Why The Huge Spike in Oil Prices? “Peak Oil” or Wall Street Speculation?

By F. WILLIAM ENGDAHL | GLOBAL RESEARCH | MARCH 19, 2012

Since around October last year, the price of crude oil on world futures markets has exploded. Different people have different explanations. The most common one is the belief in financial markets that a war between either Israel and Iran or the USA and Iran or all three is imminent. Another camp argues that the price is rising unavoidably because the world has passed what they call “Peak Oil”—the point on an imaginary Gaussian Bell Curve (see graph above) at which half of all world known oil reserves have been depleted and the remaining oil will decline in quantity at an accelerating pace with rising price.

 Both the war danger and peak oil explanations are off base. As in the astronomic price run-up in the Summer of 2008 when oil in futures markets briefly hit $147 a barrel, oil today is rising because of the speculative pressure on oil futures markets from hedge funds and major banks such as Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase and most notably, Goldman Sachs, the bank always present when there are big bucks to be won for little effort betting on a sure thing. They’re getting a generous assist from the US Government agency entrusted with regulating financial derivatives, the Commodity Futures Trading Corporation (CFTC).

Source: oilnergy.com

Since the beginning of October 2011, some six months ago, the price of Brent Crude Oil Futures on the ICE Futures exchange has risen from just below $100 a barrel to over $126 per barrel, a rise of more than 25%. Back in 2009 oil was $30.

 Yet demand for crude oil worldwide is not rising, but rather is declining in the same period. The International Energy Agency (IEA) reports that the world oil supply rose by 1.3 million barrels a day in the last three months of 2011 while world demand increased by just over half that during that same time period.Gasoline usage is down in the US by 8%, Europe by 22% and even in China. Recession across much of the European Union, a deepening recession/depression in the United States and slowdown in Japan have reduced global oil demand while new discoveries are coming online daily and countries like Iraq are increasing supply after years of war. A brief spike in China’s oil purchases in January and February had to do with a decision last December to build their Strategic Petroleum Reserve and is expected to return to more normal import levels by the end of this month.

 Why then the huge spike in oil prices?

 Playing with ‘paper oil’

 A brief look at how today’s “paper oil” markets function is useful. Since Goldman Sachs bought J. Aron & Co., a savvy commodities trader in the 1980’s, trading in crude oil has gone from a domain of buyers and sellers of spot or physical oil to a market where unregulated speculation in oil futures, bets on a price of a given crude on a specific future date, usually in 30 or 60 or 90 days, and not actual supply-demand of physical oil determine daily oil prices.

 In recent years, a Wall Street-friendly (and Wall Street financed) US Congress has passed several laws to help the banks that were interested in trading oil futures, among them one that allowed the bankrupt Enron to get away with a financial ponzi scheme worth billions in 2001 before it went bankrupt.

 The Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 (CFMA) was drafted by the man who today is President Obama’s Treasury Secretary, Tim Geithner. The CFMA in effect gave over-the-counter (between financial institutions) derivatives trading in energy futures free reign, absent any US Government supervision, as a result of the financially influential lobbying pressure of the Wall Street banks. Oil and other energy products were exempt under what came to be called the “Enron Loophole.”

 In 2008 during a popular outrage against Wall Street banks for causing the financial crisis, Congress finally passed a law over the veto of President George Bush to “close the Enron Loophole.” And as of January 2011, under the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform act, the CFTC was given authority to impose position caps on oil traders beginning in January 2011.

 Curiously, these limits have not yet been implemented by the CFTC. In a recent interview Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont stated that the CFTC doesn’t “have the will” to enact these limits and “needs to obey the law.” He adds, “What we need to do is…limit the amount of oil any one company can control on the oil futures market. The function of these speculators is not to use oil but to make profits from speculation, drive prices up and sell.”1 While he has made noises of trying to close the loopholes, CFTC Chairman Gary Gensler has yet to do so. Notably,Gensler is a former executive of, you guessed, Goldman Sachs. The enforcement by the CFTC remains non-existent.

 The role of key banks along with oil majors such as BP in manipulating a new oil price bubble since last Autumn, one detached from the physical reality of supply-demand calculations of real oil barrels, is being noted by a number of sources.

 A ‘gambling casino…’

 Current estimates are that speculators, that is futures traders such as banks and hedge funds who have no intent of taking physical delivery but only of turning a paper profit, today control some 80 percent of the energy futures market, up from 30 percent a decade ago. CFTC Chair Gary Gensler, perhaps to maintain a patina of credibility while his agency ignored the legal mandate of Congress, declared last year in reference to oil markets that “huge inflows of speculative money create a self-fulfilling prophecy that drives up commodity prices.” 2 In early March, Kuwaiti Oil Minister Minister Hani Hussein said in an interview broadcast on state television, “Under the supply and demand theory, oil prices today are not justified.”3

 Michael Greenberger, professor at the University of Maryland School of Law and a former CFTC regulator who has tried to draw public attention to the consequences of the US Government’s decisions to allow unbridled speculation and manipulation of energy prices by big banks and funds, recently noted, “There are 50 studies showing that speculation adds an incredible premium to the price of oil, but somehow that hasn’t seeped into the conventional wisdom,” Greenberger said. “Once you have the market dominated by speculators, what you really have is a gambling casino.” 4

 The result of a permissive US Government regulation of oil markets has created the ideal conditions whereby a handful of strategic banks and financial institutions, interestingly the same ones dominating world trade in oil derivatives and the same ones who own the shares of the major oil trading exchange in London, ICE Futures, are able to manipulate huge short-term swings in the price we pay for oil or gasoline or countless other petroleum-based products.

