The Daily Mail UK
written by Richard Pendlebury
Last updated on June 18, 2010 at 8:08am
Capitol Hill is not just a concerned bystander in all this economic activity. The lease of oil drilling rights in its coastal waters is one of the U.S. Government's most lucrative sources of revenue.
Areas of seabed are auctioned off for tens of millions of dollars a tract by the federal Mineral Management Service (MMS).
It then charges 18.75 per cent royalties on the oil that is recovered. After that, both State and Federal governments will tax the gasoline which is the end product.
The mineral rights for one tract, the 5,700-acre Mississippi Canyon Block 252, were bought by BP in March 2008 in an auction held at the Louisiana Superdome in New Orleans. It was called Lease Sale No 206.
BP beat nine other oil firms to the lease, paying the MMS $34 million. The company subsequently sold 35 per cent of the rights to two other oil firms.
The smaller of BP's two partners, with a 10 per cent stake, is MOEX Offshore 2007 LLC.
This firm's head office is in the U.S. oil capital of Houston, Texas. But, in fact, it is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Mitsui Oil Exploration Co, of Tokyo, Japan. The parent firm is 20 per cent owned by the Japanese government. So far, President Obama has not invoked the December 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour.
BP's other partner in Mississippi Canyon Block 252 is Anadarko Petroleum Corp. It has the remaining 25 per cent stake. The firm is American and its HQ is near Houston.
Log on to the Anadarko website and you will struggle to find any reference to the Deepwater-Horizon disaster or the fact that Anadarko is directly involved. Unsurprisingly, Anadarko is keeping a low profile while BP takes the flak.
All this corporate angst and nationalistic backbiting can, of course, be traced back to what happened at the Macondo Prospect wellhead in Mississippi Block 252, 41 miles off Louisiana, almost two months ago.
BP had started drilling in 2009, but operations had been interrupted by Hurricane Ida. The semi-submersible rig Deepwater Horizon moved into position to resume exploratory operations in February.
The rig did not belong to BP. Inevitably perhaps, it was owned and operated by Transocean, the largest deepwater oil drilling specialist contractors in the world.
Transocean has relocated its HQ to Switzerland (which has a more favourable tax regime for multinational companies), which is odd given the nature of its expertise and the fact that Switzerland is landlocked.
Transocean (motto 'never out of our depth') is as American as apple pie, able to trace its roots back to 1950s Alabama. There are a handful of Transocean employees based in an office in the Canton of Zug. But they are a fig leaf; the majority of their colleagues - some 26,000 in total - are Stateside.
Much to the chagrin of the American authorities, Transocean has moved its corporate HQ around the world purely to avoid, quite legally, paying tax.
Twenty years ago its registration was transferred from Delaware to the Cayman Islands. Two years ago, it moved to the land of the cuckoo clock, for a corporate tax rate of 17 per cent, down from the U.S. 35 per cent.
The move has apparently saved it some $2 billion, which would otherwise have gone to the U.S. Treasury, prompting a headline 'Transocean: Better at Tax Planning Than Oil Drilling. Transocean's Deepwater Horizon rig was built in South Korea by Hyundai Heavy Industries, ten years ago. The rig's port of register was Majuro in the Marshall Islands - a flag of convenience and just another moneysaving dodge in this tale of blurred national ties.
Transocean was under contract to BP at a rate of $500,000 a day to drill the Macondo Prospect well: an estimated 50 million barrels of oil, five miles below seabed, which is 4,000ft below the waves.
That sounds deep, but it's not the record - the 33,000-ton leviathan once drilled the deepest well in oil industry history.
Aboard the deepwater-Horizon on the evening of April 20 were 126 crew. Only seven were employees of BP; 79 of the others worked for Transocean, including the rig's commander Capt Curt Kuchta. The rest were from a variety of other firms, including Anadarko, Halliburton and M-I Swaco.
Halliburton is one of the world's largest oilfield services suppliers. Yet another Texas-based firm, it made a fortune out of the Iraq war, being one of the U.S. military's prime supply contractors.
Most of the food and fuel trucked into the country from Kuwait was done so by a Halliburton subsidiary. The firm was also given a multi-billion contract to oversee the restoration of the Iraqi oil industry. Such deals caused an international furore because the then U.S. Vice-President dick Cheney, one of the architects of the war, had only recently been a Halliburton executive.
Four Halliburton staff were on the Deepwater Horizon to oversee the cementing of the oil well casing. Once that was finished, they would then plug the wellhead with cement, ready for later oil extraction.
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