WASHINGTON – Government officials have temporarily banned BP from new federal contracts because of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon blowout and oil spill that killed 11 workers and polluted hundred of miles of Gulf of Mexico shoreline.
The Environmental Protection Agency said Wednesday it was taking the action because of BP’s “lack of business integrity” demonstrated by the accident and the company’s inability to curb the flow of oil into the gulf. BP pleaded guilty earlier this month to federal criminal charges arising from the disaster and agreed to pay $ 4.5 billion, including $ 1.26 billion in criminal penalties.
The suspension will be effective “until the company can provide sufficient evidence to E.P.A. demonstrating that it meets federal business standards,” the agency said in a statement. The action does not affect the company’s existing federal contracts.
BP had no immediate comment on the announcement.
The British oil company is one of the American government’s largest contractors, 45th with $ 1.47 billion in federal business in 2011, according to a ranking compiled by the General Services Administration. The company’s biggest customer is the United States Department of Defense, to which it provides more than $ 1 billion a year in fuel.
BP is also the largest deepwater oil and gas leaseholder in the Gulf of Mexico, controlling more than 650 blocks in water more than 1,250 deep. The Macondo well that exploded in April 2010 was in more than 5,000 feet of water.
The Department of the Interior is conducting a sale of leases in the western gulf on Wednesday. Officials said that BP would be allowed to participate but it would not be granted any leases until and unless the contracting suspension is lifted.
Specifically, an E.P.A. official said, BP would have to satisfy the terms of its plea agreement with the Department of Justice before the agency would consider lifting the ban. In addition to paying the fines and penalties, the company must hire a safety monitor to oversee its deepwater operations, retain an ethics monitor to ensure company employees do not again skirt federal laws and regulations, conduct safety and environmental audits for each drilling rig, and assure that all equipment and workers meet federal safety and training standards.
Officials would not speculate on how long it would take the company to meet those conditions.
Representative Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, had earlier called for a contracting ban on BP for its actions following the spill and for misleading Congress about the rate of flow of oil from the damaged well.
“After pleading guilty to such reckless behavior that killed men and constituted a crime against the environment, suspending BP’s access to contracts with our government is the right thing to do,” Mr. Markey said. “The wreckage of BP’s recklessness is still sitting at the bottom of the ocean, and this kind of time out is an appropriate element of the suite of criminal, civil and economic punishments that BP should pay for their disaster.”
The action is potentially damaging to BP because the United States accounts for such a large part of the company’s business. Its output of oil and natural gas in the country represented 28 percent of its global production, excluding Russia, in the third quarter of this year, and about a quarter of the profit in its important exploration and production unit.
BP says it has invested $ 52 billion in the United States over the last five years, more than in any other country, and it employs 23,000 Americans.
Iain Pyle of Bernstein Research in London said he did not think the action “particularly important” because the “suspension does not impact existing contracts, just new ones, and has no impact on oil and gas production, just the sale of products to the government.”
Still, he said, “it is not great news for BP as they want to do business in the U.S.”
Separately, BP announced the sale of North Sea oil fields representing about 25 percent of its British oil and gas production to TAQA, an energy company that belongs to the Abu Dhabi government.
Peter Hutton of RBC Capital Markets in London said in a research note that the estimated price that BP was receiving for the 120 million barrels of reserves was about $ 9 per barrel — at the low end of BP’s asset sales. He estimated that BP is selling about 40,000 barrels per day of production, nearly 25 percent of its output in Britain.
The transaction fits in with the strategy of Bob Dudley, the chief executive of BP, to sell mature oil fields to raise cash and concentrate on faster-growing businesses.
BP has now reached agreements to sell about $ 37 billion worth of assets since the beginning of 2010, excluding its sale of its share of the Russian affiliate TNK-BP. BP’s disposal target is $ 38 billion.
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