 We are in the midst of one of those swings now, one made worse by the Israeli saber-rattling rhetoric over Iran’s nuclear program. Let me go on record stating categorically my firm conviction that Israel will not engage in a direct war against Iran nor will Washington. But the effect of the war rhetoric is to create the ideal backdrop for a massive speculative spike in oil. Some analysts speak of oil at $150 by summer.

 Hillary Clinton just insured that the oil price will continue to ride high for months on fears of a war with Iran by delivering a new ultimatum to Iran on the nuclear issue in talks with Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov, “by year’s end or else…” 5

 Curiously, one of the real drivers of the current oil price bubble is the Obama Administration’s economic sanctions recently imposed on oil transactions of the Central Bank of Iran. By pressuring Japan, South Korea and the EU not to import Iranian oil or face punitive actions, Washington has reportedly forced a huge drop in oil supply from Iran to the world market in recent weeks, giving a turbo boost to the Wall Street derivatives play on oil. In a recent OpEd in the London Financial Times, Ian Bremmer and David Gordon of the Eurasia Group wrote, “… removing too much Iranian oil from the world’s energy supply could cause an oil price spike that would halt the recovery even as it does some financial damage to Iran. For perhaps the first time, sanctions have the potential to be ‘too successful,’ hurting the sanctioners as much as the sanctioned.”

 Iran is shipping 300,000 to 400,000 a barrels a day less than its usual 2.5 million barrels a day, according to Bloomberg. Last week, the US Energy Information Administration said in a report that much of that Iranian oil isn’t being exported because insurers won’t issue policies for the shipments.6

 The issue of unbridled and unregulated oil derivatives speculation by a handful of big banks is not a new issue. A June 2006 US Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations report on “The Role of Market Speculation in rising oil and gas prices,” noted, “…there is substantial evidence supporting the conclusion that the large amount of speculation in the current market has significantly increased prices.”

 The report pointed out that the Commodity Futures Trading Trading Commission had been mandated by Congress to ensure that prices on the futures market reflect the laws of supply and demand rather than manipulative practices or excessive speculation. The US Commodity Exchange Act (CEA) states, “Excessive speculation in any commodity under contracts of sale of such commodity for future delivery . . . causing sudden or unreasonable fluctuations or unwarranted changes in the price of such commodity, is an undue and unnecessary burden on interstate commerce in such commodity.” Further, the CEA directs the CFTC to establish such trading limits “as the Commission finds are necessary to diminish, eliminate, or prevent such burden.”7

 Where is the CFTC now that we need such limits? As Senator Sanders correctly noted, the CFTC appears to ignore the law to the benefit of Goldman Sachs and Wall Street friends who dominate the trade in oil futures.

 The moment that it becomes clear that the Obama Administration has acted to prevent any war with Iran by opening various diplomatic back-channels and that Netanyahu is merely trying to use the war threats to enhance his tactical position to horse trade with an Obama Administration he despises, the price of oil is poised to drop like a stone within days. Until then, the key oil derivatives insiders are laughing all the way to the bank. The effect of the soaring oil prices on fragile world economic growth, especially in countries like China is very negative as well.

Notes:

1 Morgan Korn, Oil Speculators Must Be Stopped and the CFTC “Needs to Obey the Law”: Sen. Bernie Sanders, Daily Ticker, March 7, 2012, accessed in
http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-ticker/oil-speculators-must-stopped-ctfc-needs-obey-law-182903332.html

2 Ibid.

3 UpstreamOnline, Kuwait’s oil minister believes current world oil prices are not justified, adding that the Gulf state’s current production rate will not affect its level of strategic reserves, 12 March 2012, accessed in
http://www.upstreamonline.com/live/article1236944.ece

4 Peter S. Goodman, Behind Gas Price Increases, Obama’s Failure To Crack Down On Speculators, The Huffington Post, March 15, 2012, accessed in
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-s-goodman/gas-price-increase_b_1346035.html

5 Tom Parfitt, US ‘tells Russia to warn Iran of last chance’ , The Telegraph, 14 March 2012, accessed in

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iran/9142688/US-tells-Russia-to-warn-Iran-of-last-chance.html

6 Steve Levine, Obama administration brushes off oil price impact of Iran sanctions, Foreign Policy, March 8, 2012, accessed in
http://oilandglory.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2012/03/08/obama_administration_brushes_off_oil_price_impact_of_iran_sanctions

7 F. William Engdahl, ‘Perhaps 60% of today’s oil price is pure speculation’, Global Research, May 2, 2008, accessed in
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=8878.

Peak Oil no More

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

So there is plenty of oil and gas after all. Prices will tumble along gently until well into the next decade. We are becoming more

The existence of massive abiotic oil reserves around the world has confirmed that Peak Oil is just a lie.

efficient in our use of energy, with 3pc extra savings annually. That is a faster pace than the rising real cost of fuel. Mankind will not run out of fuel for a very long time.

