BP Wednesday was facing more questions about its safety program in Alaska after a Congressional panel demanded to know why the oil major failed to disclose that it had received an order from the state of Alaska in 2001 requiring the company to inspect its Prudhoe Bay pipelines.
Those pipelines leaked earlier this year, forcing BP to shut down a
portion of its system, a move that caused oil prices to rise briefly in late August.
House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Joe Barton
(Republican-Texas) and some of his colleagues wrote in a letter Tuesday that the 2001 Compliance Order issued by the Alaska Department of Conservation undermined BP executives’ claims that the company could not have known that the lines “possibly contained unacceptable amounts of solids” and that they should have been thoroughly inspected.