U.S. Coast Guard via Reuters

Fire boats battle the blazing remnants of the oil rig Deepwater Horizon off Louisiana on April 21, 2010.

WASHINGTON - Transocean Ltd has agreed to pay $1.4 billion to settle U.S. government charges arising from BP Plc's massive 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

The settlement unveiled by the Department of Justice includes $1 billion in civil penalties and $400 million in criminal penalties. The company had set aside a total of $1.95 billion in potential losses related to the spill, including $1.5 billion for its anticipated settlement with the DoJ.

Shares of Transocean were up 7 percent at $49.50 on midday trading on the New York Stock Exchange. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index was up 0.1 percent.

"The bottom line to me is they now can put away the big black cloud that has been hanging over them," said Phil Weiss, an oil analyst at Argus. "I take this as a positive, even if the number is a little higher than I expected."

Switzerland-based Transocean owned the Deepwater Horizon rig that was drilling a mile-deep well when a surge of methane gas sparked an explosion on April 20, 2010. The explosion killed 11 men and led to one of the largest environmental disasters in U.S. history.

"This resolution of criminal allegations and civil claims against Transocean brings us one significant step closer to justice for the human, environmental and economic devastation wrought by the Deepwater Horizon disaster," U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said in a statement.

BP to pay $4.5 billion, plead guilty to manslaughter in Gulf of Mexico oil spill

BP and Transocean had "multiple safety management system deficiencies that contributed to the Macondo incident," and neither had adequate safety rules, according to a July 2012 report from the U.S. Chemical Safety Board.

Transocean and BP disagreed on who was in charge of interpreting what is known as a negative pressure test, which could have alerted workers to the well's instability.

BP in November agreed to a settlement with the U.S. government worth $4.5 billion, including the largest criminal fine ever at $1.256 billion. The London-based oil company also agreed to plead guilty to obstruction of Congress, a felony.

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Updated at 5:56 p.m. ET: Coast Guard crews continued searching Saturday evening for two workers missing after an explosion and fire aboard a Gulf of Mexico oil rig on Friday that was apparently triggered by workers using a blow torch to cut a pipe.

Eleven workers on the rig were airlifted to hospitals after the accident some 17 miles southeast of Grand Isle, La. Four of the injured were in critical condition.

The fire was extinguished a few hours after the blast and Coast Guard Capt. Ed Cubanski told reporters that the platform appeared to be structurally sound. Twenty-two people had been aboard the rig at the time of the accident.

The search and rescue operation is making use of an 87-foot surface vessel assisted by a helicopter, the U.S. Coast Guard told NBC News Saturday night.

The platform was not actively producing oil and a sheen spotted in the water was probably from an estimated 28 gallons of oil that could have spilled when a pipe ruptured, Cubanski said Friday.

It does not appear the incident could lead to a major environmental disaster, added Coast Guard Capt. Peter Gautier.

Gerald Herbert / AP

Damage from the fire aboard a Gulf of Mexico oil rig is seen Friday after the fire was put out.

He said initial reports suggested that the explosion occurred when maintenance workers using a torch cut into a pipe with oil inside.

The platform is a shallow-water production platform, unlike BP's Macondo well that blew out in 2010 in mile-deep water. The Macondo explosion killed 11 workers and caused the worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history.

The owner of the platform is Houston-based Black Elk Energy. On its website, the company stated that this month it was starting to drill the first of 23 new wells in the Gulf of Mexico.

Last Sunday, The Houston Chronicle named Black Elk Energy one of the top small businesses to work for in Houston based on employee surveys.

In August, the oil and gas company was named one of the fastest-growing privately held companies by Inc. Magazine.

The explosion came a day after BP settled criminal charges in the Macondo disaster by agreeing to pay $4.5 billion in penalties. It still faces up to $20 billion in civil fines.

Black Elk Energy was investigated last August by the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management Regulation and Enforcement for an incident in which two employees were dropped 60 feet into Gulf of Mexico waters due to a crane malfunction, Reuters reported. No injuries were reported.

Black Elk also paid a $300,000 civil fine in September, related to a site inspection in 2011 of one of its facilities that revealed it was not complying with regulations.