That at least is the story today from the International Energy Agency. Their medium-term outlook for fossil fuel markets is a dazzling contrast with last year’s warnings that a combination of break-neck industrialisation in China and lack of investment in new oil fields (thanks to the credit freeze) would exhaust global spare capacity by 2013.

The IEA said then that we would need “four new Saudi Arabias” within a generation to cope with the rise of China, and there were no such Saudi Arabias in sight. Such are the perils of forecasting the volatile variables of supply and demand for oil.

What has changed – apart from human emotions? For starters, the global gas market has been undergoing a revolution as a result of a) liquefied natural gas, a technology that is only just coming into its own and allows countries such as Qatar to ship their once useless reserves of gas on frozen hulls across the world; LNG output will increase by 50pc from 2008 to 2013. Actually, this is not that new, but never mind.
b) advances in US gas extraction from rock, which have turned the US into the world’s biggest producer of gas. Europe is jumping on the bandwagon. “The development of unconventional gas in North America is of global significance,” said the agency. Indeed it is. The knock-on effects run right through the energy complex.

The IEA now expects spare capacity of oil to remain at a comfortable 3.5m barrels a day (bpd) in 2015, with consumption edging up by an extra 1m bpd each year to around 90m bpd (or 92m if global growth is stronger). All this is quite manageable. It talked of a “gentle nominal price escalation through mid-decade, with prices rising from $77 to $86″.

The alarmist stories we heard last year from certain City banks about collapsing supply (I will spare the names) were wildly wrong. The IEA’s upward revisions from 2009 come from the US, Russia, Colombia, Canada, Mexico, Norway, Egypt, and even the UK (+80,000).

Supply is rising from off-shore Brazil, the Caspian, Canadian oil sands, and biofuels, offsetting declines in the North Sea. Non-OPEC output will actually grow from 51.5m (bpd) to 52.5m by 2015. No crisis there … Latin America will jump from 3.9m to 5.1m, the old Soviet bloc from 13.3m to 13.8m.

On the demand side, America’s gasoline use is slowly “evaporating”. Consumption is falling by 0.6pc a year. This will continue after the new standard of 35.5 miles per gallon for light vehicles that came into force in April. Battery technologies for electric vehicles are on the cusp of a break-through, so long as lithium does not run short, (Half the world’s reserves are in Bolivia). Japanese researchers have built an 8-wheel prototype with a motor in each wheel that massively extends battery life because less energy is lost. “The transportation game-changer is just beginning,” said the IEA.

There are “demand risks”. Large parts of Asia, Latin America, and the Mid-East are at cusp of the “critical oil demand ‘take-off’ zone of $3,000 to $4,000 per capita income” when use explodes – ie, when they move from bicycles to scooters to cars, and install air-conditioning. Demand from emerging economies will make up 52pc of total global consumption by 2015. ( The rich countries have already hit the “S Curve” of saturation, followed by a long slow slide).

I am not an oil expert, just a curious spectator like many readers. I keep an eye on energy markets because they are a window into the global economy and the world’s strategic system.

I pass on the report without taking any particular view, and would be interested in your thoughts. My own suspicion is that Peak Oil has not been conjured away quite so easily as the IEA suggests, especially after BP’s debacle in the Gulf of Mexico.

At the very least, the marginal cost and risk cost of deep-sea drilling has rocketed. This must affect projects off Brazil, Angola, the Norwegian Arctic, and up in Russia’s `High North’. If the spill keeps gushing into the Autumn it may do to sea drilling, what Three Mile Island did to the US nuclear industry for thirty years.

Jeremy Leggett from Solarcentury and a member of the UK’s Task Force on Peak Oil argues that Big Oil has systemically overstated reserves for years to inflate share prices, shielded by captive regulators. Their deception compares to the systemic errors of the banks in the credit crunch, but ultimately on a bigger scale and with potentially more nefaste consequences.

I reserve my judgement on this. The energy market is infuriatingly opaque. But on balance, I think IEA was closer to the truth last year.

OPERATION GULF GREASE: Problem, Reaction, Solution to implement Agenda 21?

newswithviews.com

In the days prior to the Gulf drilling operation and ensuing environmental catastrophe, I remember thinking just how odd and out of

What is the United Nations' Law of the Sea Treaty? Click image and read the details.

character it was that Barack Obama had announced his approval for more offshore drilling. On April 1st, The Washington Post quoted Interior Secretary Ken Salazar as saying the administration had broached “a new direction” in energy policy. [1]

Had Obama lost his mind? Had he had some sort of religious experience? This was a president who campaigned against traditional energy sources in favor of so-called “sustainable” alternatives such as wind, solar, etc. This was a president who banned offshore drilling as one of his first acts in executive office.[2] This was a president who admitted in a meeting with the San Francisco Chronicle in January of 2008 that it was his plan to use a Cap and Trade system to cause energy prices to “necessarily skyrocket” in order to force people to transition to “green” technologies. “Under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket,” Obama stated as documented in a YouTube video. [3]

Hence, the shock at the sudden “turnabout” in energy policy. True, the vast majority of Americans do support drilling for oil as a counterweight against increasing dependence upon the perpetually troubled Middle East and its OPEC cartel. But since when has any president in recent history paid attention to the opines of their electorate?

