Louisiana deep oil drilling disaster

[Ed Jewett]

History Channel video on methane explosions

[Jan Klimkowski]

You may not have to go back to paleo days. In the rush of text I've read recently, I remember some oblique reference to a recent event involving the mysterious deaths of a large number of people in a Third World country which, if my brain is working correctly, was Cameroon. See http://www.tvthrong.co.uk/nature-shock/n...-death-fog

Ed - thanks.

The gas in question in these African incidents was CO2, and it's definitely worth posting the entire article here:

Nature Shock Series Finale: Death Fog

The documentary series examining freak occurrences in the natural world concludes. In 1986, a mysterious natural disaster claimed the lives of nearly 2,000 people at a lake in Cameroon. Scientists initially believed an underwater volcanic eruption was to blame, until the evidence pointed them towards an astonishing new scientific phenomenon.

On 21 August 1986, disaster struck a remote corner of north-west Cameroon. Nearly 2,000 people dropped dead by Lake Nyos without any obvious signs of injury or struggle. The following day, news of the staggering scale of the tragedy reached the outside world.

Father Anthony Bangsi, a missionary in the village of Subum, recalls the awful event. He was a witness to the aftermath of the terrifying incident that virtually wiped out an entire village. Neither Anthony nor any of the locals could explain what happened at Lake Nyos.

American lake expert George Kling was one of the first outsiders on the scene. There was some evidence to suggest that a volcanic eruption under the lake was to blame for the incident. Bodies were burnt and people recalled smelling volcanic gases like sulphur in the air. However, Kling could find no proof of lava flows, fire fountains or any traces of volcanic gases. Moreover, the temperature of the lake was actually cooler than normal. Kling concluded that a volcano could not be responsible for the tragedy. What, then, was the cause?

Officials turned to Icelandic volcanologist Haraldur Sigurdsson, who had investigated a similar incident in Cameroon two years earlier. In 1984, Sigurdsson was dispatched to the volcanic Lake Monoun to probe 37 very similar deaths. As in the disaster at Nyos, the victims died in one night without any sign of a struggle. Sigurdsson was asked to confirm that an eruption was to blame, but his tests also showed no evidence of volcanic activity.

A sample taken from the bottom of Lake Monoun provided a possible answer. The water was found to contain large amounts of carbon dioxide, a natural gas that, in sufficient quantities, can kill through suffocation. Sigurdsson formulated a hypothesis called ‘lake overturn’. He postulated that an unprecedented natural disaster could occur when a large concentration of CO2 stored in a lake erupts to the surface.

However, Sigurdsson’s theory was deemed too controversial as nothing like it had ever happened before. It was ignored by his fellow scientists, and his suggestion that other lakes in the region be checked for high levels of CO2 was rejected by the Cameroon government. This mistake led to the massive loss of life at Lake Nyos two years later.

Back at Nyos, George Kling decided that Sigurdsson’s theory could be right. His own investigation found large quantities of CO2 in the deep water of the lake. He concluded that this natural gas erupted in a toxic cloud that poisoned three lakeside villages. This cloud would have been invisible, silent and odourless, rendering it the perfect killer.

The theory was supported by the discovery that the burns on the victims’ bodies were in fact inflicted by frostbite from the cold carbon dioxide and not from hot volcanic gases. Kling also found research from the US Air Force that proved exposure to CO2 can lead to hallucinations where victims imagine they smell sulphur. These extraordinary revelations paved the way for new safeguards to prevent any repeat of the tragic accident at Lake Nyos.

[Peter Lemkin]

BP's Blowout Preventer is Leaning and Might Fall Over
from Washington's Blog by George Washington

As I have previously noted, it is now clear that there is damage to BP's well beneath the sea floor.

Recently-retired Shell Oil President John Hofmeister told MSNBC yesterday:

The question is whether there is enough mechanical structure left at the base of the reservoir to hold the cement when they start pouring cement in [from the relief well].

***

The more oil we some coming out, the more it tells you that the whole casing system is deteriorating. The fact that more oil would be coming out rather than less oil, would suggest that the construction within the pipe is offering no resistance whatsoever, and we’re just getting a gusher.

Popout


Newsweek gives a balanced view regarding the risk of a total structural failure of the well:

The likelihood of a complete collapse is difficult to assess, in part, engineers and legislators say, because BP hasn’t shared enough information to evaluate the situation. But a handful of clues suggest that the company is concerned. On Friday, BP spokesperson Toby Odone acknowledged that the 45-ton stack of the blowout preventer was tilting noticeably, but said the company could not attribute it to down-hole leaks. “We don’t know anything about the underground portion of the well,” he said. But, the stack “is tilting and has been tilting since the rig went down. We believe that it was caused by the collapse of the riser.” The company is monitoring the degree of leaning but has not announced any plans to run additional supports to the structure.

