You read that correctly. Two years after BP’s Deepwater Horizon rig exploded, killing 11 people and spilling nearly 5 million barrels of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico, the company got the go-ahead to build three new rigs in the region.

A BP representative — Bernard Looney — said that “after much soul-searching,” abandoning the undeveloped submarine oil fields would constitute “walking away” from “a key component of our future.” He said BP would work hard to prevent “such an accident from ever happening again.”

We can only hope so. –ARK

The Guardian:

Bernard Looney, BP’s executive in charge of new wells, said BP is expecting to spend $4bn (£2.5bn) on new developments in the Gulf of Mexico this year and hopes to “invest at least that much every year over the next decade”.

“After much soul-searching in the fall of 2010, we concluded it would be wrong to walk away [from the Gulf of Mexico],” Looney said at an offshore oil conference in Houston, Texas, on Monday. “We would have been walking away not only from our past, but from a key component of our future.”

He said the Deepwater Horizon disaster, which killed 11 people, had “challenged us to the core”, but said the company has been working hard to help prevent “such an accident from ever happening again”.

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