Federal data also shows a small fire occurred at a Black Elk platform in February of 2011 in the Gulf of Mexico, but was quickly contained.

The company's chief executive, John Hoffman, formerly worked for BP Amoco, according to a report earlier this year in the Houston Business Journal. Hoffman founded Black Elk in 2007, the report said. 

Friday's incident could reignite a national debate over safety standards for offshore drilling. After the Horizon spill, the government overhauled offshore drilling regulations and imposed a ban on drilling that lasted for several months.

"BP and the government may have settled criminal matters yesterday, but today's incident shows that increasing safety of offshore drilling and for hard-working men and women is still not a settled matter," Rep. Ed Markey, the ranking Democrat on the House National Resources Committee, said in a statement.

NBC's Edgar Zuniga Jr. as well as Reuters and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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Updated at 2:45 p.m. ET: BP will pay approximately $4.5 billion and plead guilty to manslaughter and other criminal charges as part of a settlement with the U.S. government over the deadly Deepwater Horizon rig explosion and massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, the London-based oil giant and federal officials said Thursday.

The settlement total, to be paid out over five years, includes more than $1.25 billion in criminal fines -- the largest such penalty ever.

In addition, two BP employees have been indicted on manslaughter charges and a BP executive has been indicted on charges he lied to authorities about his work estimating the Gulf spill rate. 

At an afternoon news conference in New Orleans, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder called the wide-ranging settlement "the latest step forward in our ongoing efforts to achieve justice for those whose lives and whose livelihoods were impacted by the largest environmental disaster in the history of the United States."

He said the settlement amounts mark "both the largest single criminal fine … and the largest total criminal resolution" in U.S. history.

BP has agreed to plead guilty to 11 counts of felony manslaughter, one count of felony obstruction of Congress and violations of the Clean Water and Migratory Bird Treaty Acts, Holder said.

The agreement, subject to court approval, resolves all federal criminal charges and all claims by the Securities and Exchange Commission against the company stemming from the explosion and leak, the largest accidental marine oil spill in history.

“All of us at BP deeply regret the tragic loss of life caused by the Deepwater Horizon accident as well as the impact of the spill on the Gulf coast region,” Bob Dudley, BP’s group chief executive, said in a statement announcing the settlement.

Lee Celano / Reuters, file

A hard hat from an oil worker lies in oil from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill on East Grand Terre Island, Louisiana in this June 8, 2010 photo.

“From the outset, we stepped up by responding to the spill, paying legitimate claims and funding restoration efforts in the Gulf. We apologize for our role in the accident, and as today’s resolution with the U.S. government further reflects, we have accepted responsibility for our actions.”

“We believe this resolution is in the best interest of BP and its shareholders,” added Carl-Henric Svanberg, BP’s chairman. “It removes two significant legal risks and allows us to vigorously defend the company against the remaining civil claims.”

In addition, a federal indictment unsealed Thursday charges David Rainey, who was BP's vice president of exploration for the Gulf of Mexico, with obstruction of Congress and making false statements. He is accused of lying to federal investigators when they asked him how he calculated a flow rate estimate for BP's blown-out well in the days after the disaster.

Two BP well site leaders, Robert Kaluza and Donald Vidrine, were indicted on manslaughter and involuntary charges, accused of disregarding abnormal high-pressure readings that should have glaring indications of trouble just before the deadly blowout.

Rainey's lawyer said his client did "absolutely nothing wrong." And attorneys for the two rig workers accused the Justice Department of making scapegoats out of them.   

"Bob was not an executive or high-level BP official. He was a dedicated rig worker who mourns his fallen co-workers every day," Kaluza attorneys Shaun Clarke and David Gerger said in a statement, The Associated Press reported. "No one should take any satisfaction in this indictment of an innocent man. This is not justice."

Before Thursday, the only person charged in the disaster was a former BP engineer who was arrested in April on obstruction of justice charges, according to AP. He was accused of deleting text messages about the company's response to the spill.

The Deepwater Horizon rig, 50 miles off the Louisiana coast, sank after the fiery explosion. The well on the sea floor spewed an estimated 206 million gallons of crude oil, soiling sensitive tidal estuaries and beaches, killing wildlife and shutting vast areas of the Gulf to commercial fishing.