As many have speculated ... concerns over structural integrity are what led BP to halt “top kill” efforts late last month. When it was digging this particular well, the company ran out of casing–the pipe that engineers send down the hole–and switched to a less durable material called liner. This may have created several weak spots along the well that would be particularly vulnerable to excessive pressure or erosion. So instead of sealing the well, the company has been focused on trying to capture the oil as it flows out the top.

At this point, some experts say, additional leaks wouldn’t matter much. “It’s very possible that there are subfloor leaks,” says [Roger Anderson - an oil geophysicist at Columbia University]. “But that doesn’t change the strategy moving forward.” The linchpin of that strategy involves drilling relief wells that would absorb all possible leaks, both at the top and the bottom of the hulking, teetering structure. Relief wells are drilled straight down into the sea bottom. After running parallel to the existing well for a few thousand meters, they cut in and intersect the original well bore. BP is drilling two such wells, one on either side of the main well. Once they are complete, the company will use them to pump heavy fluid and cement into the main well, stopping the oil at its source. The approach usually has a 95 percent success rate.
But to work, the well must be sealed as far down as possible–if it’s sealed too high, oil could still escape through any leaks beneath the seal. In this case, relief wells will have to drill down to 5,500 meters, and that takes time, at least until August. The real question now is whether the entire structure can hold out long enough.

One of the dangers which the relief wells are racing against is that the blowout preventer (BOP) is leaning ... and might fall over.

The well casing itself is attached to the BOP. And - as discussed below - the BOP is very heavy. So if the BOP fell over, it would likely severely damage the structural integrity of the casing.

As Think Progress points out:

In a press teleconference Monday, National Incident Commander Thad Allen announced that the riser package is tilting “10 or 12 degrees off perpendicular,” twice the 5.5 degree tilt of the Leaning Tower of Pisa:

The entire arrangement is kind of listed a little bit. I think it’s 10 or 12 degrees off perpendicular so it’s not quite straight up.

As the Times-Picayune notes:

The integrity of the well has become a major topic of discussion among engineers and geologists.

"Everybody's worried about all of this. That's all people are talking about," said Don Van Nieuwenhuise, director of geoscience programs at University of Houston. He said the things that BP has being doing to try to stop the oil or gain control of it have been tantamount to repeatedly hitting the well with a hammer and sending shock waves down the pipe. "I don't think people realize how delicate it is."

"There is a very high level of concern for the integrity of the well," said Bob Bea, the University of California Berkeley engineering professor known to New Orleanians for investigating the levee failures after Katrina, who now has organized the Deepwater Horizon Study Group. Bea and other engineers say that BP hasn't released enough information publicly for people outside the company to evaluate the situation.
***

When wells are drilled, engineers send links of telescoping pipe down the hole, and those links are encased in cement. The telescoping pipe, called casing, unfolds like a radio antenna, only upside down, so the width of pipe gets smaller as the well gets deeper.

The cement and layers of casing are normally quite strong, Van Nieuwenhuise said. But with the BP well, there are several weak spots that the highly pressurized oil could exploit. BP ran out of casing sections before it hit the reservoir of oil, so it switched to using something called liner for the remainder of the well, which isn't as strong. The joints between two sections of liner pipe and the joint where the liner pipe meets the casing could be weak, Van Nieuwenhuise said.

Bill Gale, an engineer specializing in fires and explosions on oil rigs who is part of Bea's Deepwater Horizon Study Group, said the 16-inch wide casing contains disks that are designed to relieve pressure if necessary. If any of those disks popped, it could create undesirable new avenues for the oil to flow.

Bea said there are also concerns about the casing at the seabed right under the blowout preventer.

Van Nieuwenhuise said he's never actually heard of oil from a blown out well rupturing the casing and bubbling up through the ocean floor. He would consider that an unlikely, worst-case scenario.

A more likely problem, he said, is that oil could find its way into open spaces in the casing string, known as the annulus, and travel up the well in areas where it isn't supposed to be. This scenario could be one reason why more oil than expected is flowing at the containment cap that BP installed earlier this month to collect the oil.

Bea is more concerned about the worst-case scenario than Van Nieuwnhuise. In an answer to a question, Bea said, "Yes," there is reason to think that hydrocarbons are leaking from places in the well other than the containment cap.

"The likelihood of failure is extremely high," Bea said. "We could have multiple losses of containment, and that's going to provide much more difficult time of trying to capture this (oil)."

