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Nearly two years after the worst accidental offshore oil spill in the history of the energy industry, some of the biggest companies in the world are busy pointing their legal fingers at one another in court over who has to pay what in claims, damages and fines over the deadly Deepwater Horizon oil spill. A federal judge this week ruled that BP is still obligated to a clause in its contract with Transocean that would protect the rig owner from damages related to the spill. That means BP still has to shell out money to settle claims filed by those...

The last decade has seen a sustained campaign by the hydraulic fracturing (‘fracking”) industry against its critics, as the fracking industry in the U.S. alone was worth an estimated $76 billion in 2010 and is projected to grow to $231 billion in 2036 if only those pesky environmentalists can be sidelined. According to Washington’s energy Information Administration, production of shale gas in the United States in 2010 totalled 4.87 trillion cubic feet (tcf) compared with 0.39 tcf only a decade earlier. The combination of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing has already transformed North America's natural gas market in less than...

BP on Monday accused Halliburton of destroying potentially damaging internal test results that showed that the cement it used to secure the Macondo well that blew out in the Gulf of Mexico last year was unstable.

Need a link to that funny animation from a year ago where a shrill liberal is arguing with a reasonable person at a water cooler. I would appreciate your help in locating this humorous video. In it the young liberal woman draws ridiculous distinctions between bush and Obama, and when challenged simply blurts out "Koch Brothere, Halliburton". If you have the link and can post it, that would be greatly appreciated.

   MEDIA: HALLIBURTON PAID DICK CHENEY TO COMMIT RAPE IN IRAN August 3, 2011A front-page story by James Risen in The New York Times on Wednesday, Feb. 13, 2008, reported on a "troubling trend" of sexual assaults committed by American employees of military contractors in Iraq. The centerpiece of his story was Jamie Leigh Jones, who claimed to have been brutally gang-raped in 2005 while working in the Green Zone. (Risen also interviewed other women claiming to have been sexually assaulted in Iraq and -- for journalistic balance -- their attorneys.) Jones famously claimed that days after arriving in Iraq...

Billionaire George Soros has quietly invested $62 million in the purchase of more than 2 million shares of Halliburton, the major government contractor criticized by his own Open Society Institute and the activist group he funds, MoveOn.org. The holdings were disclosed in a quarterly filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission by Soros Fund Management LLC. Vice President Cheney is the former CEO of Halliburton. Read more: Soros makes Halliburton stealth buy http://www.wnd.com/?pageId=40449#ixzz1PAzabPLn

Nigeria will file charges against former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney and officials from five foreign companies including Halliburton Co. over a $180 million bribery scandal, a prosecutor at the anti-graft agency said.

NEW YORK (MarketWatch) — Shares of Halliburton Co. fell sharply on Thursday after the lead lawyer for a presidential commission to investigate the Deepwater Horizon accident focused on the cement-sealing work, meant to prevent gas leakage from the stricken well that caused the death of 11 workers and the worst oil spill in U.S. history. A letter from the commission’s lawyer also points out that tests of the sealing job were either misinterpreted or not made by well owner BP PLC or Transocean Ltd. , the operator of the Deepwater Horizon rig. Halliburton stock dropped 10% at $30.94 in afternoon...

WASHINGTON -- Tests performed before the deadly blowout of BP's oil well in the Gulf of Mexico should have raised doubts about the cement used to seal the well, but the company and its cementing contractor used it anyway, investigators with the president's oil spill commission said Thursday. It's the first finding from the commission looking into the causes of the April 20 explosion that killed 11 workers and led to the largest offshore oil spill in U.S. history. And it appears to conflict with statements made by Halliburton Co., which has said tests showed the cement mix was stable....

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Shares of Halliburton(NYSE:HAL) dropped by as much as 10% on Thursday afternoon after a presidential commission revealed that tests conducted before the BP Macondo oil spill showed that cement used by Halliburton were liable to create unstable conditions.