Now, as the days turn into weeks, and weeks into months — and the oil continues to gush in the Gulf with no sign of ever letting up — Obama has used the crisis as an excuse to not only ban offshore drilling,[4] but also to clamor for passage of his “cap and trade” energy bill.[5] Politico has cited opinion polls that suggest public support for drilling may be eroding.[6]

Was this the Hegelian plan all along? To foment a crisis in the Gulf to condition the masses that the world must adopt Agenda 21 “sustainable development” as its model for energy or pay the environmental consequences? Before you dismiss this notion as insanity, there are many troubling questions that demand answers. Questions that imply foreknowledge and planning. Questions of “coincidence.”

For example, is it “coincidental” the numerous incredible financial and business transactions that took place in the days, weeks, and months prior to the rig explosion?

We know the ties between British Petroleum and Goldman Sachs run deep. Peter Sutherland, the chairman of Goldman Sachs International also served as chairman of BP right up until last year, according to a 2009 bio on the site of the Trilateral Commission. It says,

“Peter Sutherland is chairman of BP plc (1997 – current). He is also chairman of Goldman Sachs International (1995 – current). He was appointed chairman of the London School of Economics in 2008. He is currently UN special representative for migration and development. Before these appointments, he was the founding director-general of the World Trade Organization. He had previously served as director general of GATT since July 1993 and was instrumental in concluding the Uruguay GATT Round Negotiations.”[7]

On April 30th, The Huffington Post published a satire piece about Goldman Sachs, who was embroiled in a Congressional probe over the present and pending financial meltdown just days before the Gulf disaster stole the headlines. The spoof article titled, Goldman Sachs Reveals It Shorted Gulf of Mexico, was actually mistaken by some as a legitimate news story. Written by a comedian, the satirical article said,

“In what is looming as another public relations predicament for Goldman Sachs, the banking giant admitted today that it made ‘a substantial financial bet against the Gulf of Mexico’ one day before the sinking of an oil rig in that body of water.”[8]

After this gag piece was published, various independent researchers began checking into the financial transactions of Goldman. What they found turned out to be a case of art imitating life.

Sterling Allan reported in The Examiner on May 5th,

“It turns out that Goldman Sachs really did place shorts on TransOcean stock days before the explosions rocked the rig in the Gulf of Mexico sending stocks plunging while GS profits soared — benefitting [sic] once again from a huge disaster, having done the same with airline stocks prior to 911 then again with the housing bubble.”[9]

It’s important to note the cozy relationship between Goldman Sachs and the Obama administration. According to McClatchy, while Goldman Sachs was under fire from the Securities and Exchange Commission, and their lawyers were in negotiations with the regulatory agency, Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein was a repeated visitor to the White House. He attended events with Obama and met with Larry Summers, Obama’s top economic advisor. Obama’s 2008 campaign benefited from $994,795 worth of campaign donations from Goldman employees and their relatives.[10] The Gulf disaster, coming on the heels of the Congressional hearing and SEC “investigation,” served to distract attention from the ongoing financial fraud and economic meltdown caused by Goldman and others.

We now know from John Byrne at Raw Story that prior to the Gulf oil mess, not only did Goldman Sachs short shares of TransOcean, the owner of the failed Deepwater Horizon rig, they also ditched 4,680,822 shares of BP stock, worth $250 million and representing 44% of their holdings. “Goldman’s sales were the largest of any firm during that time,” writes Byrne. “Goldman would have pocketed slightly more than $266 million if their holdings were sold at the average price of BP’s stock during the quarter.”[11]

Byrne also noted other financial institutions that also dumped BP holdings.

“Other asset management firms also sold huge blocks of BP stock in the first quarter — but their sales were a fraction of Goldman’s. Wachovia, which is owned by Wells Fargo, sold 2,667,419 shares; UBS, the Swiss bank, sold 2,125,566 shares.”[12]

If that weren’t enough of a “coincidence,” we also had The Telegraph out of London reporting that the chief executive of BP, Tony Hayward, also sold 223,288 shares, worth £1.4 million of stock in his own company (over $2 million) on March 17th — only weeks before the BP Gulf mess. The paper noted that by doing so he “avoided losing more than £423,000 ($614,449) when BP’s share price plunged after the oil spill began six weeks ago.”[13] He took the money and paid off the mortgage on his family mansion in Kent.

At this point, a question should be coming to mind: What did these people know that the rest of us didn’t? How is it that stock in BP and Transocean suddenly seemed so unattractive to those closest to the disaster? Ah, the coincidences! But it gets even better.

On April 10th, The Houston Chronicle reported that Halliburton — the company of which former Vice-President Dick Cheney was CEO — was in the process of acquiring Boots & Coots. Reuters reported that the deal was announced on Friday, April 9th — just eleven days prior to the explosion.[14] The Chronicle noted that “Boots & Coots has become well known for putting out some of the world’s largest oil and gas fires.”[15] The company’s website lists services they provide, including “deepwater application and well inspections, as well as blowout prevention and control counsel or assistance…”[16] According to the Orlando Sentinel, their expertise is already being put to use in the Gulf, as they are “one of two primary companies designing relief-well strategies for the BP blowout.”[17]

So when the acquisition deal is formerly approved by the government, Halliburton — the company famous for profiting from no-bid government contracts in war zones — will have collected for themselves yet another “slick” profit.