Meanwhile, observers monitoring the video feeds from the robotic vehicles working on the sea floor have noticed BP measuring a tilt in the 40-ton blowout preventer stack with a level and a device called an inclinometer.

***

Bea said BP isn't sharing enough information for others to know. If there is oil and gas escaping from the sides of the well, it could erode the sediments around the well and eat away at the support for all the heavy equipment that sits above. Bea said reports that BP is using an inclinometer is significant news. "It tells me that they are also concerned," he said.

Here are videos of BP measuring the tilt of the BOP.

While the BOP weighs 40 tons, the riser package as a whole weighs over 450 tons. If the BOP and riser package fell over, it would inflict severe damage to the attached well casing.

The Houston Chronicle reports:

Money-saving measures BP took while designing the Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico appear to have dogged efforts to bring the massive oil spill under control.

Documents released by congressional investigators show that modifications to the well design BP made last year included a reduction in the thickness of a section of the casing — steel piping in the wellbore

The modification included a slight reduction in the specified thickness for the wall of a 16-inch-diameter section of pipe toward the bottom of the well, according to a May 14, 2009, document.

***

The condition of the well also limits how much oil and gas can flow into containment systems now being used successfully to capture some of the flow. Even if a vessel could capture all the hydrocarbons gushing from the well, some would have to be released to keep well pressure under control.

Marvin Odum, president of Houston-based Shell Oil, the U.S. arm of Royal Dutch Shell, told the Houston Chronicle last week that the integrity of the well casing is a major concern. Odum and others from the industry regularly sit in on high-level meetings with BP and government officials about the spill.

If the well casing burst it could send oil and gas streaming through the strata to appear elsewhere on the sea floor, or create a crater underneath the wellhead - a device placed at the top of the well where the casing meets the seafloor - that would destabilize it and the blowout preventer.

The steel casing used in oil wells is strong, said Gene Beck, petroleum engineering professor at Texas A&M, but pressures deep in a well are powerful enough to split strong steel pipe or "crush it like a beer can."

The strength and thickness of casing walls are key decisions in well design, he said. If the BP well's casing wasn't strong enough, it may already be split or could split during a containment effort.

BP spokesman Toby Odone said the decision to reduce the pipe thickness was made after careful review. The company said it doesn't know the condition of the well casing and has no way of inspecting it.

BP is drilling two relief wells to intercept the Macondo well near the reservoir and plug it with cement. A rupture in the Macondo well casing probably wouldn't affect that effort, said Donald Van Nieuwenhuise, director of geoscience programs at the University of Houston.

"When they start the bottom kill the cement will try to follow oil wherever it's escaping, so it would actually hide a lot of sins in the well bore," Van Nieuwenhuise said.

So far there are no signs that the section of the pipe below the sea floor is leaking.

The blowout preventer has been listing slightly since the accident, but officials believe that may have happened when the Deepwater Horizon sank while still attached to the well via a pipe called a riser.

***

But the longer the well flows uncontrolled the more likely it is that the well casing could be damaged or the blowout preventer damaged further. Sand and other debris that flows through the pipes at high velocity can wear through metal over time, said Van Nieuwenhuise.

The chances of the well eroding from underneath and the blowout preventer tipping may seem unlikely.
"But everything about this well has been unlikely," said David Pursell, an analyst with Tudor Pickering Holt & Co

Indeed, oil industry expert Rob Cavner says that he wouldn't be surprised if the BOP ended up falling over entirely:

http://georgewashington2.blogspot.com/20...g-and.html

[Peter Lemkin]

Gulf Methane Levels 1 Million Times Above Normal Are Depleting Oxygen And Creating Marine Dead Zones
from zero hedge by Tyler Durden

http://www.zerohedge.com/article/gulf-me...gle+Reader


Reuters is so not getting the administration's latest round of taxpayer bail out funding when mainstream media comes knocking on Obama's door looking for handouts. The media company has shockingly decided to release some of the truth about the biosystematic genocide currently happening in the Gulf: "As much as 1 million times the normal level of methane gas has been found in some regions near the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, enough to potentially deplete oxygen and create a dead zone, U.S. scientists said on Tuesday. Texas A&M University oceanography professor John Kessler, just back from a 10-day research expedition near the BP Plc oil spill in the gulf, says methane gas levels in some areas are "astonishingly high." Luckily, America is gradually realizing that the entire food chain in the southeast is about to be turned around on its head, leading to a massive and unprecedented ecological disaster, which will certainly wipe out thousands of species and result in not only a surge in unemployment (that's a given) but outright loss of life (at statistically significant levels), and the anger is mounting. Perhaps the one good thing to come out of the worst ecological disaster in world history will be the sudden, and jarring awakening from the generational slumber for most of America, and a long overdue overhaul of a broken political and economic system.