After several attempts failed, engineers finally managed to cap the gushing well on July 15, 2010, halting the flow of oil into the Gulf after more than 85 days.

The spill exposed lax government oversight and led to a temporary ban on deepwater drilling while officials and the oil industry studied the risks, worked to make it safer and developed better disaster plans.

Thirteen of the 14 criminal charges to which BP plans to plead guilty pertain to the accident itself and stem from the negligent misinterpretation of a negative pressure test conducted on board the Deepwater Horizon, BP said. The company said it acknowledged this misinterpretation more than two years ago when it released its internal investigation report.

The remaining criminal count of obstruction pertains to allegations that company officials lied to Congress about how much oil was pouring out of the ruptured well during the spill response.

As part of its resolution of criminal claims with the U.S. government, BP will pay $4 billion in installments over five years and has also agreed to five years’ probation.

The amount includes about $1.25 billion in criminal fines, nearly $2.4 billion to be paid to the National Fish & Wildlife Foundation and $350 million to be paid to the National Academy of Sciences.

BP said it will also pay the SEC $525 million over three years to settle all securities claims.

The $1.25 criminal penalty is the largest in U.S. history, eclipsing the nearly $1.2 billion paid by Pfizer Inc. for marketing fraud related to its Bextra pain medicine in 2009, according to Bloomberg and AP.

BP has also agreed to take more steps to boost safety of drilling operations in the Gulf of Mexico, including third-party auditing and verification, training and well control equipment and processes such as blowout preventers and cementing.

Under U.S. law, companies convicted of certain criminal acts can be debarred from contracting with the federal government. BP says it has not been told of any intent by government agencies to suspend or debar the company in connection with the plea agreement.

Still pending is a separate civil court action in which the federal government contends BP was grossly negligent in causing the spill. “We’ve been in negotiations with BP. We have not reached a number that I consider satisfactory to resolve those claims that we have,” Holder said.

The criminal deal announced Thursday with the Justice Department is also separate from a March settlement in which BP agreed to pay $7.8 billion to more than 100,000 businesses and individuals who say they were harmed by the spill.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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Texas A&M University

Texas A&M University researchers found these 55-gallon drums at a known chemical weapons dumpsite near the mouth of the Mississippi River. They suspect mustard gas was leaking out.

Oil and bombs don’t mix, yet there’s millions of pounds of unexploded World War II munitions dumped in the Gulf of Mexico that pose a risk to offshore drilling and the environment, researchers say. 

The military carried out the dumping from 1946 to 1970 — including off the Pacific, Atlantic and Hawaii coasts — so it's no secret. But now that some of the containers used to store the munitions are more than 60 years old, the researchers say it's time to see them as a threat.

"The bottom line is that these bombs are a threat today and no one knows how to deal with the situation," Texas A&M oceanographer William Bryant said in a statement ahead of a briefing he'll give at a weapons disposal conference. "If chemical agents are leaking from some of them, that’s a real problem. If many of them are still capable of exploding, that’s another big problem."

Photos taken during surveys show that some of the chemical weapons canisters, such as those that carried mustard gas, appear to be leaking materials and are damaged, Bryant and others on his team reported.

The surveys have turned up 10 dump sites at 60 and 100 miles out — and one of them had a pipeline running through it.

Texas has the closest dump, followed by Louisiana, "not far from where the Mississippi River delta area is," Bryant said. "Some shrimpers have recovered bombs and drums of mustard gas in their fishing nets.

Texas A&M University

Texas A&M University researchers found this unexploded, 500-pound bomb at a dumpsite near the mouth of the Mississippi River in 2008.

"No one seems to know where all of them are and what condition they are in today," he added. "The best guess is that at least 31 million pounds of bombs were dumped, but that could be a very conservative estimate.

"These were all kinds of bombs, from land mines to the standard military bombs, also several types of chemical weapons," he said. "Our military also dumped bombs offshore that they got from Nazi Germany right after World War II.

"Is there an environmental risk? We don’t know, and that in itself is reason to worry," he said. 

