When the truth is finally revealed about the cause of the Mexican Gulf oil disaster, it may be that it was a combination of back luck, poor judgement, complacency and corner cutting. Having spent the last few weeks laying into ‘British Petroleum’, the US political establishment has discovered that it could have been any of the major oil companies as BP were employing standard operating procedure in the Gulf aided and abetted by a complicit regulator. BP messed up first and had to ‘take one for the team’. Looking and sounding a bit foreign did not help their cause, nor did ham fisted PR skills.
All of the companies had disaster plans which made provision for saving walruses, not a common sight in the sub-tropical waters between Mexico and Florida, so, presumably, they had simply copied the plan (each of them had the same one) prepared for Arctic waters without making the effort to modify it.
By fluffing it so badly, BP may well have spoilt it for everyone as it is possible that the Gulf will be off limits for a while, at least until the stable door can be bolted by a newly invigorated regulator.
BP has been persuaded to set aside $20bn for the cleanup and compensation costs. This achieves a number of objectives; investors gain a degree of certainty about the cost, BP starts to turn a PR corner, politicians can claim a victory and BP may well have salvaged a future for its US operations.
One commentator in the FT drew a parallel between BP having to fund every cent of the clean up and compensation costs, having threaten a few thousand jobs and polluted the environment, with the taxpayer funded bail out of the banks. The banks, of course, were technically bust and had brought the world economy to the brink of meltdown.
So, it seems, if you are going to mess up, it pays to do it spectacularly and £20bn just does not cut the mustard these days.