More from Reuters:

Kessler's crew took measurements of both surface and deep water within a 5-mile (8 kilometer) radius of BP's broken wellhead.

"There is an incredible amount of methane in there," Kessler told reporters in a telephone briefing.

In some areas, the crew of 12 scientists found concentrations that were 100,000 times higher than normal.

"We saw them approach a million times above background concentrations" in some areas, Kessler said.

The scientists were looking for signs that the methane gas had depleted levels of oxygen dissolved in the water needed to sustain marine life.

"At some locations, we saw depletions of up to 30 percent of oxygen based on its natural concentration in the waters. At other places, we saw no depletion of oxygen in the waters. We need to determine why that is," he told the briefing.

Methane occurs naturally in sea water, but high concentrations can encourage the growth of microbes that gobble up oxygen needed by marine life.

Kessler said oxygen depletions have not reached a critical level yet, but the oil is still spilling into the Gulf, now at a rate of as much as 60,000 barrels a day, according to U.S. government estimates.

"What is it going to look like two months down the road, six months down the road, two years down the road?" he asked.

No commentary necessary, suffice it to say we sincerely urge Whitney Tilson to hedge his BP holdings with at least a few puts.

:dancing:

[Peter Lemkin]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/riki-ott/

She's done some very good work on BP controlling the news coming out of the Gulf and 'disappearing' dead animals, arresting those who try to take photos of what is really going on, etc

Orange Beach, Alabama -- While President Obama insists that the federal government is firmly in control of the response to BP's spill in the Gulf, people in coastal communities where I visited last week in Louisiana and Alabama know an inconvenient truth: BP -- not our president -- controls the response. In fact, people on the ground say things are out of control in the gulf.

Even worse, as my latest week of adventures illustrate, BP is using federal agencies to shield itself from public accountability.

For example, while flying on a small plane from New Orleans to Orange Beach, the pilot suddenly exclaimed, "Look at that!" The thin red line marking the federal flight restrictions of 3,000 feet over the oiled Gulf region had just jumped to include the coastal barrier islands off Alabama.



"There's only one reason for that," the pilot said. "BP doesn't want the media taking pictures of oil on the beaches. You should see the oil that's about six miles off the coast," he said grimly. We looked down at the wavy orange boom surrounding the islands below us. The pilot shook his head. "There's no way those booms are going to stop what's offshore from hitting those beaches."

BP knows this as well -- boom can only deflect oil under the calmest of sea conditions, not barricade it -- so they have stepped up their already aggressive effort to control what the public sees.

At the same time I was en route to Orange Beach, Clint Guidry with the Louisiana Shrimp Association and Dean Blanchard, who owns the largest shrimp processor in Louisiana, were in Grand Isle taking Anderson Cooper out in a small boat to see the oiled beaches. The U.S. Coast Guard held up the boat for 20 minutes - an intimidation tactic intended to stop the cameras from recording BP's damage. Luckily for Cooper and the viewing public, Dean Blanchard is not easily intimidated.



A few days later, the jig was up with the booms. Oil was making landfall in four states and even BP can't be everywhere at once. CBS 60 Minutes Australia found entire sections of boom hung up in marsh grasses two feet above the water off Venice. On the same day on the other side of Barataria Bay, Louisiana Bayoukeeper documented pools of oil and oiled pelicans inside the boom - on the supposedly protected landward side - of Queen Bess Island off Grand Isle.

With oil undisputedly hitting the beaches and the number of dead wildlife mounting, BP is switching tactics. In Orange Beach, people told me BP wouldn't let them collect carcasses. Instead, the company was raking up carcasses of oiled seabirds. "The heads separate from the bodies," one upset resident told me. "There's no way those birds are going to be autopsied. BP is destroying evidence!"

The body count of affected wildlife is crucial to prove the harm caused by the spill, and also serves as an invaluable tool to evaluate damages to public property - the dolphins, sea turtles, whales, sea birds, fish, and more, that are owned by the American public. Disappeared body counts means disappeared damages - and disappeared liability for BP. BP should not be collecting carcasses. The job should be given to NOAA, a federal agency, and volunteers, as was done during the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska.

NOAA should also be conducting carcass drift studies. Only one percent of the dead sea birds made landfall in the Gulf of Alaska, for example. That means for every one bird that was found, another 99 were carried out to sea by currents. Further, NOAA should be conducting aerial surveys to look for carcasses in the offshore rips where the currents converge. That's where the carcasses will pile up--a fact we learned during the Exxon Valdez spill. Maybe that's another reason for BP's "no camera" policy and the flight restrictions.



