This week in oil disaster news

Cementing contractor settles with BP Company agrees to pay BP $75M to settle claims

Meanwhile Tranocean has published the results of its internal investigation. Surprise! They find BP negligent.

Mississippi brown shrimp catch is off by nearly one million compared to this time a few years ago.

Traci Floyd, director of the state Department of Marine Resources Shrimp and Crab Bureau, says 903,908 pounds of brown shrimp were caught in the two weeks after the brown shrimp season started on May 25. She says that compares with first two weeks of 2007 when the catch was 1.96 million pounds.

Mark Stewart, an Ocean Springs shrimper, said the shrimp have been small and scarce in Mississippi waters. He says that has resulted in low prices.

This morning on WWL radio, Bob Delgiorno was confusingly describing the low price paid to shrimpers for a scarce and low quality product as a "shrimp glut." Clearly that's not what this is.

Feinberg says he's making progress. Although it's still quite difficult to pin down what that actually means.

The biggest lingering question is: What claims are still out there? The uncertainty rests mostly in the fishing industry, where the true measure of the spill's economic pain is still unfolding. Only 24,000 fishers, crabbers, shrimpers, oyster harvesters and seafood processors have sought final payments so far, and half have settled. The vast majority of them -- about 11,000 -- took the quick payment option of $5,000 for individuals or $25,000 for businesses.

Also there are thousands of fishers who are currently relying on government assistance and periodic (although stingily disbursed) interim payments from GCCF for subsistence alone. And, of course, the long term damage to the fisheries won't be fully known for many years.

Finally, the deadline to submit oil spill related "restoration" project proposals to the Natural Resource Trustees set up by BP on behalf of five Gulf Coast states is this Saturday.

Louisiana will receive a minimum of $100 million for "oil restoration" projects from the trust but will have to compete for a share of an additional $300 million with Texas, Florida, Mississippi, and Alabama. Despite initial optimism that this money could at least serve as a modest beginning to the massive funding needed to mitigate Louisiana's dire coastal erosion problem, this language appears to restrict the projects to Macondo clean-up only.

Trustees determining early restoration projects are guided in their selection in part by criteria laid down by the Oil Pollution Act of 1990. The projects must "contribute to making the environment and the public whole by restoring, rehabilitating, replacing or acquiring the equivalent of natural resources or services injured as a result of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill or response, or compensating for interim losses resulting from the incident," according to a recent presentations made by Drue Banta, an attorney for the Governor's Office of Coastal Protection and Restoration, and Stephanie Morris, an attorney for the Louisiana Oil Spill Coordinator's Office.

The projects also must "address one or more specific injuries to natural resources or services associated with the incident." And they must "seek to restore natural resources, habitats or natural resource services of the same type, quality and of comparable ecological and/or human use value to compensate for identified resource and service losses resulting from the incident."

The good news is there may be more money available at some point once the National Resource Damage Assessment is complete.

That money will be deducted from the final bill presented to BP and other responsible parties after completion of the overall Natural Resource Damage Assessment process, which is anticipated to take several years.

The bad news is many observers believe BP is trying to manipulate the NRDA process.