Every hour so far in 2012, the five largest oil corporations have recorded a $14,400,000 profit. And every hour, they received more than $270,000 in federal tax breaks. That adds up to $2.4 billion in subsidies every year for the five largest oil corporations — Royal Dutch Shell, ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP, and ConocoPhillips — all ranked as the top 9 companies in the world.

Even though BP posted an unexpected second-quarter loss, these five companies are on track to meet last year’s record profits. Put these numbers into context, and they are not so “disappointing“: Big Oil profits more in one minute than what 96 percent of American households earn in one year. Even so, Mitt Romney and House Republicans want to double what the five companies receive in federal tax breaks to $12.8 million per day, even though the three publicly owned U.S. companies paid an average tax rate of under 17 percent.

The graphic below illustrates where Big Oil directs these profits and its pollution over the course of a day:

¹ Center for American Progress, 7/30
² Center for American Progress, 7/31
³ EPA
⁴ Wall Street Journal
⁵ Open Secrets

The Big Five oil companies – BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil and Shell – are slated to announce their 2012 second-quarter profits later this week.

We can expect these companies, all of which rank in the top 10 of the “Fortune 500 Global Ranking,” to reveal billions of dollars more in profits, after earning $375 million in profits per day in 2011 ($261,000 per minute), and $368 million per day in the first three-months of 2012 — bringing their combined profits to $1 trillion from 2001 through 2011.

Below is a quick look at just how much these Big Oil companies are making, and where they are spending their billions in profits.

Big Oil’s Big Profits, In 24 Hours

• The five biggest oil companies earned a combined profit of $375 million per day, or a record $137 billion profit for the year, in 2011, despite reducing their oil production.

• In 60 seconds, these five companies earned $261,000 — more than 96 percent of American households make in one year.

• These five oil companies received $6.6 million in federal tax breaks every day.

• In 2011, the three largest domestic public oil companies spent $100 million of their profits each day, or over 50 percent, buying back their own stock to enrich their board, senior managers, and largest share holders.

• The entire oil and gas industry spent on average $400,000 each day lobbying senators and representatives to weaken public health safeguards and keep big oil tax breaks, totaling nearly $150 million.

• Each CEO of the Big Five companies received an average of $60,110 in compensation per day last year. On average, their pay jumped 55 percent in 2011. Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson’s compensation came close to $100,000 per day last year.

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Today in Houston, the U.S. Chemical Safety Board will present the results of its investigation into the causes behind 2010′s devastating oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

The board found that BP failed to pay adequate attention to the safety of its rig systems, focusing instead on worker safety precautions like proper boots.

The board concluded that “BP applied lesser process safety standards” to contracted drilling rigs and that the company “dropped the ball on major accident hazards.” It also concluded that the disaster can be largely blamed on BP’s lack of “comprehensive hazard evaluation” for the Deepwater Horizon rig and the Macondo well.

Safety board managing director Daniel Horowitz told the Associated Press that BP was chronically short-sighted in its safety measures:

BP “did not conduct an effective comprehensive hazard evaluation of the major accident risks for the activities of the Deepwater Horizon rig or for the Macondo well” and accounted only for previous BP assets, not temporary ones like Deepwater Horizon. The Chemical Safety Board found that BP “focused on financial risks, not process safety risks” when drilling offshore.

The board’s presentation highlights the difference between worker safety measures and system safety measures, which are designed to make sure rigs are safe and not subject to leaks or combustion. The board found that BP and Transocean had an “inadequate” system in place.

Chemical Safety Board spokesperson Cheryl Mackenzie said the neglect bears an “eerie resemblance” to what the agency found in its investigation of the 2005 Texas City Refinery BP explosion, which killed 15 people. In that case, BP failed to ensure system safety by overlooking safety indicators like well kicks, flammable gas leaks and equipment damage.

“One of the main lessons coming out of the Texas City disaster was the need for a separate focus on process safety as opposed to personal safety,” board member Dr. Anthony Hopkins explains in a working paper, noting that the U.S. has weak regulations on rig safety indicators. Ian Whewell, another board member, said that the problem does not seem to be improving: “[I]t is clear that performance indicators are in many companies still not being used as effectively as they should be to control major accident risks.”

The 2010 BP oil spill killed 11 people and released 5 million barrels of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico. Though BP has spent millions on an ad campaign promoting their response to the spill, the work to identify the damage has just begun. In April, Al Jazeera reported that Gulf seafood is showing signs of drastic deformities from the spill, such as eyeless shrimp and fish riddled with lesions. Researchers have also said the oil spill contributed to a “perfect storm” for mass dolphin deaths in the Gulf.