On Saturday June 12, people across America will stand up and speak out with one voice to protest BP's treatment of the Gulf, neglect for the response workers, and their response to government authority. President Obama needs to hear and see the people waving cameras and respirators. Until the media is allowed unrestricted access to the Gulf and impacted beaches, BP - not the President of United States - will remain in charge of the Gulf response..

[Magda Hassan]

BP Has Built An Artificial Island To Get Around Offshore Drilling Ban In Alaska




The offshore drilling moratorium that is falling apart in court already contains one major loophole -- and there's little surprise which company is threading the needle.
BP plans to begin drilling two miles under the sea just miles away from a delicate wildlife reserve in Alaska. The company will get around the deep-water moratorium by constructing an artificial island -- 31 acres of gravel -- and registering as an onshore rig.
Not exactly the safest operation, reports Rolling Stone:
Here's what BP has in store for the Arctic: First, the company will drill two miles beneath its tiny island, which it has christened "Liberty." Then, in an ingenious twist, it will drill sideways for another six to eight miles, until it reaches an offshore reservoir estimated to hold 105 million barrels of oil. This would be the longest "extended reach" well ever attempted, and the effort has required BP to push drilling technology beyond its proven limits. As the most powerful "land-based" oil rig ever built, Liberty requires special pipe to withstand the 105,000 foot-pounds of torque — the equivalent of 50 Mack truck engines — needed to turn the drill. "This is about as sexy as it gets," a top BP official boasted to reporters in 2008. BP, a repeat felon subject to record fines for its willful safety violations, calls the project "one of its biggest challenges to date" — an engineering task made even more dangerous by plans to operate year-round in what the company itself admits is "some of the harshest weather on Earth."
Don't expect the White House to crack down on the loophole. Just the opposite: Ken Salazar said yesterday he would issue a new version of the moratorium that could include provisions to allow drilling in areas where reserves and risks are known.
http://www.businessinsider.com/bp-libert...ska-2010-6

[Jan Klimkowski]

BP accused of killing endangered sea turtles in cleanup operation

Environmentalists press Obama administration to put a halt to BP's 'burn fields' to dispose of oil from the Gulf spill

Endangered sea turtles and other marine creatures are being corralled into 500 square-mile "burn fields" and burnt alive in operations intended to contain oil from BP's ruptured well in the Gulf of Mexico, the Obama administration confirmed today.

The killing of the turtles – which once teetered on the brink of extinction – has outraged environmentalists and could put BP into even deeper legal jeopardy.

Environmental organisations are demanding that the oil company stop blocking rescue of the turtles, and are pressing the US administration to halt the burning and look at prosecuting BP and its contractors for killing endangered species during the cleanup operation. Harming or killing a sea turtle carries fines of up to $50,000 (£33,000).

"It is criminal and cruel and they need to be held accountable," said Carole Allen, Gulf office director of the Sea Turtle Restoration Project. "There should not be another lighting of a fire of any kind till people have gone in there and looked for turtles."

The Obama administration, confirming the kills, said BP was under orders to avoid the turtles. "My understanding is that protocols include looking for wildlife prior to igniting of oil," a spokeswoman for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) said. "We take these things very seriously."

The agency this week posted a single turtle spotter on the burn vessels, but government scientists are pressing for more wildlife experts to try to rescue the animals before the oil is lit – or at the very least to give them access to the burn fields.

"One can't just ride through an area where they are burning and expect to be safe while looking for turtles. We don't expect that, but we would like to access those areas where we suspect there may be turtles," said Blair Witherington, a sea turtle research scientist at Florida's Fish and Wildlife Research Institute.

More than 425 turtles are known to have died in the spill zone since 30 April, Noaa said.

Conservationists say the losses could imperil the long-term survival of the creatures. All five species of turtles found in the Gulf are endangered or threatened: the Kemp's Ridley most of all.

But in a video posted on YouTube, Mike Ellis, a skipper from Venice, Louisiana, accuses BP of chasing away a boat of conservationists trying to rescue turtles caught in the oil and weed a few miles away from the leak.

"They ran us out of there and then they shut us down," said Ellis.

On days when the weather is fine and there is relatively no wind, BP conducts up to a dozen "controlled burns", torching vast expanses of the ocean surface within a corral of fireproof booms.

Biologists say such burns are deadly for young turtles because oil and sargassum – the seaweed mats that provide nutrients to jellyfish and a range of other creatures – – congregate in the same locations. The sargassum is also a perfect hunting ground for young sea turtles, who are not developed enough to dive to the ocean floor to forage for food.

Once BP moves in, the turtles are doomed. "They drag a boom between two shrimp boats and whatever gets caught between the two boats, they circle it up and catch it on fire. Once the turtles are in there, they can't get out," Ellis said.

