“On the 11th anniversary of the BP blowout, the real takeaway is that oil companies that think they are ‘beyond petroleum’ are value destroyers for shareholders and for the environment.”

Every April commemorates BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil spill (April 10, 2010). To the anti-energy Left, Deepwater Horizon is the epitome of oil-gone-bad, coming some 21 years after the Exxon Valdez oil spill. It was not supposed to happen again, but ….

The sad facts of Deepwater Horizon will forever remain. The multiple failures behind the accident are also well documented. But a paradox remains. Mighty BP, captained by John Browne, the leading “environmentalist” of the petroleum industry created the corporate culture that resulted in lax safety and environmental protocols. By saving about $5 million out of $100+ million in drilling costs, the company ended up paying out in excess of $60 billion.…

“‘Unintended consequences of government intervention?’ Are you f***in’ kidding me? What just happened is a direct consequence of insufficient government intervention!” (Robert Borlick, energy consultant)

“No, with due respect. When the system loaded up on renewables, who would have known that low-to-negative marginal-cost pricing would have ruined the economics of baseload generators and natural gas peakers, existing and prospective. I was an adamant critic of windpower in the old days (1997) and just did not foresee this.” (Bradley, retort)

Many planners and regulators involved involved in the Great Texas Electricity Blackout have resigned or been fired. But their brethren, the experts behind the fallen PUCT/ERCOT model, are emotionally defending central planning and renewable energies by blaming the natural gas industry. “The CEOs of those gas companies should be criminally charged,” exclaims Robert Borlick, below).…

“[Texas] energy infrastructure, overseen by agencies whose top priorities seem to be keeping the energy markets happy, gets neglected. Such neglect, deadly as we have seen, is a crime — or it ought to be.” (Houston Chronicle editorial board, April 4, 2021)

The grand failure of Texas’s power grid under legislative/regulator/expert control is a case study in political economy.

The mainstream narrative combines an Act of God (weather) with private-side failure (non-weatherization). But electricity, while mostly under private ownership, is one of the most highly regulated industries in the U.S. It does not operate in an unhampered market.

Don’t blame God or Market Man–blame the system, the regulated system. Many posts at MasterResource have laid blame, brick-by-brick, on contrived versus real free markets and, more generally, on anti-fossil-fuel planning.…

Robert Michaels has specialized in electricity and natural gas over the decades, in addition to antitrust law. Professor of Economics at California State University, Fullerton, Dr. Michaels is an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute and has contributed many posts to MasterResource.

Q. Robert, you have spent decades in the regulatory fields of antitrust and of energy. How did it all begin?

A. Like so many of life’s better stories, it started with randomness.  Around 1980 I moved from Washington, DC to the reality of a southern California mortgage.  At the time I was working on the industrial organization of the mainframe computer market for some academic publications to help me get tenure at California State University, Fullerton.

I got a call from a former classmate about my possible interest in expert work in what would turn out to be a major antitrust case regarding an electric utility.…