BP Moves To Resume Deep Water Drilling As Transocean Gives Bonuses To Top Executives For “Best Year” In Safety Performance

The Obama Administration is in talks with BP over the resumption of deep water drilling after the President’s call for more drilling of oil and more coal development. They could have an agreement before the one year anniversary of the April 20 blowout on the Deep water Horizon rig. In the meantime, Transocean Ltd. gave its top executives bonuses for achieving the “best year in safety performance in our company’s history” — despite the explosion killed nine of its own employees and spilled 200 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

The Obama Administration quickly moved after the disaster to try to restart its plan to drill in pristine areas of the East Coast. The President has been pushing for more oil and coal development despite his pledge during the campaign to focus on renewable energy sources.

For Transocean, last year was wonderful in terms of safety. The total bonus for CEO Steve Newman last year was $374,062. This was the bonus part of his overall compensation package was $5.8 million.

As the article below discusses, a commission found that the explosion was caused in part by “a series of time and money-saving decisions by Transocean, BP and oil services company Halliburton Inc.”

Source: MSNBC