If you live in the Parkway, you probably have seen the new BP station at the corner of Centre Street and Belgrade Ave. The station was formerly a Getty station, and then a Lukoil station, but as a result of recent transactions, BP is has rebranded it with the upbeat, jolly green BP logo.
I encourage my neighbors to take their business elsewhere–the Hess station right across the street is friendly, and you can’t buy Hess trucks at Christmastime anywhere else! And more to the point, the best way we can tell BP what we think of it is to buy gas elsewhere.
TedF
Please share widely!
…that all this action does is hurt your neighborhood gas station and the people who work there, with negligible impact on the BP corporation?
That reminds me of the notion from a while back that it was unpatriotic to buy a foreign-made car. Unpatriotic! I didn’t owe it to Ford’s workers to keep Ford in business so that they would have jobs. Ford owed it to Ford’s workers to make cars that people wanted to buy. Similarly, I don’t owe it to BP’s workers to buy from BP so as to save their jobs. BP owes it to its workers not to befoul the ocean, so that its brand will have positive associations rather than associations with environmental catastrophe, and people will be willing to buy its products.
<
p>Anyway, assuming (as I think is the case) that all that has changed at the station is the logo, the full service (the station doesn’t have self-serve, unless something has changed recently) has never been very good in my opinion.
<
p>TedF
You assume that “your neighborhood gas station” is not wholly-owned by BP. I do not know if it is, nor do I know that it isn’t. If it is, then denying it your business will certainly have some small impact on the oil giant. Since even a franchisee sends some of his profit to the big guys, not buying gas at that station will still have a tiny effect on BP. If enough people do the same, the bastards will notice.
The other stations nearby are also neighborhood gas stations with people who work there. Transferring your business from one local place to another might contribute to one local place thriving at the expense of another doing poorly, but what’s wrong with that? If there aren’t enough customers nearby for both places to succeed, then one would’ve failed anyway; if there are more customers than enough customers for two places, then if one fails another will take its place (or an existing one will expand and hire).
operated by immigrants from either Pakistan or India. I don’t go there much, so I haven’t learned much about them. As selectman, however, I do approve and sign their license.
And if you DO succeed in driving BP into bankruptcy (BP-America is a seperate division, IIRC) who will pay for the fishermen’s livelihood and other damages?
how on Earth do we get shareholder attention of all other companies so that they ensure that this kind of nonsense doesn’t happen again?
Yesterday on Meet the Press, David Gregory brought out that there are about 5,000 deep water wells in Gulf, and they have never failed before, as the systems have multiple redundancies.
<
p>We CAN bankrupt all the deep water oil comapnies should they fail, of course. I will miss chatting with you on the internet once electricity rationing begins due to the energy shortage.
<
p>(BUILD CAPE WIND!!!)
Never failed? Wrong. This is the first deep water catastrophic failure, but we’ve had offshore failures. More to the point, a failure rate of 1:5000 is frankly too high given the immense damage a single failure causes. I’ve heard that in other parts of the world, the company must drill two access points, so in case something like this happens they can depressurize with the other access point — but I have no idea how this works, nor am I particularly interested in learning.
<
p>As for “miss chatting with me” — about 1.5% of our electricity comes from oil. Furthermore, a relatively small percentage of our oil comes from deep water rigs. If we banned all deep water drilling tomorrow, it would have a relatively small impact on oil prices and almost no impact on electricity — so thanks for playing on that one.
<
p>
<
p>You’ve dodged the question. What policies can we implement so that private companies become more risk averse on major catastrophic failures? I’m not referring merely to offshore oil drilling — I’m referring to all companies.
<
p>So far as I can tell, there are two techniques:
1. Assess huge cost to the management structure. I’m not talking fines, I’m talking long jail sentences to anybody in the management team who didn’t explicitly ensure that the company was going out of it’s way to be safe. This is hard to implement, and hard to prove.
2. Whack the shareholders, hard. You can’t take more than the value of the company (that’s the whole point of the limited liability of shareholders), but you can take the entire value of the shares from the holders. What good does that do? It provides the shareholders with an awful lot of incentive to make sure that their company manages catastrophic risk far better than they’re doing now.
<
p>
<
p>So please, PP, no hockeypucks about how the Internetz will failz if we don’t have offshore drilling, and maybe consider answering my question: how do we ensure that we don’t have to bail out companies who fail catastrophically in environmental areas?
