Is the Alaska Pipeline corroded? You bet it is. Has been for more than a decade. Did British Petroleum shut the pipe yesterday to turn a quick buck on its negligence, to profit off the disaster it created? Just ask the "smart pig."
Years ago, I had the unhappy job of leading an investigation of British Petroleum's management of the Alaska pipeline system. I was working for the Chugach villages, the Alaskan Natives who own the shoreline slimed by the 1989 Exxon Valdez tanker grounding.
Even then, courageous government inspectors and pipeline workers were screaming about corrosion all through the pipeline. I say "courageous" because BP, which owns 46% of the pipe and is supposed to manage the system, had a habit of hunting down and destroying the careers of those who warn of pipeline problems.
In one case, BP's CEO of Alaskan operations hired a former CIA expert to break into the home of a whistleblower, Chuck Hamel, who had complained of conditions at the pipe's tanker facility. BP tapped his phone calls with a US congressman and ran a surveillance and smear campaign against him. When caught, a US federal judge said BP's acts were "reminiscent of Nazi Germany."
This was not an isolated case. Captain James Woodle, once in charge of the pipe's Valdez terminus, was blackmailed into resigning the post when he complained of disastrous conditions there. The weapon used on Woodle was a file of faked evidence of marital infidelity. Nice guys, eh?
Now let's talk timing. BP's suddenly discovered corrosion necessitating an emergency shut-down of the line is the same corrosion Dan Lawn has been screaming about for 15 years. Lawn is a steel-eyed government inspector who has kept his job only because his union's lawyers have kept BP from having his head.
Indeed, it's pretty darn hard for BP to claim it is surprised to find corrosion this week when Lawn issued a damning report on corrosion right after a leak and spill were discovered on March 2 of this year.
Why shut the pipe now? The timing of a sudden inspection and fix of a decade-long problem has a suspicious smell. A precipitous shutdown in mid-summer, in the middle of Middle East war(s), is guaranteed to raise prices and reap monster profits for BP. The price of crude jumped $2.22 a barrel on the shutdown news to over $76. How lucky for BP which sells four million barrels of oil a day. Had BP completed its inspection and repairs a couple years back -- say, after Dan Lawn's tenth warning -- the oil market would have hardly noticed.
But $2 a barrel is just the beginning of BP's shut-down bonus. The Alaskan oil was destined for the California market which now faces a supply crisis at the very height of the summer travel season. The big winner is ARCO petroleum, the largest retailer in the Golden State. ARCO is a 100%-owned subsidiary of ... British Petroleum.
BP could have fixed the pipeline problem this past winter, after their latest corrosion-caused oil spill. But then ARCO would have lost the summertime supply-squeeze windfall.
Enron Corporation was infamous for deliberately timing repairs to maximize profit. Would BP also manipulate the market in such a crude manner? Some US prosecutors think they did so in the US propane market. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) just six weeks ago charged the company with approving an Enron-style scheme to crank up the price of propane sold in poor rural communities in the US. One former BP exec has pleaded guilty.
Lord Browne, the imperious CEO of BP, has apologized for that scam, for the Alaska spill, for this week's shutdown and for the deaths in 2005 of 15 workers at the company's mortally sloppy refinery operation at Texas City, Texas.
I don't want readers to think BP isn't civic-minded. The company's US CEO, Bob Malone, was Co-Chairman of the Bush re-election campaign in Alaska. Mr. Bush, in turn, was so impressed with BP's care of Alaska's environment that he pushed again to open the state's arctic wildlife refuge (ANWR) to drilling by the BP consortium.
Indeed, you can go to Alaska today and see for yourself the evidence of BP's care of the wilderness. You can smell it: the crude oil still on the beaches from the Exxon Valdez spill.
Exxon took all the blame for the spill because they were dumb enough to have the company's name on the ship. But it was BP's pipeline managers who filed reports that oil spill containment equipment was sitting right at the site of the grounding near Bligh Island. However, the reports were bogus, the equipment wasn't there and so the beaches were poisoned. At the time, our investigators uncovered four-volume's worth of faked safety reports and concluded that BP was at least as culpable as Exxon for the 1,200 miles of oil-destroyed coastline.
Where is it shipped to? Japan? Washington State? Oregon? California? Isn't that crucial to this discussion? Most Americans barely know what gas comes from, much less the shipping information, the locations of its sources and the steps taken before it gets to their pump. Then there's the refineries, why don't I know much about them? It isn't easy information to find.
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zephyr (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 74 comments [4 recommended, 0 rejected]) on Wednesday, Aug 9, 2006 at 12:06:18 AM
The Neocons/Repulicans allowed the K-Street lawyers and lobbyist to successfully and secretly craft a "pork-roll" energy bill approved by Congress last year. These politicans want to hide the megamergers that have placed control oil industry in the US - a major and essential part of the military industrial complex - into the hands of a select few creating a monopoly. And it is making them all 'stinking' rich with record profits that will find a way into the GOP coffers this Nov election. They have stuffed the Defense Policy Board and every other 'national security' agency with their own. You can't find out because they don't want you to know...'a matter of national security.' Bet you didn't know that US pays for security to guard a pipleline owned by Occidental Petroleum (Calif. based) in South America costing taxpayers millions a year. And there are many other examples of how these politicans have emptied the US Treasury making taxpayers foot the bill so the oil corporations can reap and keep record profits.
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Amanda Lang (23 articles, 14528 quicklinks, 442 diaries, 731 comments [17 recommended, 0 rejected]) on Wednesday, Aug 9, 2006 at 4:16:18 PM
Being aware of these factors of takeover by the neo-cons does not ameliorate the results of their greed. It only pushes the envelope even further and adds to the angst we people in America feel. Slowly but surely the pendulum will swing back in the opposite direction and the dis-ease will lessen. Sometimes it seems that Sisyphus (sp) had it right.
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zephyr (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 74 comments [4 recommended, 0 rejected]) on Saturday, Aug 12, 2006 at 12:08:57 PM
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