(Demotivator by William Benhoff, from a photo by Mark and Vicki Cipolle)

Almost from the outset of the Deepwater Horizon disaster on April 20, BP has insisted that this wasn't its accident. Now, after four months of investigating itself, BP appears to have arrived at more or less the same conclusion. From the executive summary of BP's report (pdf):

The team did not identify any single action or inaction that caused this accident. Rather, a complex and interlinked series of mechanical failures, human judgments, engineering design, operational implementation and team interfaces came together to allow the initiation and escalation of the accident. Multiple companies, work teams and circumstances were involved over time.

The BP report comes with video and appendices and will take a little while to read. Go for it.

If you're in this for what's going to happen next, you can get that in one word: Lawsuits. BP partner Transocean bit back, right away with this statement:

This is a self-serving report that attempts to conceal the critical factor that set the stage for the Macondo incident: BP's fatally flawed well design. In both its design and construction, BP made a series of cost-saving decisions that increased risk - in some cases, severely. Those decisions, made exclusively by BP, included:

Using a long production string rather than a casing tie back, decreasing the number of barriers to gas flow.

Neglecting to run a cement bond log (CBL) to test the integrity of the cement.

Installing fewer than one third of the recommended number of centralizers, dramatically increasing the risk of cement channeling and gas flow.

Failing to conduct a complete "bottoms up" circulation of the well to insure the quality of the cement seal.

Not running a lockdown sleeve to secure the production string to the well head, eliminating yet another barrier to a blowout.

Transocean's investigation is ongoing, and will be concluded when all of the evidence is in, including the critical information the company has requested of BP but has yet to receive.

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On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Martin Feldman struck down the Obama administration's six-month moratorium on deepwater drilling. A review of Judge Feldman's 2009 Financial Disclosure Report (pdf) shows that Feldman is significantly invested in BP, which is on the hook for the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

The latest information that we have available shows that Judge Feldman holds investments in several funds run by Blackrock, which holds a billion shares of BP. Blackrock is BP's largest single shareholder. Judge Feldman discloses a financial interest in Blackrock's Floating Rate Income Strategies Fund, the Limited Duration Income Trust and the Enhanced Dividend Achievers Trust. He lists each of these Blackrock investments as having a value of up to $15,000.

At least some of the value is in BP stock. The latest SEC filing for Blackrock Enhanced Dividend Achievers Trust, for example, shows it had money in BP.

Feldman's energy holdings include some 17 companies in the industry. His disclosure form for 2008 showed he owned and sold stock in Transocean, which owned the Deepwater Horizon rig. Within the last year, he also held stock in a company called Noble Corporation. Noble is currently operating two drilling rigs in the Gulf of Mexico that are sitting idle because of this drilling ban. For one of those rigs, the ban costs Noble roughly $459,000 per day. Feldman reports selling those shares last year.

Then there's Exxon-Mobil, which also has a Gulf rig idled by the moratorium. Judge Feldman owned Exxon stock on Tuesday, making a special note of it on his financial disclosure reportL "The Exxon stock ... was sold at the opening of the stock market on June 22, 2010, prior to the opening of a Court hearing on the Oil Spill Moratorium case." That was the day he made his ruling to overturn this moratorium.

When Feldman began hearings on the case -- and right up until the day of the ruling -- he remained an Exxon shareholder, ruling on a case that would affect the financial future of a company he held stock in.

Judge Feldman's office told us today that the judge says didn't learn he was an Exxon shareholder until Monday night. He instructed his stockbroker to sell his shares the next day.

The district court in Louisiana on which Judge Feldman sits reportedly has systems in place to catch conflicts of interest like this. Apparently those systems work about as well as a blowout preventer on a 5000-foot-deep well.

[Full segment]

An oiled northern gannet gets cleaned in Alabama. Coast Guard photo.

Transocean has two rigs drilling the pair of relief wells for BP's Deepwater Horizon, the Development Driller II and the Development Driller III.

We know now the Deepwater Horizon carried only one of a crucial and troublesome piece of safety equipment, the blind shear ram. We also know that relief wells can be just as dangerous as the originals.

A Transocean description of the Development Driller III has more than one blind shear ram. Overall though, the description is a list of blanks compared to the one for the Development Driller II. And then there's the very complete description of the Deepwater Horizon, for all the good that did us. Here we go, diving into the details. More on this later.

From the New York Times

When everything else on a deepwater oil rig goes wrong, a part called the "blind shear ram" is supposed to sever the pipe and seal it shut. That part failed on the Deepwater Horizon, and the rest is miserable, miserable history.

The New York Times today, in some of the best technical and investigative reporting so far, reveals the panic among BP and Transocean engineers as they tried desperately, for hours and then days after the April 20 explosion, to get the two pinchers to shut. One of them would and one of them wouldn't and the oil hasn't stopped gushing yet.