– Ben Sherman

Two years after the Deepwater Horizon disaster, BP has mostly resumed normal operations in the Gulf of Mexico. But many animals in the Gulf haven’t gone back to normal.

Researchers have connected a recent dolphin die-off to the 2010 oil spill, which likely weakened dolphins for colder conditions in Gulf waters.

According to a study from scientists at the Dauphin Island Sea Lab, published in PLoS ONE, 186 young dolphins washed ashore along Gulf coasts during a four-month period between January 1 and April 30 2011. This included 86 baby dolphins, which is six times more than the average.

University of Central Florida biologist and study researcher Graham Worthy said:

“Unfortunately, it was a ‘perfect storm’ that led to the dolphin deaths. The oil spill and cold water of 2010 had already put significant stress on their food resources. . . .   It appears the high volumes of cold freshwater coming from snowmelt water that pushed through Mobile Bay and Mississippi Sound in 2011 was the final blow.

Other studies have connected the massive dolphin die-off to the BP spill. Earlier this year, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration found that dolphins off the coast of Louisiana — an area significantly hit by the spill — have become seriously ill due to oil exposure. NOAA “found problems like drastically low weight, low blood sugar and, in some cases, cancer of the liver and lungs.”

Since Febrauary 2010 (two months before the spill) 754 marine mammals have washed onto the shore, 95 percent of which were dead. The actual death toll could be much higher since many bodies never wash up.

The BP disaster has hit other marine life, as well, causing eyeless shrimp and fish with lesions.

Courtesy of AP

by Molly Peterson, excerpted from Science Progress.

An op-ed written by two Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, or WHOI, scientists in The Boston Globe this week is heating up a debate about how chilly legal scrutiny can be when it comes to ocean science.

Back in 2010 marine geochemist Chris Reddy and environmental engineer Richard Camilli pinged the plume of spilt oil in Gulf Coast waters with sonar. Remote-operated vehicles thousands of feet below the ocean’s surface helped tell them where the oil was. They analyzed the makeup of that subsurface plume to figure out what kind of light, aromatic hydrocarbons were in it. They calculated an average flow rate of 57,000 barrels of oil a day, for a total release of 4.9 million barrels of oil.

That last part is the sticky wicket. Spilling oil in federal waters tends to yield fines, and in this case, quite large ones. The outcome of federal and scientific calculations is worth billions of dollars, and as a result, BP has been very interested in making Reddy, Camilli, and other researchers show their work.

Now Reddy and Camilli write that they’ve handed over 3,000 emails they call confidential at the demand of BP and under court order. They sure don’t like having to do it. What’s in there anyway? As the authors explained in the op-ed:

In reviewing our private documents, BP will probably find email correspondence showing that during the course of our analysis, we hit dead-ends; that we remained skeptical and pushed one another to analyze data from various perspectives; that we discovered weaknesses in our methods (if only to find ways to make them stronger); or that we modified our course, especially when we received new information that provided additional insight and caused us to re-examine hypotheses and methods.

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by Daniel J. Weiss and Rebecca Leber

Together the big five oil companies—BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, and Shell—earned a combined $33.5 billion, or $368 million per day, during the first quarter of 2012.

Recall that these companies made a combined record profit of $137 billion in 2011, mostly due to high oil and gasoline prices. Their ongoing huge earnings mean that these companies do not need $24 billion for a decade’s worth of tax breaks, particularly since the three American companies pay relatively low effective federal tax rates.

Profits for Chevron continued to grow during the first quarter of 2012 compared to this time last year, while they fell slightly for Shell and ConocoPhillips. ExxonMobil and BP saw a decline in first-quarter profits mainly due to reduced oil production (both) and very low natural gas prices (Exxon).

Cumulatively, profits were 7 percent lower than the first quarter of 2011. And more than one-quarter of these profits were used to repurchase companies’ stock. Meanwhile, CEO compensation grew by a whopping average of 55 percent.

Below we dig a little deeper into the big five’s latest earnings—including how they spent them—and explain why companies this profitable should not be receiving billions in tax breaks especially when this money could be spent on other national priorities.

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by Kiley Kroh and Rebecca Leber

Two years after the Deepwater Horizon disaster, BP is reporting profits of $5.9 billion for the first quarter of 2012.

That’s an 18.5 percent dip compared to the first quarter of last year; however, it’s a major reversal from 2010. After claiming a loss that year, BP quickly rebounded in 2011, recording a profit of $25.7 billion.

Even as the company sells off assets to pay billions in damages for the 2010 disaster, it is already pursuing drilling plans again in the Gulf of Mexico:

Deepwater Horizon disaster ruined Florida's shores.

On the heels of the second anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, federal prosecutors have issued the first arrest related to the worst oil disaster in U.S. history. The Justice Department has charged former BP engineer Kurt Mix with destroying evidence on BP’s internal response to the disaster.

