BP Taking Blame for Now, but Legal Battles Will Be Complex

Boston, MAThere is little doubt that pending legal battles over the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico will involve more than just British Petroleum, despite the fact that the company has taken full public responsibility for the disaster. But it's hardly cut-and-dried, and contractual clauses will most assuredly come into play in the courts of law.


Currently the primary focus is on stopping the crude oil spill and mitigating the damage to vulnerable ecosystems, not to mention the property and livelihoods of those who live in the vicinity of the spill. But when the smoke clears and the well is finally capped, the legal battles will begin in earnest.

To say it's complicated would be an understatement.

According to the 6/9/10 issue of the Christian Science Monitor, BP is publicly taking the heat for the spill—even though there are other companies involved, including Transocean Limited, the owner of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig. Subcontractors included Halliburton Co., Weatherford International Ltd. and M-I SWACO.

Two of the subcontractors were called to testify along with BP, after US Attorney General Eric Holder announced the opening of a criminal investigation that will focus on BP, Transocean and Halliburton—the latter of which undertook to cement the well some 20 hours immediately before the spill began.

However, BP owns the well and therefore shoulders the blame under the Oil Pollution Act (OPA) of 1990, which was created in the wake of the Exxon Valdez disaster. Zygmunt Plater, a law professor at Boston College who chaired the legal task force that grew out of the Exxon Valdez spill the year prior, told the Christian Science Monitor that OPA is designed to focus responsibility on one party for the sake of simplicity.

Yet even as BP commits to fund the clean-up and compensate all "reasonable" claims, there is nothing stopping the petroleum giant from suing other implicated parties in an effort to share the costs of the clean-up and compensation—especially those whom a criminal investigation could find partly responsible for the disaster.

But there may be a catch. According to Peter Henning, a former Justice Department prosecutor writing recently in the New York Times, Transocean has a contractual clause that legally indemnifies them from responsibility. Halliburton, in a recent call to investors, reportedly noted that they, too, are legally indemnified from responsibility through their contract with BP.

At Congressional hearings last month neither Transocean nor Halliburton were willing to accept any blame in association with the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

Henning is now based at the Wayne State University Law School. He wrote in his New York Times column that litigation attempting to sort out the blame for the oil rig spill could last a decade or more.