By not using the resource in the first place. Eschew electricity, transportation and modern convenience in general. Good luck with that.
<
p>And again, MTP was specifically talking about this deep water failure. The techniques used – top hat, top fill (top drawer?) – are what have been used on the other off-shore spills you allude to, and they HAVE worked. The deep water is the variable that wasn’t taken into account.
<
p>Do you advocate shutting down the other 4,999 deep water wells immediately and unilaterally?
Except sometimes, they haven’t. The Rachel Maddow piece is about a previous Gulf blowout in which they tried all these techniques, and they DIDN’T work. What did work? A couple of relief wells. BP says they will have a relief well done in August.
<
p>You keep claiming deep-water drilling has a swell safety record. For the record, the 4,000 some-odd wells in the Gulf are not all deep water wells. That Ixtoc well was in only 150 feet of water, and they couldn’t fix it for nine months. If the BP well keeps vomiting oil at the current rate until August, even if the deep-water drilling safety record were perfect up until this blowout, it will not have been worth it.
<
p>BP had no plan for dealing with a blowout of this well. The papers they filed with MMS talk about walruses and seals as being potentially affected by a spill. They apparently copied a plan from somewhere in the Arctic, and never marshalled any of the equipment required to deal with a blowout.
<
p>Canada does not require that a relief well be drilled along with every ocean well. It does require that the drillers show that they are prepared to drill one if necessary. They probably don’t accept any plans that include saving flamingos.
I’m not referring specifically about energy companies. I’m referring to each and every corporation.
<
p>How do we as a society ensure that corporations do their damnedest to make sure that catastrophes — environmental or otherwise — simply don’t happen because the company won’t engage in behavior that risky.
<
p>I can only come up with two ways:
* whack the management hard in cases of error — long prison terms. Tough to prove and prosecute.
* whack the shareholders hard in cases of error — massive fines, reverse stock splits, whatever.
<
p>If we don’t punish a company who engaged in risky behavior without taking as many precautions as necessary, then we’re sure to have to clean up catastrophe after catastrophe.
<
p>
<
p>You won’t answer my question, but I’ll answer yours:
<
p>
<
p>Yip. We’ll bring them back online after a complete, systematic review of both (a) the safety history of that particular well, subject to (b) the immediate implementation of any additional safety measures mandated, following a review of what is required by other nations who have expertise and a better safety record (Norway comes to mind). Oh, and (c) a much higher per barrel fee to pay for future mistakes, until we’ve got a much higher degree of certainty that the worst case disaster imaginable can be cleaned up with the money already in escrow/fund.
<
p>Given that the currently allowed offshore locations account for only about 1/6th of total American proven + inferred reserves, we could shut it all down and hardly suffer — only 25% of the oil we use comes from America, so losing 1/6th of that would result in a reduction of supply by only 4%. Careful here — I didn’t write that 1/6th of America’s supply in 2009 came from off-shore; I couldn’t find those numbers easily, so I had to use a long term view: total reserves. One could argue that the 4% is an overstatement since the share of oil consumed by America recovered from American wells is expected to continue to decline from 25% to something less, year after year.
<
p>Bottom line: we don’t need offshore drilling. We just don’t. It makes oil a bit cheaper, but only a bit. The cleanup every 2 decades is getting a bit tiresome methinks, and just not worth it.
From what little I understand of the offshore-well business, the period of greatest risk (barring hurricanes and earthquakes) is during the drilling and cementing phases. It was during cementing that the BP and Ixtoc wells blew out. Wells that are already producing oil are relatively safe. If I’m right about that, it’s not necessary to shut down all the wells in the Gulf; just the ones that are in the dangerous phase. All the wells should be inspected to make sure that they and their paperwork are in order, but most of them are probably OK.
my comments also presume that there’s no risk in “shutting down” existing wells, a presumption on my part based in no part by science or engineering.
<
p>Obviously, this should be driven by sound engineering and sound policy — but I’m not willing to brush off pre-existing risk simply because it’s pre-existing… and, frankly, they’re not producing very much oil for our economy anyway.
… they haven’t worked at this depth. Also my recollection that others (either Canada or UK or both) require relief wells before any production can start.
Canada does not require that a relief well be drilled at the same time as the main well; it requires that the driller be prepared to drill a relief well in the same drilling season (before ice in Canadian waters stops all drilling) as the main well.
<
p>I can’t find any UK requirement for relief wells.
New logo, new name, massive marketing campaign, etc.