Mix, who worked on estimating the amount of oil spilling into the Gulf, allegedly deleted hundreds of text messages with a BP supervisor. This includes one that read “Too much flowrate —- over 15,000,” barrels of oil per day, which was three-times higher than BP’s public estimate of barrels of oil per day at the time.

Attorney General Eric Holder issued the statement [emphasis added]:

“The department has filed initial charges in its investigation into the Deepwater Horizon disaster against an individual for allegedly deleting records relating to the amount of oil flowing from the Macondo well after the explosion that led to the devastating tragedy in the Gulf of Mexico,” said Attorney General Holder. “The Deepwater Horizon Task Force is continuing its investigation into the explosion and will hold accountable those who violated the law in connection with the largest environmental disaster in U.S. history.”

As the criminal investigations continue, Congress has still not yet passed legislation responding to a disaster that continues to have devastating effects on fish, beaches, and wetlands.

The Lasting Impact Of Deepwater Horizon

by Kiley Kroh and Michael Conathan

Two years ago an explosion aboard the Deepwater Horizon rig in the Gulf of Mexico took the lives of 11 men and spewed nearly 5 million barrels of oil into the Gulf. It took 9,700 vessels, 127 aircraft, 47,829 people, nearly 2 million gallons of toxic dispersants, and 89 days to stop the gush of oil. But the work to restore the ecosystem and Gulf economy has only just begun.

The regional oil and gas industry hasn’t skipped a beat despite claims from Big Oil and drilling advocates in Congress that the moratorium on deepwater drilling imposed in the wake of the spill devastated the Gulf economy. The New Orleans Times-Picayune found that oil-fueled economies in the Houma area are humming along just fine. And according to a recent Reuters analysis, Gulf drillers will be busier this year than at any point since the spill, adding eight new deepwater rigs and bringing the total count to 29, just shy of pre-spill levels.

But even though BP’s slick new ads show sparkling beaches and flourishing marshes, the perception that everything is fine in the Gulf is far from the truth. Last week Garret Graves, top coastal advisor to Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, said the state “still has 200 miles of oiled coast,” including “very clear, retrievable oil in coastal areas,” and called the current conditions “unacceptable.”

While the Obama administration took steps to strengthen offshore drilling safety and oversight, much remains to be done. Tourism in the region has rebounded this year but the Gulf Coast is still struggling with the lingering effects of the spill and will likely continue to do so for decades to come. Here are five reasons the Gulf deserves renewed attention:

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by Kiley Kroh and Michael Conathan

Yesterday, former members of the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling released a report card evaluating the progress made by the federal government, Congress, and industry toward implementing the critical reforms recommended by the Commission in their 2011 report.

None of them make the honor roll. While the harshest rebukes were aimed at Congress, the report card finds that overall, “in every category, much more needs to be done.”

Big Oil, on the other hand, touted the reforms made by the oil and gas industry. Oil & Gas Journal reported “the industry has always demonstrated a strong commitment to operate safely and responsibly offshore, and has deepened that [sic] the commitment in the nearly 2 years since the Macondo well accident.”

Erik Milito, API’s upstream and industry operations group director, said “the bar continues to rise, the commitment is stronger, and the mechanisms are in place to support the strongest safety standards possible.”

Such assurances from API are dubious at best, considering the Commission’s 2011 report found a direct causal relationship between API’s role as the industry’s principal lobbyist and public policy advocate and “compromised” safety standards that were a direct contributor to the BP disaster:

API’s proffered safety and technical standards were a major casualty of this conflicted role … Because the Interior Department has in turn relied on API in developing its own regulatory safety standards, API’s shortfalls have undermined the entire federal regulatory system.

John Watson, CEO of oil giant Chevron, told USA Today that he’s confident production can occur safely, saying, “we’ve learned from the Macondo incident and others and have steadily improved our practices as an industry. We’re in a much better position as an industry today than we were a few years ago.”

That’s a questionable self-evaluation from a company recently slapped with an $11 billion lawsuit and criminal charges for a November 2011 spill off the coast Brazil and responsible for setting the ocean ablaze with a natural gas fire in Nigeria this year that burned for 46 days and took the lives of two workers.

While both the federal government and industry have taken steps to improve the serious shortfalls in safety and oversight that led to the Deepwater Horizon disaster, a great deal remains to be done – especially as the industry looks to move into frontier areas like the Arctic that are fraught with uncertainty and risk.

The Commission gave the administration an overall grade of B, industry a C+ and Congress a D. (The ocean conservation group Oceana released a similar report card yesterday comprised of nothing but D’s and F’s.)

Let’s take a look at the commission’s findings.

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