Halliburton Manages to Profit from BP Spill

It seems that Halliburton has another national disaster to add to its repertoire of profiteering: the BP oil spill. It's only fitting that the multinational corporation that has made money from Iraq war contracts and Hurricane Katrina cleanup would find a way to benefit from an oil spill that it also helped cause. As the Earth Island Journal reports this week:

The preliminary investigations into the causes of the Deepwater Horizon blowout show that Halliburton’s job in the cementing work on the well may have led to the gas leakage that ignited the explosion and sinking of the drilling rig.

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A week before the Deepwater Horizon accident, Halliburton purchased Boots & Coots, a $191 million company that specializes in “prevention and risk-control services for oil- and gas-well fires and blowouts,” according to an April 12 story in Daily Finance. The company also “helps enhance production for oil and gas operators,” and will likely see an increase in operations as more activity is focused on unconventional, difficult to extract fossil fuel sources like shale oil and gas.

According to The Christian Science Monitor, Boots & Coots is now under contract with BP to help with the relief well that will, hopefully, put a final cap on the blowout. Halliburton is essentially making money from causing the accident and then helping to repair it.

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The post goes on to liken Halliburton's far reach to "a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity." Sounds pretty accurate. [Apologies to any vampire squids who might be reading this. —Ed.]

Read the full post here.

Image (cc) by Flickr user Mike Licht