The heartbreak for conservationists is that the convergence of sargassum and oil offers the best chance of finding young turtles before they suffocate on the crude. But it can also be deadly.

"When they breathe and come to the surface, they get a mouthful and a bellyful of toxic substance that is very much like wallpaper paste," said John Hewitt, the director of husbandry at the New Orleans aquarium. "If we don't remove them and clean them up, in three or four days that probably spells the end of the turtle."

Since the spill, the aquarium has taken in 90 sea turtles, scrubbing the oil off their shells with toothbrushes and washing-up liquid.

Even before the fires, the two-month gusher in the Gulf of Mexico was threatening the long-term survival of sea turtles.

"This is the worst calamity that I have ever seen for sea turtles," said David Godfrey, executive director of the Sea Turtle Conservancy. "This is really the cradle of sea turtle reproduction for the western hemisphere."The threat to the turtles could continue well after the gusher is capped. The oil spill is turning vast expanses of the Gulf into a dead zone, killing off the jellyfish, crabs and conches that are the staples of an adult diet.

Conservationists are also worried about the survival of the next generation of loggerhead turtles, which are about to climb up on to badly oiled shorelines to begin their nesting season. "They are doomed" said Godfrey.

Godfrey said his organisation was working on plans to dig up about 1,000 nests, or 100,000 eggs, from nesting grounds in the Florida Panhandle and transfer them to hatcheries for safekeeping. "It is a last gasp measure to save 100,000 young sea turtles," he said. "We need every one of these turtles to survive."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/20...ng-turtles

[Jan Klimkowski]

The Sunday Times: MI6 'Firm' Spied on Green Groups

By Maurice Chittenden and Nicholas Rufford

Published on Sunday, June 17, 2001

A PRIVATE intelligence firm with close links to MI6 spied on environmental campaign groups to collect information for oil companies, including Shell and BP.

MPs are to demand an inquiry by Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, into whether the secret intelligence service used the firm as a front to spy on green activists.

Insider reports effectively scuppered Greenpeace campaigns against oil firms in the Atlantic and the North Sea.

The firm's agent, who posed as a left-wing sympathizer and film maker, was asked to betray plans of Greenpeace's activities against oil giants.

He also tried to dupe Anita Roddick's Body Shop group to pass on information about its opposition to Shell drilling for oil in a Nigerian tribal land.

The Sunday Times has seen documents which show that the spy, German-born Manfred Schlickenrieder, was hired by Hakluyt, an agency that operates from offices in London's West End.

Schlickenrieder was known by the code name Camus and had worked for the German foreign intelligence service gathering information about terrorist groups, including the Red Army Faction.

He fronted a film production company called Gruppe 2, based in Munich, but he also worked in London and Zurich. His company was a one-man band with a video camera making rarely seen documentaries. He had been making an unfinished film about Italy's Red Brigade since 1985. Another of his alleged guises was as a civil servant of the Bavarian conservation agency in charge of listed buildings and monuments.

One of his assignments from Hakluyt was to gather information about the movements of the motor vessel Greenpeace in the north Atlantic. Greenpeace claims the scandal has echoes of the Rainbow Warrior affair, when its ship protesting against nuclear testing in the South Pacific was blown up by the French secret service in 1985. A Dutch photographer died in the explosion.

Both BP and Shell admit hiring Hakluyt, but say they were unaware of the tactics used. Shell said it had wanted to protect its employees against possible attack.

Schlickenrieder was hired by Mike Reynolds, a director of Hakluyt and MI6's former head of station in Germany. His cover was blown by a female colleague who had worked with him. Last night he refused to comment.

Reynolds and other MI6 executives left the intelligence service after the cold war ended to form Hakluyt in 1995. It was set up with the blessing of Sir David Spedding, the then chief of MI6, who died last week. Christopher James, the managing director, had been head of the MI6 section that liaised with British firms.

The firm, which takes its name from Richard Hakluyt, the Elizabethan geographer, assembled a foundation board of directors from the Establishment to oversee its activities, including Sir Fitzroy Maclean, Ian Fleming's model for James Bond. Baroness Smith, the widow of John Smith, the late Labour leader, was a director until the end of last year.

The company has close links to the oil industry through Sir Peter Cazalet, the former deputy chairman of BP, who helped to establish Hakluyt before he retired, last year, and Sir Peter Holmes, former chairman of Shell, who is president of its foundation.

MPs believe the affair poses serious questions about the blurring of the divisions between the secret service, a private intelligence company and the interests of big companies. Hakluyt refutes claims by some in the intelligence community that it was started by MI6 officers to carry out "deniable" operations.

