Hurricanes leave behind £4bn ($7.5 billion) bill for oil giants

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=/money/2005/10/05/cnhurr05.xml&menuId=242&sSheet=/money/2005/10/05/ixcitytop.html

The world's biggest oil and gas companies are facing a $7.5billion (£4.3billion) bill from the hurricanes that lashed the Gulf of Mexico.

The news emerged as BP, the world's number two oil and gas company, said the impact of hurricanes Rita and Katrina had knocked $700m (£400m) off its third-quarter profits.

Analysts at Wood MacKenzie estimated that 45m barrels of oil and 220billion cubic feet of gas, worth between $4billion and $5billion in lost revenues, had been "shut in" by the storms.

With production slow to come back on stream, the energy consultancy said that the figure could grow by another $2.5billion by the end of the year.

Ian Ashcroft, a Wood MacKenzie analyst, said: "This is a bad one. I can't recall it being this bad and I have been doing this for 20 years."

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I think what this is attempting to say is:

"Bend over"

I'm sure one of the Rethugs has a bill all drafted up and raring to go. We can just knock a few more people off of Medicare, maybe whack a few more Pell grants, and voila, our friends in Big Oil won't have to suffer.

Then they can recoup their losses. But then, the storm was the cause of the increases, wasn't it?

Oh, I get it. Nothing can stop oil company profits. It's built in to the system!

in this year, alone.