The worst part is that everyone involved either knew or should have known that blowout preventers and parts like blind shear rams often fail -- everyone including BP and Transocean and the rest of the oil industry and the government that was supposed to oversee it. Everyone knew. From the New York Times:

In 2001, just as BP and Transocean were pressing the Deepwater Horizon into service, the Minerals Management Service was being warned against allowing deepwater rigs to operate with only one blind shear ram. The agency had commissioned a study that documented more than 100 failures during testing of blowout preventers.

"All subsea B.O.P. stacks used for deepwater drilling should be equipped with two blind shear rams," said the report, written by the SINTEF Group, a Scandinavian research organization that advises the oil industry and maintains detailed records on blowouts around the world.

The agency made no such requirement. Indeed, it waited until 2003 to require even one blind shear ram.

In some ways, Transocean was ahead of the industry. By now, almost all of its rigs have two -- but not the Deepwater Horizon.

By 2001, when Transocean, now the world's largest offshore drilling contractor, acquired the Deepwater Horizon, it had already begun equipping its new rigs with blowout preventers that could easily accommodate two blind shear rams. . . . But neither Transocean nor BP took steps to outfit the Deepwater Horizon's blowout preventer with two blind shear rams.

The two companies blame each other for the decision to not carry a backup. And the Minerals Management Service, despite paying for studies that showed blind shear rams and the rest of blowout preventers are notorious for failing, would tell the Coast Guard that it left the whole question to the oil companies themselves.

"So my understanding," Captain Nguyen said, "is that it is designed to industry standard, manufactured by industry, installed by industry, with no government witnessing oversight of the construction or the installation. Is that correct?"

"That would be correct," Mr. Saucier said.

Go read this story, in bits or all at once. It's long, and it can be difficult, and it matters.

The Deepwater Horizon, before you heard of it.

From the New York Times' Green blog:

The [Deepwater Horizon] rig was registered in the Marshall Islands, once administered by the United States under a United Nations mandate but now an independent republic. Mr. Oberstar said that it took two to three weeks for the Coast Guard to inspect a vessel or rig with a United States flag, but four to eight hours for a foreign-flag vessel or rig.

In questioning, Steven Newman, the president and chief executive of Transocean, which owned the rig, said the company had 15 "mobile offshore drilling units" in United States waters. "I believe they're all foreign flagged,'' he said.

Transocean itself is based in Switzerland.

Coast Guard inspection of a rig flying a US flag? Two-three weeks.

Coast Guard inspection of a rig flying, say, the flag of the Marshall Islands? Four-eight hours.

So the Houston-based oil company (Transocean) that says it's based in Switzerland, for tax purposes, puts foreign flags on all 15 of the rigs they've got drilling in the U.S.

U.S.A! U.S.A!

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At a hearing on Capitol Hill yesterday, executives from BP, Transocean and Halliburton took turns explaining why their companies couldn't possibly be blamed for the Deepwater Horizon disaster. Guest host Chris Hayes calls it the Shaggy Defense, after the singer Shaggy's "It Wasn't Me."

While the oil execs blame someone, anyone else, oil from the collapsed rig continues pouring into the Gulf of Mexico and the fishing industries of the region are at a standstill.

Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ) tells Hayes the reasoning behind his bill to raise the liability of big oil interests for the harm they do local economies from $75 million to $10 billion. Menendez:

[W]e need to do this because as they play the blame game, we want to make sure that people are made whole....[R]ight now, for example, B.P. has only a $75 million liability. That's beyond the cleanup, of course. They'll have to clean up.

But when commercial fishermen are harmed, when shrimp fishermen are harmed, when seafood processing plants are harmed, when those coastal communities lose tourism and on and on and on, their liability is $75 million. That's ridiculous. So, we want to raise to that to $10 billion.

And considering that B.P. made $5.6 billion in profit, not proceeds, profits, in the first three months of this year alone, I think they can afford to pay it.

[Oil companies as good at passing bucks as they are at making them]
[Kent Jones: How to stanch an oil volcano]
[Ideas and hopes for plugging the gusher]

Big oil is really, really big here. Tonight at 9 PM, we'll have a special show live from Venice, Louisiana, all about the Deepwater Horizon disaster. Slideshow from the trip is after the jump.

BP, which leased the Deepwater Horizon oil rig from Transocean, has been trying to contain the legal disaster as well as the natural one.

Today, U.S. District Judge Ginger Berrigan struck down part of a charter contract between Louisiana fisherman and BP. The oil company was asking local fisherman, who've been put out of work by the oil disaster, to sign off an agreement saying they wouldn't talk about what they saw without approval from BP, among other provisions.

In Alabama, BP representatives asked people in Bayou La Batre to sign away their right to sue in exchange for $5,000. Alabama Attorney General Troy King told them the BP reps they should stop doing that and encouraged local people to talk to a lawyer first.

BP and its partners in the Deepwater Horizon may have a financial disaster on their hands, too. Transocean, which owned the well, Halliburton, which has been accused of improperly capping it, and BP have all seen their stock fall since the explosion last week.

Photos by producer Rebekah Dryden.