Norman Baker, home affairs spokesman for the Liberal Democrats, called on Straw to make a statement. "The fact that this organization [Hakluyt] is staffed by people with close ties to MI6 suggests this was semi-official," he said.

Rod Macrae, communications director of Greenpeace International, said: "We are aware of the budgets these big companies have at their disposal to get information. The use of a friendly film maker may sound bizarre but if you go back to when Rainbow Warrior was sunk, one of the French agents appeared in our New Zealand office as a volunteer."

Hakluyt was reluctant to discuss its activities. Michael Maclay, one of the agency's directors and a former special adviser to Douglas Hurd when he was Conservative foreign minister, said: "We don't ever talk about anything we do. We never go into any details of what we may or what we may not be doing."

How Agent Camus Sank Greenpeace Oil Protests

WITH his shoulder-length hair tumbling over the collar of a leather jacket and clutching a video camera, Manfred Schlickenrieder cut a familiar figure among left-wing political parties and environmental groups across Europe for almost 20 years.

Whenever there was a campaign being organized, he was there to make a "sympathetic" documentary.

His political credentials seemed impeccable: he had once been chairman of the Munich branch of the German Communist party and the bookshelves of his office held the works of Bertolt Brecht, the Marxist playwright and poet.

One step ahead: Schlickenrieder had the right credentials

Behind the facade, however, Schlickenrieder was a spy working for both the German secret service and for Hakluyt, a private intelligence agency based in London's West End and set up by former officers of MI6, the secret intelligence service. His codename was Camus after Albert Camus, the existentialist author of L'Etranger.

Hakluyt paid him thousands of pounds to inform on the activities of Greenpeace, Anita Roddick's Body Shop and other environmental campaigners. The BND, the German equivalent of MI6, allegedly paid him £3,125 a month living expenses.

The rewards of espionage brought him a spacious flat overlooking a park in Munich and a BMW Z3, the sports car driven by Pierce Brosnan in GoldenEye.

The spying operation for Hakluyt began in April 1996, when Mike Reynolds, one of the agency's directors and a former MI6 head of station in Germany, was asked by Shell to find out who was orchestrating threats against its petrol forecourts across Europe.

The threats followed an outcry over the oil giant's attempts in 1995 to dump the disused Brent Spar oil platform at sea and allegations of environmental damage caused by its oil drilling in Ogoniland, Nigeria.

Schlickenrieder approached environmental groups and far-left organizations including Revolutionärer Aufbau, a Zurichbased communist group. He was finally betrayed to the group by a female colleague.

Last week Shell confirmed it was Hakluyt's client until December 1996. The company said that some of its petrol stations in Germany had been firebombed or shot at. "We did talk to Hakluyt about what intelligence they could gather," said Mike Hogan, director of media relations at Shell UK.

In May 1997, Reynolds asked the German spy for information on whether there were legal moves within Greenpeace to protect its assets against sequestration in the event of it being sued by an oil company. Two months later, Greenpeace occupied BP's Stena Dee oil installation off the Shetland islands in an unsuccessful publicity stunt to stop oil drilling in a new part of the Atlantic. Schlickenrieder sent a report saying that Greenpeace was disappointed with its campaign.

He sent an invoice to Hakluyt on June 6, 1997, billing the agency for DM20,000 (£6,250) for "Greenpeace research".

Commercial target: Anita Roddick's Body Shop campaigns were monitored carefully. Photograph: Mike Lawn

BP confirmed it had hired Hakluyt, but said it had asked the company to compile a report based only on published sources of information. BP has longstanding links with MI6. John Gerson, BP's director of government and public affairs, was at one time a leading candidate to succeed Sir David Spedding as head of MI6.

Schlickenrieder continued working for Hakluyt until 1999. He made a film on Shell in Nigeria called Business as Usual: the Arrogance of Power, during which he interviewed friends of Ken Saro-Wiwa, the Nobel prize nominee, who was hanged by the military regime in 1995 after leading a campaign against oil exploration.

Schlickenrieder sent a letter to a Body Shop executive saying he had been researching the activities of Shell in Nigeria, and asked about plans for further activities. Greenpeace said yesterday that Schlickenrieder's activities had effectively sunk its campaign against BP's oil exploration in the Atlantic.

Fouad Hamdan, communications director of Greenpeace Germany, said: "The bastard was good, I have to admit.

"He got information about our planned Atlantic Frontier campaign to focus on the climate change issue and the responsibility of BP. BP knew everything. They were not taken by surprise." He added: "Manfred filmed and interviewed all the time, but now we realize we never saw anything."