This is especially intriguing in light of the fact that, according to NPR, Halliburton’s cementing work — completed only hours prior to the explosion — has become a “central focus” of the Congressional investigation.[18] The Wall Street Journal quotes unnamed “experts” as saying the timing of the cementing in relation to the blast “points to it as a possible culprit.”[19]

But Halliburton isn’t the only company that stands to make a killing off the crisis. The Times Online out of the UK reported that TransOcean itself took out a $560 million insurance policy on the Deepwater Horizon rig. The dollar amount was well above the rig’s value. According to the paper, insurance payouts amounted to a $270 million profit from the disaster.

“The windfall, revealed in a conference call with analysts, will more than cover the $200m that Transocean expects to pay to survivors and their families and for higher insurance costs.”[20]

A number of people have questioned why Corexit — a chemical banned in the UK[21] and is much more toxic than the oil itself — was used as a dispersant in the Gulf. Assuming for the moment that chemical dispersants had to be used, the New York Times reported on May 13th:

“Of 18 dispersants whose use EPA has approved, 12 were found to be more effective on southern Louisiana crude than Corexit, EPA data show. Two of the 12 were found to be 100 percent effective on Gulf of Mexico crude, while the two Corexit products rated 56 percent and 63 percent effective, respectively. The toxicity of the 12 was shown to be either comparable to the Corexit line or, in some cases, 10 or 20 times less, according to EPA.”[22]

Yet, despite the EPA data ranking it “far above dispersants made by competitors” for toxicity, BP chose to dump more than 400,000 gallons of Corexit into the Gulf, order 805,000 more gallons with plans of hundreds of thousands of additional gallons should the spewing continue. Why?

The answer may lie in the fact that not only has Corexit production benefited BP and Exxon Chemical Company, it also has ties to the very same banking company that somehow knew to sell nearly half its holdings in BP stock just prior to the disaster — Goldman Sachs. Cassandra Anderson of Morph City connects the dots to the economic ties between the oil industry and the bankers.

“Corexit is produced by NALCO, originally named the National Aluminate Corporation, which formed a limited partnership with Exxon Chemical Company in 1994. Ondeo Nalco was purchased by Goldman Sachs, Apollo and Blackstone in 2003 and is currently a publicly traded company. Given NALCO’s business ties, it seems that safe and natural cleanup methods were avoided in the Gulf to pursue an economic agenda. The use of Corexit in Alaska, after the Exxon Valdez disaster, resulted in toxicity to humans that included respiratory, nervous system, liver, kidney and blood disorders.”[23]

They say that history repeats itself. We know from wire reports that all 125 fishing boats had to be recalled from Gulf cleanup efforts after workers aboard began “experiencing nausea, dizziness, headaches and chest pains.”[24]

What’s going on here? Is the Gulf being poisoned on purpose to enhance corporate profits? Or has this crisis been orchestrated by the illuminists in order to force the United States to ratify the Law of the Sea Treaty (LOST) which would cede control of the oceans — over 70 percent of the planet’s surface — to the United Nations?

One must always keep in mind that Agenda 21 is the game plan for all that happens in the world today. The Hegelian dialectic is the means by which that game plan is implemented — creation of a crisis to condition the minds of the people that an undesired change is necessary, creation of their own controlled opposition to the crisis, finally the introduction of their pre-determined solution.

Chapter 17 of Agenda 21 deals with “Protection of the Oceans, all Kinds of Seas, Including Enclosed & Semi-enclosed Seas, & Coastal Areas & the Protection, Rational Use & Development of their Living Resources.” Who will determine what constitutes “rational use” of the oceans and their resources? If the LOST is ratified, it will be the United Nations.

In July 2009, State Department official Margaret Hayes told the New York Times that the Obama administration was in the process of working to “craft a plan to ratify the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea.”

“President Obama is strongly in favor of the United States becoming a party to the Law of the Sea Convention,” Hayes was quoted as saying. “There is discussion going on as to the exact timing of when they might have a hearing and when they might proceed to have the full Senate consider accession.”[25]

The Times goes on to report that the administration is continuing a multi-year mapping of the sea floor in the Arctic in preparation to stake a claim under the LOST.[26]

Furthermore, the World Ocean Council, an alliance of multi-national businesses that are dedicated to ocean “sustainability,” is having its “Corporate Ocean Responsibility” meeting this month — conveniently on the heels of a major maritime disaster. The Sustainable Ocean Summit is described as “the first international, cross-sectoral ocean sustainability conference for the private sector – [that] will catalyze the growing interest among ocean businesses for more effective leadership and collaboration in addressing ocean environmental challenges.”[27] It just so happens that two of the founding members of the World Ocean Council are ExxonMobil and TransOcean.[28]

That the crisis in the Gulf may have been planned and executed with the intention of profiting from it while pushing an environmental control agenda, might explain the pathetic federal response after the disaster. [NWV POLL: Was the Gulf oil spill deliberately created?]

