BP, or British Petroleum as Mr. Obama likes to call them, today announced that they had succeeded in capping off the leak in the gulf of Mexico. This will hopefully be a great bit of news for what is a very important eco-system and for the UK's premier company. it will take a couple of days to know if it has worked but hopefully we are on the way to a solution. It appears that as the leak is around a mile deep (deeper than any human can operate.) they had to use small remote control robots to do the work, which leads to the question, was this inevitable? we have increased our demand to such a high extent and exhausted all easily retrievable supplies that we are forcing these countries to operate at the very limits of scientific possibility, maybe in fact it the consumers fault.
I have to admit however that I feel Barak Obama and other Americans have been very unfair to BP on this one, obviously this is an issue that needs prompt, swift and decisive action but I have not seen anything from Tony Haywood (CEO of BP) that suggests that they haven't provided exactly this. Mr. Haywood and his team have relocated to the US to ensure that they are on hand to deal with this disaster and BP have attempted a great deal of solutions for this problem, which seems to be at odds with the impressions the Americans want for this "greedy oil" company. I am sure this is in no way lead by America's own "caring, sharing" oil companies who donate so much each year to various politicians.
Anyway, there is a question to if this will destroy BP, personally my uninformed view is that they should be ok, It is predicted to have cost the firm £1bn so far, when you consider they had profits last year of £13bn and gave £10bn in dividends to share holders, they should be alright. A bigger risk could be from a take over bid, most likely run by the aforementioned American Oil Companies.
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