Copyright 2001 Times Newspapers Ltd.

http://www.shellnews.net/2004%20Document...8april.htm

[Magda Hassan]

Stupak: BP Won't Let House Panel Talk to Employees


House investigations panel chairman says BP refusing to let his panel question some employees


The Associated Press
2 comments
By HARRY R. WEBER AP Business Writer

ATLANTA June 25, 2010 (AP)


The chairman of a House panel investigating the Gulf oil spill said Friday that BP won't let members talk to several employees who may have critical information about what led to the catastrophe.
Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Mich., told The Associated Press that BP PLC has cited its own investigation as its reason for denying access to the employees.
BP spokesman David Nicholas said in an e-mail that BP "has not objected to providing access to any of the specific BP employees that the committee has requested, and we continue to cooperate with the committee." He would not elaborate.
BP was leasing and operating the Deepwater Horizon rig when it exploded April 20, killing 11 workers and blowing out the well that has now gushed as much as 131.5 million gallons of oil into the Gulf.
"They have been slow in bringing forth documents and witnesses we want to talk to," Stupak said of BP.
He also said information gathered so far shows it could be difficult for the government to prosecute anyone for the spill because of vague environmental laws and other challenges.

"And remember, in a criminal case you have to prove intent," he said. "That's very, very difficult in a situation like this."
Stupak said there are a half-dozen people his committee wants to question, but hasn't been able to. Stupak, chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee's Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, did not say whether some of those people work for companies other than BP that were involved with the Deepwater Horizon.
He also said he isn't ready to issue subpoenas yet.
Among the people Stupak's committee wants to talk to is BP well site leader Donald Vidrine, one of the top two BP officials on the Deepwater Horizon at the time of the blast.
Vidrine was scheduled to testify earlier this month at a hearing in Kenner, La., where government investigators were questioning rig workers. But Vidrine had a health problem and didn't testify, a Coast Guard official said at the time.
Vidrine told investigators three days after the explosion that at one point before the blast he had a call from the rig floor and that there was a problem "getting mud back" from the well. Some time later, there was an explosion, he said.

Stupak described Vidrine as an "important piece" of the puzzle as investigators try to determine what happened.
Vidrine has repeatedly declined to speak to the AP, and BP has ignored several requests for information on his status with the company.
http://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory?id=11015587

[Peter Lemkin]

Stupak: BP Won't Let House Panel Talk to Employees


House investigations panel chairman says BP refusing to let his panel question some employees


The Associated Press
2 comments
By HARRY R. WEBER AP Business Writer

ATLANTA June 25, 2010 (AP)


The chairman of a House panel investigating the Gulf oil spill said Friday that BP won't let members talk to several employees who may have critical information about what led to the catastrophe.
Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Mich., told The Associated Press that BP PLC has cited its own investigation as its reason for denying access to the employees.
BP spokesman David Nicholas said in an e-mail that BP "has not objected to providing access to any of the specific BP employees that the committee has requested, and we continue to cooperate with the committee." He would not elaborate.
BP was leasing and operating the Deepwater Horizon rig when it exploded April 20, killing 11 workers and blowing out the well that has now gushed as much as 131.5 million gallons of oil into the Gulf.
"They have been slow in bringing forth documents and witnesses we want to talk to," Stupak said of BP.
He also said information gathered so far shows it could be difficult for the government to prosecute anyone for the spill because of vague environmental laws and other challenges.

"And remember, in a criminal case you have to prove intent," he said. "That's very, very difficult in a situation like this."
Stupak said there are a half-dozen people his committee wants to question, but hasn't been able to. Stupak, chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee's Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, did not say whether some of those people work for companies other than BP that were involved with the Deepwater Horizon.
He also said he isn't ready to issue subpoenas yet.
Among the people Stupak's committee wants to talk to is BP well site leader Donald Vidrine, one of the top two BP officials on the Deepwater Horizon at the time of the blast.
Vidrine was scheduled to testify earlier this month at a hearing in Kenner, La., where government investigators were questioning rig workers. But Vidrine had a health problem and didn't testify, a Coast Guard official said at the time.
Vidrine told investigators three days after the explosion that at one point before the blast he had a call from the rig floor and that there was a problem "getting mud back" from the well. Some time later, there was an explosion, he said.

Stupak described Vidrine as an "important piece" of the puzzle as investigators try to determine what happened.
Vidrine has repeatedly declined to speak to the AP, and BP has ignored several requests for information on his status with the company.
http://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory?id=11015587

What is strange is that the House has all the authority it needs to compel anyone in the USA to speak under penalty of perjury or refusing to answer a subpoena of Congress , if they want.....but as the big Corporations run the Congress and rest of the Government, perhaps they are backing off from asking embarrassing questions of their Masters. Won't be the first time; nor the thousandth....