Three days after learning of the Gulf gusher, the Interior Department Chief of Staff Tom Strickland left for the Grand Canyon with his wife and went white water rafting.[29] The Department of the Interior is charged with the task of coordinating federal response to a major oil spill. Yet, Strickland’s priorities were elsewhere.

The “In-Situ Burn” plan was developed by the federal government in 1994 to deal with oil spill disasters in the Gulf, and calls for the immediate use of fire booms. Had the plan been followed, it might have prevented oil from reaching the shoreline. A single fire boom can burn up to 1,800 barrels or 75,000 gallons an hour. Yet, despite the plan, not one fire boom was available anywhere in the Gulf at the time of the incident.[30] [31]

On May 11th, ABC News reported that the U.S. Coast Guard conducted operations in the Gulf, simulating a major oil spill and practicing federal response to it a mere three weeks prior to the real disaster.[32] What was the purpose of the simulation? Obviously, it wasn’t to improve federal response.

In 2002, there was a similar practice operation which ABC describes as “eerily similar” to the current disaster. Lack of experience, poor communications, conflicting roles, and a need for new technology were cited. None of the recommendations were ever put into place.[33]

Wire reports from the Associated Press have said that workers aboard the rig were forced to sign statements that they hadn’t witnessed the explosion. They were told they couldn’t go home, nor could they make phone calls and talk to their friends and family until they signed the statements indicating they had no “first hand or personal knowledge” of the incident.[34]

We now have private military contractors deployed from Wackenhut — the military contractor infamous for its employees’ drunken brawls and vodka shots taken out of each other’s backside — guarding the perimeter of the Deepwater Horizon Unified Command.

Respected attorney Ellen Brown has written about empty Wackenhut buses with prison bars on the windows being driven around for no apparent reason in Arizona. Your writer has personally talked to other people who have seen these buses. Ellen wrote last year:

“The new Wackenhut operation is shrouded in mystery. It has been running its fleet of empty prison buses night and day, apparently logging miles on a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) contract. Multiple buses can be seen driving all over town and even on remote desert back roads. Oddly, except for the driver and one escort guard seated in front, these buses appear to be empty.”[35]

Network news media have been complaining of being harassed and threatened by the security contractors for shooting video of the coast,[36] [37] which we’re told may soon become uninhabitable. Will Wackenhut buses be utilized to relocate mass numbers of people out of the coastal states?

It’s shaping up to be an interesting summer.

BP to blame in explosion, internal documents show

AP

The secret we all knew: BP cut corners days before platform explosion.

BP made a series of money-saving shortcuts and blunders that dramatically increased the danger of a destructive oil spill in a well that an engineer ominously described as a “nightmare” just six days before the blowout, according to documents released Monday that provide new insight into the causes of the disaster.

The House Energy and Commerce Committee released dozens of internal documents that outline several problems on the deep-sea rig in the days and weeks before the April 20 explosion that set in motion the largest environmental disaster in U.S. history. Investigators found that BP was badly behind schedule on the project and losing hundreds of thousands of dollars with each passing day, and responded by cutting corners in the well design, cementing and drilling mud efforts and the installation of key safety devices.

“Time after time, it appears that BP made decisions that increased the risk of a blowout to save the company time or expense. If this is what happened, BP’s carelessness and complacency have inflicted a heavy toll on the Gulf, its inhabitants, and the workers on the rig,” said Democratic Reps. Henry A. Waxman and Bart Stupak.

The missteps emerged on the same day that President Barack Obama made his fourth visit to the Gulf, where he sought to assure beleaguered residents that the government will “leave the Gulf Coast in better shape than it was before.”

Obama’s two-day trip to Mississippi, Alabama and Florida represents his latest attempt to persevere through a crisis that has served as an important early test of his presidency. The visit coincides with a national address from the Oval Office on Tuesday night in which he will announce new steps to restore the Gulf Coast ecosystem, according to a senior administration official who spoke on condition of anonymity so as not to upstage the president’s announcements.

“I can’t promise folks … that the oil will be cleaned up overnight. It will not be,” Obama said after encouraging workers in hard hats as they hosed off and repaired oil-blocking boom. “It’s going to be painful for a lot of folks.”

But, he said, “things are going to return to normal.”

The breached well has dumped as much as 114 million gallons of oil into the Gulf under the worst-case scenario described by scientists — a rate of more than 2 million a day. BP has collected 5.6 million gallons of oil through its latest containment cap on top of the well, or about 630,000 gallons per day.

But BP believes it will see considerable improvements in the next two weeks. The company said Monday that it could trap a maximum of roughly 2.2 million gallons of oil each day by the end of June as it deploys additional containment efforts, including a system that could start burning off vast quantities as early as Tuesday. That would more than triple the amount of oil it is currently capturing — and be a huge relief for those trying to keep it from hitting the shore.

“It would be a game changer,” said Coast Guard Chief Petty Officer Mark Boivin, deputy director for near-shore operations at a command center in Mobile. He works with a team that coordinates the efforts of roughly 80 skimming boats gathering oil off the coast.

Still, BP warned its containment efforts could face problems if hoses or pipes clog and engineers struggle to run the complicated collection system. Early efforts at the bottom of the Gulf failed to capture oil.

Meanwhile, congressional investigators have identified several mistakes by BP in the weeks leading up to the disaster as it fell way behind on drilling the well.

