Sunday, December 01, 2019

The Face of the Petro-State


America's Taylor Energy is an object lesson in how petro-states succumb to a toxic, climate-wrecking industry.

The story begins in the Gulf of Mexico in 2004 when Hurricane Ivan toppled a Taylor Energy oil drilling platform. 15 years later that well is still leaking. 70,000 gallons of crude a day, every day. It has leaked more oil than the Deepwater Horizon disaster.


Critics say the lack of action by Taylor and the federal agencies that oversee offshore drilling is a result of a self-regulated Wild West industry that’s allowed to under-report spills while trying to shun responsibility to contain or clean up leaks.

The company says it has done everything possible to stem the flow of oil and that it should no longer be held accountable for the leak. 
Costs are extreme, and the technology needed to fix the massive leak does not yet exist, the company has argued in court.
Polluter pays? Well, not so much. And it seems the people of Alberta stupidly imagine their fossil energy companies will foot the bill for the quarter 'T'rillion dollars it will take to clean up the Tar Sands tailing ponds and those countless thousands of orphan wells.

10 comments:

Trailblazer said...

Ethical oil( not the subject of this thread) is a fucking big con job.
FFS will anyone call out Jason Kenny and his best tar sands friends for what they are and for what they are doing.



https://www.gregpalast.com/how-mother-nature-took-the-rap-for-destroying-new-orleans/


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zoiq17Jh6xg


https://qz.com/1577099/pictures-from-the-1989-exxon-valdez-disaster-30-years-ago/

https://www.cnn.com/2014/03/23/opinion/holleman-exxon-valdez-anniversary/index.html

Alberta's clean up will pale to these incidents.

Will Alberta cough up for remediation or ,once again, or sing in unison; please give us one more chance!!!

Fuck them, call their bluff.

TB

Hugh said...

"Natural gas drilling credits eat up royalty revenue from extraction industry: report

Just over $2.6 billion in deep well credits are currently owed to producers, which they can use to reduce natural gas royalty payments"

https://vancouversun.com/business/energy/natural-gas-drilling-credits-eat-up-royalty-revenue-from-extraction-industry-report

Trailblazer said...

Golly gosh; we live in a world of !! lets just call it fraud.

TB

Trailblazer said...

Yet; Tarsands is supposedly the driving force of the Canadian economy!!

TB


Another myth exposed.


https://prism.ucalgary.ca/bitstrem/handle/1880/109313/capstone_McColl_2018.pdf

TB

the salamander said...

.. Taylor Energy currently has but one employee.. seemingly
.. the spill itself of course, 20 times the early pronouncements, secretive
.. US Coast Guard has deployed an effective temporary capture system

Any of this sound familiar ? Resonate in the hallowed halls of provincial or federal Branded political franchises ??

Your suggestion, Mound re just 250 billion or so re Remediation.. may need an upward tweak. I have provided a study.. perhaps not to you (but can) that indicates astonishingly positive .. low spill levels since late 1900's and equally astonished spill cleanup.. World Class, record breaking on steroids if true.. Never a mention of who the buyer or seller is/was.. the nature of the 'oil' shipment.. which any first responder must receive on arriving in the vicinity of any spill. Yet that data never gets to the public.. or the local residents.Its always 'No species have been harmed & the spill is contained and has not reached any protected navigable waters' .. Harper solved that via omnibus bill and retroactive application Canada wide..

Maybe think in terms of a trillion .. assuming you are including the tar sands
Economically of course.. include law fees, lawsuites, reparations, studies, reports
and surely you are not including science and biology to replace or clone species !

I may treat you to a 4:30 AM morning tweet & challenge I sent out today..which slashes into Kenney / Trudeau and the great fooferaw re Alberta is driving Canada's holy sacred 'grow the economy or the sky will fall' fantasy..

Looking forward to the 12 Days Of Christmas here in the flatlands BTW ..
after the 1.5 months we've already endured of Christmas carols in stores
and on MainMedia .. I make it as 1/6th of the year now.. October 31 to Jan 1

The Mound of Sound said...

Thanks everyone for the helpful links. COP25 is now upon us, a testament to a quarter century of global inertia. 25 years and GHG emissions continue to increase, waiting perhaps for the next Great Recession or similar calamity to interrupt consumption.

Anonymous said...

In the run-up to the Dunces Parade, the meeting of premiers/nuclear scientists of the Stephen harper level of Chalk River expertise, Kenney was already bleating that Canada should fund remediation of orphan wells in Alberta:

https://calgaryherald.com/opinion/columnists/varcoe-alberta-seeks-ottawas-help-and-money-in-cleaning-up-abandoned-wells

So obviously "Alberta", or the fifth column that runs it against Canadian interests and for their own exclusively, has no intention of cleaning up anything on its territory it can palm off on the rest of us. Which is everything. And by taking Albertans's share of the CPP to promote even more tarsand digging nonsense, we all of us get an even bigger bill at the end. That's what I mean by "fifth column - traitors in our midst getting us to pay for their nihilist dumb-bunny follies while they bask in jobs of the distinctly shovel-level variety, and say "f*ck" you to the rest of us. These are provincial hacks who need a lecture on being responsible adults, but JT ain't no wagging finger berater unless the humanoid(s) in front of him cannot fight back, like the First Nations kids who need dental work.

BM

The Mound of Sound said...

I doubt that it would surprise many that Alberta would want the 'rest of Canada' to foot the cleanup bill. In the next breath they threaten to separate. Hmmm.

Trailblazer said...

Today at the Premiers conference , much time was given to Jason Kenny who had even less to say of value than his counterparts.
Why are we pandering to the whims of a failed Province?
I and many others have lived through the 'please give us another chance and we will not do it again' whine from Alberta!
ALbertan are younger and do not see the world beyond the next pay cheque.

https://www.google.com/search?q=alberta+average+age&oq=alberta+average+age&aqs=chrome..69i57j0.12047j0j4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

What else do you expect from children?

TB


Anonymous said...

It's only a greedy person who would say and one who is protected by government, "Their company don't have to pay for an oil spill polluting the environment".