The U.S. Department of Justice announced Monday that the USA and five Gulf states have reached a $20.8 billion settlement with BP over the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill. The Justice Department filed federal lawsuits against BP in late 2010, and Monday’s announcement marks the end of litigation between the two sides.
Advertisement
Attorney General Loretta Lynch said the resolution marks the largest settlement against a single entity in US history and will finance an unprecedented project to restore plant and wildlife habitats that were fouled by the spill of 3 million barrels of oil into the Gulf.
BP officials have said previously the agreement provides the company, and the Gulf region, “a path to closure”, resolving the largest legal exposure and providing more certainty in terms of costs and payments. That will be followed by a 60-day public comment period, the next step toward final court approval.
– $8.1 billion in natural resources damages, which includes the $1 billion BP already committed to pay for early restoration.
Advertisement
The settlement takes BP’s total budget for the spill to more than $54 billion, five years after an explosion at the Macondo well polluted the Gulf of Mexico and forced the company to shed more than third of its market value and assets to pay for the accident. The money, she said, will be used to both clean up areas damaged by the spill and to pump desperately needed capital into an area that still has not fully covered economically from the disaster. Previous settlements included a fund originally set at $7.8 billion to compensate individuals claiming economic harm from the spill.