BP started drilling in October, only to have the rig damaged by Hurricane Ida in early November. The company switched to a new rig, the Deepwater Horizon, and resumed drilling on Feb. 6. The rig was 43 days late for its next drilling location by the time it exploded April 20, costing BP at least $500,000 each day it was overdue, congressional documents show.

As BP found itself in a frantic race against time to get the job done, engineers took several time-saving measures, according to congressional investigators.

In the design of the well, the company apparently chose a riskier option among two possibilities to provide a barrier to the flow of gas in space surrounding steel tubes in the well, documents and internal e-mails show. The decision saved BP $7 million to $10 million; the original cost estimate for the well was about $96 million.

In an e-mail, BP engineer Brian Morel told a fellow employee that the company is likely to make last-minute changes in the well.

“We could be running it in 2-3 days, so need a relative quick response. Sorry for the late notice, this has been nightmare well which has everyone all over the place,” Morel wrote.

The e-mail chain culminated with the following message by another worker: “This has been a crazy well for sure.”

BP also apparently rejected advice of a subcontractor, Halliburton Inc., in preparing for a cementing job to close up the well. BP rejected Halliburton’s recommendation to use 21 “centralizers” to make sure the casing ran down the center of the well bore. Instead, BP used six centralizers.

In an e-mail on April 16, a BP official involved in the decision explained: “It will take 10 hours to install them. I do not like this.” Later that day, another official recognized the risks of proceeding with insufficient centralizers but commented: “Who cares, it’s done, end of story, will probably be fine.”

The lawmakers also said BP also decided against a nine- to 12-hour procedure known as a “cement bond log” that would have tested the integrity of the cement. A team from Schlumberger, an oil services firm, was on board the rig, but BP sent the team home on a regularly scheduled helicopter flight the morning of April 20.

Less than 12 hours later, the rig exploded.

BP also failed to fully circulate drilling mud, a 12-hour procedure that could have helped detect gas pockets that later shot up the well and exploded on the drilling rig.

Asked about the details disclosed from the investigation, BP spokesman Mark Proegler said the company’s main focus right now is on the response and stopping the flow of oil. “It would be inappropriate for us to comment while an investigation is ongoing,” Proegler told AP. BP executives including CEO Tony Hayward will be questioned by Congress on Thursday.

The letter from Waxman and Stupak noted at least five questionable decisions BP made before the explosion, and was supplemented by 61 footnotes and dozens of documents.

“The common feature of these five decisions is that they posed a trade-off between cost and well safety,” said Waxman and Stupak. Waxman, D-Calif., chairs the energy panel while Stupak, D-Mich., heads a subcommittee on oversight and investigations.

British Petroleum Disaster: An Insider’s Account

By LUIS MIRANDA | THE REAL AGENDA | JUNE 13, 2010

As The Real Agenda has reported, the Gulf of Mexico’s oil spill goes beyond a few thousand gallons a day and chemical dispersants.

Oil industry insiders who have revealed first-hand information that could make the manliest human being tremble like jello.  The most prominent of these insiders, Pastor Lindsey Williams, who worked closely with heads of the oil industry for several years, appeared on talk radio to share his testimony on what is really going on in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico.  The details are neither easy nor pleasant to understand.

Williams’ account begins with what a former oil industry CEO told him with regard to the Deep Water Horizon disaster.  According to him, the reason for the oil disaster was that BP may have drilled into something known as a batholith, which is a gigantic well usually filled with magma, but that this time seemed to be full of crude.  After drilling into the chamber, the pressure was so high that the Deepwater Horizon’s platform and its structure, weren’t able to withstand it causing the explosion and the consequent disaster.  Why didn’t the platform sustain the pressure generated from the crude coming out?  Pressures experienced after drilling an oil well vary, but maximum numbers usually hit 1500 pounds of pressure per square inch.  In the case of the oil well in the Gulf of Mexico, the pressure reached up to 70,000 pounds of natural pressure per square inch.  Williams said: “No structure built by man could have withstood such force.”  Does this mean the explosion was an accident?  Not necessarily.  As we have reported, Deepwater Horizon workers said in their testimony that BP’s heads knew of the lack of capacity the platform had to take on the well’s pressure, but forced the workers to continue the drilling process.  He added that the kind of oil contained in the gigantic well is not of the fossil type, but of another one known as Abiotic oil.  This oil is produced during chemical processes, deep down into the Earth’s core.  Williams said some of the most important oil deposits in the world are replenishing themselves through this process and therefore the peak oil idea is false.  On this side topic, Pastor Williams is supported by what can be called the Russian oil rush.  In the last few years, Russia has dug at least three oil wells such as the one apparently found in the Gulf of Mexico down to depths of 20,000 to 30,000 feet into the ground.  Other projects of the sort are located closer to the United States than anyone could think.  Just as Russia dug such deep wells on land, the United States granted BP permission to dig a 5,000 feet deep well in the waters of the Gulf of Mexico.  Big mistake says Williams.  The fact the drilling was being done from a floating platform, only stabilized by propellers, may have played a determinant role on what happened next.

