MOSCOW (MRC) -- BP PLC has agreed to pay USD18.7 billion to settle all federal and state claims arising from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, including the biggest pollution penalty in US history, reported The Wall Street Journal.
If approved by a federal judge, Thursday’s deal would conclude a monumental legal showdown over the Deepwater Horizon disaster, which killed 11 crew members aboard the drilling rig and caused the largest oil spill in US waters.
The agreement would avert years of litigation over the environmental impact of a spill that leaked millions of barrels of crude into the Gulf of Mexico over the course of 87 days and coated hundreds of miles of sensitive beaches, marshes and mangroves with oil.
The settlement would add at least USD10 billion to the roughly USD44 billion BP has already incurred in legal and cleanup costs, pushing its tab for the spill higher than all the profits it has earned since 2012.
The company will pay far less in fines - USD5.5 billion of the settlement’s total - than the maximum USD13.7 billion it faced under the federal Clean Water Act. But its payment would be the largest ever under that law, the government said, and the entire deal would be the biggest it ever reached with a corporation.
As MRC wrote before, BP plans to invest over USD200 million to upgrade its purified terephthalic acid (PTA) plants at Cooper River, South Carolina and Geel, Belgium. The investments will position these assets amongst the most efficient PTA manufacturing facilities in the world.
BP is one of the world's leading international oil and gas companies, providing its customers with fuel for transportation, energy for heat and light, retail services and petrochemicals products for everyday items. BP is the world's largest PTA producer with about 7,1 million tonnes of annual production.
MRC