The hazards pose even more of a risk as the Obama administration and energy companies pick up the pace of drilling after the 2010 BP oil spill.

Ironically, unexploded ordnance was found in the offshore zone known as Mississippi Canyon where the BP well was drilled.

Pentagon

This chart lists some of the munitions dumpsites in the Gulf of Mexico, and what's there.

"My first thought when I saw the news reports of the Deepwater Horizon explosion in the Gulf two years ago were, 'Oh my gosh, I wonder if some of the bombs down there are to blame'," recalled Bryant.

That turned out not to be the case, but such World War II finds are not surprising in the oil industry.

Last year, BP shut a major North Sea pipeline for five days to remove a 13-foot unexploded German mine. BP discovered the mine during an inspection, then spent months devising a plan to remove and safely detonate it.

Pentagon

This chart lists some of the munitions dump sites in the Gulf of Mexico, and what is there.

In 2001, BP and Shell found the wreckage of the U-166, a German WWII submarine, 45 miles from the mouth of the Mississippi River. 

While the practice of dumping bombs and chemical weapons in the ocean ended 40 years ago, some effects are just now being seen, Terrance Long, founder of the International Dialogue on Underwater Munitions, told Reuters. Bryant will be briefing the group's conference, which begins Monday in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

"You can find munitions in basically every ocean around the world, every major sea, lake and river," Long said. "They are a threat to human health and the environment."

Reuters contributed to this report.

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HOUSTON - The Coast Guard searched Monday for six people reported missing after a fishing vessel started sinking in the Gulf of Mexico near Galveston, Texas.

The Coast Guard received a mayday call on Sunday afternoon from the captain, who reported the boat was taking on water. The captain said the six people aboard were abandoning ship and getting into an orange life raft.

Because of the poor quality of the radio transmission, the name of the vessel was difficult to make out. It sounded like either Scallywag or Skylark, Coast Guard officials said. The boat was described as a purple-and-blue-colored fishing vessel with a white stripe.

Multiple Coast Guard units responded, and on Monday were searching an area roughly the size of Delaware.

"The Coast Guard is expending all available resources to try and locate the six missing people," Elvie Damaso, a Coast Guard command center controller for Sector Houston-Galveston, said in a statement.

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Waterkeeper Alliance says this image was taken on Dec. 30, 2011, and shows an oil sheen from the Taylor Energy platform that was destroyed by Hurricane Ivan in 2004.

Environmental groups on Thursday sued an oil company over the pace of its cleanup of a Gulf of Mexico spill that continues seven years after it was triggered by Hurricane Ivan in 2004.

"The plaintiffs filed suit to stop the spill and lift the veil of secrecy surrounding Taylor oil’s seven-year-long response and recovery operation," Marc Yaggi, executive director of Waterkeeper Alliance, said in a statement announcing the lawsuit, which was filed in federal court in New Orleans. "Neither the government nor Taylor will answer basic questions related to the spill response, citing privacy concerns."

Justin Bloom, a Waterkeeper Alliance director, told msnbc.com that the group had made Freedom of Information Act requests for documentation "and ultimately the Coast Guard has refused to provide us documents citing the Privacy Act."

The groups allege that Taylor Energy, based in New Orleans, has violated the Clean Water Act provisions that require public participation in any enforcement of the law.

"Without details about Taylor’s response to this crisis," the lawsuit states, "it is impossible for members of the public to assess the risk that similar events will cause additional multi-year spills, including spills from higher-pressure wells in deeper water."

Taylor Energy did not immediately return a msnbc.com call for comment, but it has acknoweldged the spill and has been working with the U.S. Coast Guard and federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management to plug it.

Three containment domes had "substantially reduced" sheening over time, it stated on June 8, 2010, after the BP spill drew attention to the area.

The gulf is home to hundreds of oil wells and platforms, both active and capped, and some of which periodically leak. In addition, the gulf and other bodies of ocean regularly see natural oil seeps.

Waterkeeper said it estimates that hundreds of gallons of oil have been leaking from the Taylor site each day for the last seven years.