During the interview, Williams said that two sources from British Petroleum confirmed that not only had the company gone down 5,000 feet to the sea floor through sea water, but had drilled 25,000 feet into the sea bed down to the Earth’s crust.  His sources also confirmed that 3 hours before the explosion, BP had sent executives, geologists and other personnel to the region in order to witnessed what the result of the drilling would be.  Williams emphasized that the explosion was not done on purpose, but that it was all an accident due to the unexpected pressure that came together with the abiotic oil.  “The pressure was so great that no human manufactured device could have stopped the flow,” said Williams.  He also confirmed through his BP sources the allegation that BP high-ups collaborated in a way with the accident.  “A platform worker told the foreman that the fail safe valve was broken and needed to be replaced, but the foreman replied there was no time for that.”

Another of Mr. Williams’ revelations was that the leak of crude oil from the sea bed of the Gulf of Mexico is not spewing thousands or hundreds of thousands of gallons a day, but millions of gallons a day.  He said his oil industry source confirm what other independent sources have claimed: “that the oil spill is letting out between 4 and 5 million gallons of crude a day.”  The explosion the Pastor said during an interview on the Alex Jones Show, caused the sea bed to turn unstable, and that is why there are more than a few leaks down there.  Williams was told there were oil leaks as far as 20 miles away from the location where the Deepwater Horizon structure once stood.  He was fast to address one of the options some people have suggested as a solution to end the oil leak: To nuke the place in order to stop the crude from coming into the Gulf’s waters.  He said his source confessed this may be the only option to stop the disaster once and for all, but that given the degree of difficulty of such operation, there was a big enough chance the explosion of a nuclear device would make the problem worse.  If not done correctly and precisely, the explosion could further destabilize the well and cause a major collapse that would release greater amounts of oil which could not be stopped.

How does Mr. Williams knows this?  As mentioned before, his source, a former oil industry Chief Executive Officer, provided him with this and other information for the past few years.  Why should we believe what he says?  His track record has been immaculate so far.  Pastor Williams appeared on radio shows several times detailing -beforehand- the rise and fall of oil prices, the devaluation of the dollar, the food crisis, and the fake oil scarcity agenda the oil industry has planted in the public’s mind.  All of this before it happened.

birds

Marine life, birds and humans will have to live with the consequences of the spill for years to come.

One of the questions raised during the interview was what else besides the oil is coming out of the oil gushers?  At the beginning of the disaster, it was thought the oil was accompanied by mud only, but now, just as the numbers of the leak have changed, the account of what is flowing into the ocean along with the crude has also changed.  It seems the oil leak is not the biggest problem at hand.  The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) confirmed the existence of multiple plumes on the sea floor and these very plumes are releasing toxic gases that are ultimately the greatest danger for marine and human life.  The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) confirmed NOAA’s findings after carrying out independent tests of the underwater plumes.

According to the EPA report, Volatile Organic Compounds (VOC’s)are being emitted from the bottom of the ocean in amounts never seen before.  Below is the transcript of the report where it cites the VOC’s present, the levels at which they are safe for humans, and the amounts that were detected in the studies the EPA performed.  The

1. Hydrogen Sulfide (H2S) emitted at a rate of 1,200 parts per billion(ppb) into the water and the air afterwards, once it surfaces.  Levels considered “safe” for humans round 5-10 ppb;

2. Benzene (C6H6) emitted at a rate of 3,000 ppb.  Human “safe” levels are said to be around 0-4 ppb

3. Methylene Chloride or dichloromethane CH2Cl2, emitted at a rate of 3,400 ppb.  Human tolerance is established to levels below 61 ppb.

Other gases cited during the interview as being emitted from the spill include vanadium, which according to our research is, in its pure form, a greyish silvery, soft and ductile metal used as an alloy in the manufacturing of cars.  According to the Mineral Information Institute, “it is found in magnetite (iron oxide) deposits that are also very rich in the element titanium. It is also found in bauxite (aluminum ore), rocks with high concentrations of phosphorous-containing minerals, and sandstones that have high uranium content.” It has 2 isotopes that occur naturally.  One of the isotopes is stable and one is radioactive.

The emission of these gases into the water and later into the air people breathe indeed confirms a nefarious slow-paced genocide of marine life and human life.  If exposure to low levels of benzene causes dizziness, and organ failure, imagine what it is doing and what it will do to people exposed to it at the concentration levels read by the studies made by the EPA.  Deformities, cancer, respiratory problems are just a few of the problems people will face in the short and long run due to exposure to benzene, hydrogen sulfide, methylene chloride and who knows what else is coming out of deep beneath the sea floor.  Suddenly, the disaster seems to move from ecological and marine  to the very survival of the people who leave on the coast of Louisiana, Florida, and possibly the whole East Coast of the United States.

To all this we can add, as the media has reported, that Goldman Sachs sold 44 percent of its BP stock just three days before the explosion at the Deepwater Horizon platform.  Additionally, Tony Hayward -BP’s CEO- also sold a third of his own shares right before the accident occurred for a total of 1.4 million pounds.  In the meantime, fishers and other workers who are now helping with the cleaning efforts reported sickness after being in and on the waters of the Gulf of Mexico.  As channel 6, WSDU, reported, workers are experiencing illness, strong stomachache, respiratory problems, coughing and other symptoms of intoxication due to the inhalation of fumes from both the chemicals and the gases emanating from the waters.

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