A federal judge says military contractors can be sued by soldiers and others who allege they were harmed by improper waste disposal while serving in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The BP Spill: Tuesday on Capitol Hill, oil executives were subjected to the Senate's latest show trial. Senators did not say the accident in federal waters was a federal responsibility or that nature spills more oil every day. The morning hearing by the Energy and Natural Resources Committee chaired by Sen. Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico and the afternoon session before California Sen. Barbara Boxer's Environmental and Public Works Committee prove White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel's dictum that a good crisis is a terrible thing to waste — especially when your goal is exploiting the Deepwater Horizon disaster...

Powerful puffs of natural gas, called kicks, are a normal occurrence in many deep-ocean drilling operations. But one intense kick of natural gas caused the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig to be shut down because of the fear of an explosion just weeks before a similar release succeeded in destroying and sinking the platform and sent millions of gallons of oil on a collision course with Louisiana and the rest of the northern coast of the Gulf of Mexico. Shortly before the accident, engineers argued about whether to remove heavy drilling mud that acted as a last defense against such catastrophic...

BP, Transocean and Halliburton pointed fingers over who bears responsibility for the oil-rig explosion. At hearings Tuesday, Halliburton is expected to describe a failure to place a cement plug within the well before withdrawal of drilling "mud" that kept gas from escaping. Two rig workers corroborated this account.

ON THE GULF OF MEXICO (AP) - The deadly blowout of an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico was triggered by a bubble of methane gas that escaped from the well and shot up the drill column, expanding quickly as it burst through several seals and barriers before exploding, according to interviews with rig workers conducted during BP's internal investigation.

The Obama administration has lacked vision and urgency in responding to the worst environmental disaster it has faced. The oil gushing from the destroyed rig into the Gulf of Mexico has overwhelmed the industry and local governments, and only Washington can muster the resources to meet such an ominous threat to the entire coast. Yet the president did not send his top environmental aides and mobilize the Navy and Air Force until Friday — after the giant slick already had reached the fragile marshes and shorelines of the Mississippi Delta...President Barack Obama met U2's Bono in the Oval Office on...

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more. Here's another update on the disaster that befell Transocean Ltd. (RIG: NYSE) and BP (BP: NYSE) last week in the Gulf of Mexico. (Thanks to OI reader Steve, in Texas, for sending some of the photos in today’s alert.) As you know by now, the drilling vessel Deepwater Horizon exploded, burned and sank last week, with the loss of 11 workers and injuries to many more. What happened? What's happening now? What's going to happen? I've spent the weekend working to piece things together. An Ill-fated Discovery According to news accounts,...

Investigators delving into the possible cause of the massive gulf oil spill are focusing on the role of Houston-based Halliburton Co., the giant energy services company, which was responsible for cementing the drill into place below the water. The company acknowledged Friday that it had completed the final cementing of the oil well and pipe just 20 hours before the blowout last week. In a letter to to Halliburton Chief Executive David J. Lesar on Friday, Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Beverly Hills) chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, and Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.), chairman of the Subcommittee...

Energy: The administration has banned new offshore drilling until the Gulf oil spill is investigated. Was its heart in it anyway? It seems environmental concerns apply only to certain forms of energy. No one pays much attention to the aquatic "dead zones" that have appeared off our shores at the mouths of our rivers due to agricultural runoff created by mandates for corn-based ethanol. Ethanol is green energy, good energy — never mind that such biofuels drive up food prices, increase hunger around the world and damage the environment in their own way. The explosion that blew apart an oil...

Summary Halliburton was awarded a five year integrated turnkey contract for Ghawar field. Work will be performed in Uthmaniyah, Haradh, Hawiyah and Shedgum. Halliburton will provide drilling rigs, directional and horizontal drilling tools, logging, cementing, mud engineering, perforation, completion and well construction services. Halliburton will engineer and manage the entire drilling operation.Three to four rigs will drill and complete between 153 and 185 oil and water injection wells. Analysis Ghawar field, the world's largest, is a long asymmetric structure that is 230 kilometers long and approximately 30 miles wide however the width diminishes going south.The The announcement makes no mention...