The Coast Guard, however, said the average amount of oil leaking from the site is 7.5 gallons per day. Oil sheens from the site have been "minimal" and have never made landfall, according to the Coast Guard, which says a total of 12,720 gallons of oil have been reported from daily observations since the spill started in 2004.

"The sheen size of a few gallons (in volume as observed over the sheen dimensional area) has been too thin of an oil film to warrant offshore recovery operations," the Coast Guard said in a statement.

The plaintiffs acknowledge that the spill is tiny next to the BP spill of 200 million gallons but, argued Bloom, the Taylor spill "is emblematic of a broken system, where oil production is prioritized over concerns for human health and the environment."

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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U.S. Coast Guard / Getty Images, file

Crews battle the blazing remnants of the Deepwater Horizon rig in the Gulf of Mexico on April 21, 2010.

NEW ORLEANS -- BP has accused Halliburton of destroying damaging evidence about the quality of its cement slurry that went into drilling the oil well that blew out last year and caused the worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history.

In a court filing, the oil company alleged that Halliburton did inadequate cement work. BP also asked a federal judge to punish the oilfield services company.

The accusation raises the stakes ahead of a trial, expected in late February, to assign blame and damages for the April 2010 blowout of the Macondo well, which triggered the spill.

Citing recent depositions and Halliburton's own documents, BP said Halliburton "intentionally" destroyed the results of slurry testing for the well, in part to "eliminate any risk that this evidence would be used against it at trial."

Also in the documents filed in a New Orleans federal court, BP accused Halliburton of failing to produce incriminating computer modeling evidence. BP accused Halliburton of claiming the modeling is gone.

BP asked U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier to penalize Halliburton and order a court-sponsored computer forensic team to recover the missing modeling results.

'Without merit'
Beverly Blohm Stafford, a spokeswoman for Halliburton, told Reuters the Houston-based company is reviewing BP's filing.

"We believe that the conclusion that BP is asking the court to draw is without merit and we look forward to contesting their motion in court," she said.

The allegations in the 310-page motion ratcheted up the showdown among BP PLC and contractors, Halliburton and Transocean Ltd. The three companies have been sparring over blame for the April 2010 Deepwater Horizon blast, which killed 11 workers and led to the release of 206 million gallons of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

So far, BP, the majority owner of the Macondo well, has footed the bill for the emergency response and cleanup.

Also involved are Anadarko Petroleum Co. and Cameron International Corp.

The first trial over the Deepwater Horizon disaster is scheduled to start Feb. 27 in New Orleans. The first leg is expected to take about three months and determine the liability of each company involved in drilling the Macondo well. There will be other phases over cleanup costs, punitive damages and other claims.

Federal and independent investigations of the disaster have found fault in Halliburton's cement job because it failed to properly plug the well. Halliburton used a foamy cement slurry.

• Slideshow: Deepwater Horizon disaster

In Monday's court filing, BP accused Halliburton employees doing an internal investigation of the Macondo disaster of discarding and destroying early test results they performed on the same batch of cement slurry used in the Macondo well.

BP said Halliburton's chief cement mixer for Gulf projects testified in depositions that the cement slurry seemed "thin" to him but that he chose not to write about his findings to his bosses out of fear he would be misinterpreted.

"I didn't want to put anything on an email that could be twisted, and turned," Rickey Morgan, the Halliburton cement expert, said in depositions. He worked at a laboratory in Duncan, Oklahoma.

"Upon reviewing these latest testing results, Halliburton employees destroyed records of the testing as well as the physical cement samples used in the testing," BP alleged.

Halliburton is the world's second-largest oilfield services provider.

The Deepwater Horizon drilling rig's explosion on April 20, 2010, caused 11 deaths, and brought tens of billions of dollars of lawsuits. Halliburton has accused BP of fraud and defamation, among other claims.

BP has also sued Transocean Ltd, which owned the rig, and Cameron International Corp, which made a blowout preventer.

In October, Anadarko Petroleum Corp, which owned 25 percent of the well, agreed to pay BP $4 billion toward clean-up costs and victims compensation.

BP has also reached settlements with Mitsui & Co, whose MOEX Offshore 2007 LLC venture was a drilling partner, and Weatherford International Ltd, which provided equipment used in the well. 

The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.

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