President Obama is doing stomach stimulus this week as he eats his way across the Midwest, but exactly a year ago he had more riding on the presidential palate as he ate his way across the Gulf of Mexico coast, trying to revive the region's tourism and seafood industries one shrimp po' boy at a time.
Big energy companies have set up shop to tap the Marcellus Shale, a massive chunk of marine sedimentary rock stretching from the Finger Lakes region of New York as far south as Kentucky and Tennessee, holding within its subterranean grip vast deposits of natural gas.
A provocative documentary screened Tuesday at the Cannes Film Festival argues that the human and environmental devastation of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill has been covered up by authorities eager to return to business as usual.
BP PLC's subsidiary in Alaska has agreed to pay a $25 million civil penalty as part of a settlement for spilling more than 200,000 gallons of crude oil from company pipelines on the North Slope in 2006.
The first nightmare for John and Kathy Struchen, owners of Lanier Sailing Academy in Pensacola, Fla., was the fear of what could happen — tar balls washing up on shore, black sludge invading bay inlets — after the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded exactly a year ago off the coast of Louisiana.
Oil prices soared and global stocks plunged Monday on signs that Libya, a major exporter, will cut oil production amid spreading violence and unrest.
The Gulf of Mexico should largely recover from BP's oil spill within three years, and all settlement offers to victims who lost revenue from the disaster will be based on that assessment, the administrator of the $20 billion compensation fund said Wednesday.
BP PLC said Tuesday it is resuming dividend payouts for the first time since the Gulf of Mexico well disaster and announced plans to sell off almost half of its U.S. refinery business, including the Texas City facility where 15 workers died in a massive explosion in 2005.
Months of investigation by a presidential commission and other panels have heightened the likelihood that companies involved in the Gulf oil spill will be slapped with criminal charges that could add tens of billions of dollars to the huge fines they already face, legal experts said Thursday.
