Internal emails reveal BP plotted to influence what scientists say about oil spill’s impact

The company tried to "steer the research" for a report on the disaster's impact.

A recently leaked body of internal company correspondence shows senior BP brass trying to spin scientific research produced by company-paid researchers in order to minimize the scale of the spill's destruction in the public mind.

The news doesn't exactly come as a shock to many in the Gulf region. After all, when the Mobile Press-Register first reported last summer that BP was contracting to hire a battery of coastal scientists, many theorized that some such initiative was afoot. And now the internal BP emails obtained by Greenpeace through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) appear to bear such worries out.

As The Guardian reports today, BP officials sought to tailor the findings of company-funded research. Last May, BP announced that it was ponying up $500 million to fund "an open research program studying the impact of the Deepwater Horizon incident." That mega-project is now known as the Gulf of Mexico Research Institute (GRI). And to judge by the emails released via Greenpeace, company leaders were deeply concerned with how to spin to the group's findings given they footed its research bills.

"Can we 'direct' GRI funding to a specific study (as we now see the governor's offices trying to do)," BP environmental official Russell Putt asked in a June 2010 email. "What influence do we have over the vessels/equipment driving the studies vs the questions?"

Another email written by a BP environmental officer, Karen Ragoonanan-Jalim, indicates that company officials met in Houma, Louisiana, to discuss how they might "steer the research" to best serve the oil company's interests, writing that officials discussed how "BP can influence this long-term research programme" to "undertake the studies we believe will be useful."

The emails also reveal dissension among U.S. government leaders over the spill, specifically over the White House's controversial, and ultimately disproved, claims that the "vast majority" of the spilled oil had vanished from the Gulf.