BP will have had $30-40-50 million in that well when they lost it. NOBODY does stuff like that in the patch anyway; this is all serious damned money, and everyone is trying to make his division or his company pay off at the end of the year. The bottom line is the bottom line!
These are horrendously expensive enterprises and take years to bring to fruition. Every project is like rolling a big rock uphill and involves scores of people. People don't play around with this stuff, and any rig fire is a damned serious business.
Trying to see a political dimension in something like this is a major mistake. The politicking will all be in DC, where the dildo-heads dwell.
On second analysis, I have to admit my tinfoil was wrapped a little too tight. That happens at times, you know.
However, I wouldn't put sabotage past a foreign government like the Chavez bunch or even China. They know all too well that our enviro-whackos are just itching to try and shut down our means of production and the Chinese are already slurping up from our fields (at the edges) at the behest of Venuezela and Cuba. One enviro disaster could impact the entire industry. Thank God the USCG so far has said that no oil is leaking up from below. If we let this stop us we're really doomed in the long run.
This should also offer an impetus to start drilling on land (ANWR) and to further the new technologies that will allow us to recover the crude from the oil shale. I gather that SHELL OIL has just perfected a means to do that and it leaves a tiny footprint. Something to do with sinking heating rods into the shale that raises the temperature to 600 degrees F at which time the oil separates and can be sucked upward. They just finished a tiny test in like Montana and the entire site measured forty feet by forty feet. It was able to draw (tiny site so tiny amount) 5,000 gallons (not barrels) a day, but it proved the technique was sound.