Judge dismisses Taylor Energy lawsuit against company cleaning up its oil leak
BY TRISTAN BAURICK | STAFF WRITER
SEP 1, 2020 - 8:00 AM
A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit filed by Taylor Energy against the Belle Chasse contractor the federal government hired to clean up Taylor’s long-running oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico.
U.S. District Court Judge Judge Greg Guidry ruled on Aug. 21 that contractor Couvillion Group has legal immunity while performing work ordered by the federal government. …
Taylor is also suing the Coast Guard over its order for the New Orleans oil company to halt what had become one of the largest and longest-running oil disasters in U.S. history.
After Taylor challenged the order, the Coast Guard hired Couvillion to do the job. …
Taylor’s lawsuit against Couvillion asserted the contractor had no authority to conduct work at its well site. (Thought they refuse to do anything about the leak. They also report the leak at about 2 gallons a day, when a thousand is being currently harvested from the leak.)
“Given Taylor Energy’s responsibility to contain the spill and failure to meet this responsibility for more than 15 years, Taylor Energy’s claims against Couvillion represented nothing more than another effort to shirk its obligations," a Couvillion spokesperson said.
The Longest-Running Offshore Oil Spill You’ve Never Heard About
The Taylor oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is a cautionary tale
But nothing is to be done about the utter malicious stupid disregard for our biosphere and the fact that it’s our freak’n life support system we are destroying. This is what happens when profits, power and gluttony, blinds human rationality and creates psychopaths out of sociopaths.
Where are the Regs Cc? Democrats putting up more Regs??
The Taylor Oil was suing the Coast Guard because the Coast Guard decided to clean up the mess that Taylor Oil lies about, and wants to ignore, and that's the best you can come up with. Pathetic.
What about the oil industry doing all they can to demonize and circumvent regulations intended to protect people and our biosphere?
NOAA - Taylor Energy
Oil Spill | Gulf of Mexico off Mississippi River Delta | September 2004
New Estimate for an Oil Leak: A Thousand Times Worse Than Rig Owner Says
By Lisa Friedman - June 25, 2019
www. nytimes. com/2019/06/25/climate/taylor-energy-gulf-of-mexico. html
WASHINGTON — A new federal study has found that an oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico that began 14 years ago has been releasing as much as 4,500 gallons a day, not three or four gallons a day as the rig owner has claimed.
Joan Meiners, The Times-Picayune and The Advocate, Dec. 27, 2019,
How Oil Companies Avoided Environmental Accountability After 10.8 Million Gallons Spilled
Louisiana still hasn’t finished investigating 540 oil spills after Hurricane Katrina. The state is likely leaving millions of dollars in remediation fines on the table — money that environmental groups say they need as storms get stronger. …
It’s nothing more than corporate greed and lack of caring for the earth, other animals, the environment, the water everyone drinks on the planet, and even concern for the human animal’s habitat. I had an uncle who was the foreman on the Alaskan pipeline in the early 80s. He promised me he wouldn’t let any oil spill and during that time, there was no spillage, but the pipeline is still very dangerous to everything I listed above and they keep wanting more pipelines, not caring if they kill non-human lifeforms or even humans, as long as they make money. They lie and lie and lie, and then get upset if someone attempts to clean up their mess and expose their lies.
Therein lies the problem. The greedy corporations pay off greedy representatives and senators so that there are no regs. Case in point is Moscow Mitch (big anti-solar and wind power) and Boy Blunt-head (who supports big tobacco too).
Since taking office, Trump has aggressively sought to roll back environmental regulations, particularly those seen as an obstacle to business. According to an analysis by The New York Times that was updated a month ago, the administration has revised or eliminated more than 90 environmental rules in the past three years, although several were reinstated following legal challenges and several others are still in the courts.
What is the Halliburton loophole?
A loophole signed into law during the Bush administration has been fiendishly tough to close.
MATT DAVIS,…25 June, 2019
In 2005, the 109th United States Congress passed the Energy Policy Act. Like any major bill, its provisions ranged from the useful (like authorizing tax credits for alternative energy producers), the questionably effective (like extending daylight savings time for a few weeks), and the downright counterproductive (like incentivizing the use of coal as an energy source).
The act also included an exemption that fell firmly in the latter category that would later become known as the Halliburton loophole. This loophole amended the Safe Drinking Water Act — a major tool the EPA uses to keep our drinking water clean — to provide an exemption for the fluids used in hydraulic fracturing (or fracking). As a result, the EPA does not have the legal authority to regulate fracking fluids.
This exemption came to be as a result of a recommendation by the Energy Task Force, an organization formed by then-President George Bush and headed by then-Vice President Dick Cheney, former CEO of Halliburton, which coincidentally also first patented fracking and is the largest provider of fracking services in the world. Hence, the "Halliburton loophole."
What effects has fracking had?
The last major review of fracking was conducted by the EPA in 2016. Between 2006 and 2012, the EPA collected reports on 151 separate spills from 11 states, with the amount of spilled fluid ranging from just 5 gallons to over 19,000 gallons. Not all of these were just water or the mixed fracking fluid, either: some of these spills "were often described as acids, biocides, friction reducers, crosslinkers, gels, and blended hydraulic fracturing fluid, but few specific chemicals were mentioned."
Furthermore, 13 of these 151 spills were observed to have reached surface waters. However, the report authors warn that even spills that occurred far from a known body of water may have seeped into the ground and polluted the groundwater if they occurred on more permeable soil.
Even if the fluid is handled appropriately, it’s still ultimately being blasted into the earth. The targets of fracking are often far below groundwater resources, but faulty boreholes can leak fracking fluids into near-surface groundwater.
In any case, there is evidence that fracking fluids have polluted groundwater before: Bainbridge Township in Ohio's drinking water became polluted with methane after a fracking operation; fracking fluids were found in the water in Killdeer, North Dakota, and 133 additional instances throughout Texas where towns' water supply were polluted with methane. Numerous other examples of chemicals linked to fracking practices finding their way into drinking water exist.
2004 incident folks. What Regs did obama introduce to ensure oil companies have fully funded emergency management plans as part of thier operating licence and stop them outsourcing thier responsibility?
In any case, there is evidence that fracking fluids have polluted groundwater before: Bainbridge Township in Ohio’s drinking water became polluted with methane after a fracking operation;
Yes. Flammable water. I remember the news reports.
