Exxon CEO admits to lying to regulators

During the House hearings that featured the CEOs of all the top oil companies, the Exxon CEO, Rex Tillerson, made an interesting admission: That the oil companies simply aren’t prepared to handle major oil spills. Under questioning by Rep. Bart Stupak of Michigan, Tillerson said the following:

There will be impacts as we are seeing. We have never represented anything different than that. That’s why the emphasis is always on preventing these things from occurring because when they happen we are not well equipped to deal with them. And that’s just a fact of the enormity of what we’re dealing with.

But it isn’t true that they’ve never represented anything different than that. Every single application made for an offshore well begins with the filing of an Initial Exploration Plan with the Minerals Management Service. One of the requirements of that plan is to assure regulators that you are prepared to handle a major leak. The company asking for the permit provides lower and upper ranges for any anticipated disaster and assert that they have the ability to handle a leak in those upper ranges.

For the Deepwater Horizon well, BP filed an IEP that said the company “has the capability to respond, to the maximum extent practicable, to a worst-case discharge, or a substantial threat of such a discharge, resulting from the activities proposed in our Exploration Plan.” The worst case discharge in that document: 300,000 barrels per day, more than ten times the rate in the current disaster.

Every well Exxon owns a piece of had a similar document filed and every one of them includes such assurances. But now Tillerson admits that they don’t really mean it when they say they’re capable of handling such disasters.

You can view video of the exchange between Tillerson and Stupak here.