federal claims for environmental damages. The company went to trial in 1994, however, against a class action suit by over 32,000 individuals and small businesses devastated by the accident, predominantly commercial fishermen, native Alaskans and local landowners, who claimed that Exxon’s reckless conduct caused the accident.
Exxon conceded fault, and the compensatory damages for the class were set at $507.5 million. The trial then proceeded on the issue of punitive damages only.
The evidence showed that on March 23, 1989, the tanker left port carrying 53 million barrels of crude oil from the Trans-Alaska pipeline. Its captain, Joseph Hazlewood, had recently completed an alcohol rehabilitation program. His superiors knew about Hazlewood’s problem, learned that he had relapsed recently, and even drank with him.
Witnesses testified that before leaving port Hazlewood consumed five double-vodka drinks, an amount that would have rendered any non-alcoholic unconscious. When tested by the Coast Guard 11 hours after the accident Hazlewood still had a blood-alcohol level of .061, meaning that during the wreck his level was about three times the legal limit for driving a car.
As the ship approached a well-known reef, Hazlewood set the autopilot, increased speed and turned the ship over to a subordinate unlicensed to perform the maneuver necessary to avoid running aground. The Exxon Valdez hit the reef, spilling crude oil into Prince William Sound. Hazlewood then tried to “rock” the ship free, a procedure that spewed more oil and risked killing the crew.
The result was the largest oil spill in US history: 11 million gallons covering 11,000 square miles, including 1,300 miles of pristine shoreline. The spill devastated the local economy as well as the environment. Estimated losses in the sport fishing industry alone were almost $600 million over the two years following the accident. Within days an estimated 250,000 seabirds perished, along with thousands of otters and seals. Despite billions of dollars in cleanup, the environmental effects of the spill still linger. Much of the oil seeped below the surface of affected beaches, decaying at a rate of about three to four percent per year. Animals that dig in the sand for their food continue to be contaminated.
After hearing this evidence, the jury awarded the 32,000 plaintiffs a total of $5 billion in punitive damages. In 2007 the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit reduced the amount to $2.5 billion. The Supreme Court decision reduces the award to $507.5 million, effectively fashioning a rule under federal maritime law that limits punitive damages to the amount of compensatory damages awarded, a so-called one-to-one ratio.
The punitive award must be viewed in light of Exxon Mobil’s enormous profits. The jury’s original $5 billion award amounts to less than the company’s profits for 1990 alone.
