Markey to press oil CEOs on whether they endorse BP practices

Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) plans to use a high-profile Capitol Hill hearing Tuesday to press executives of the country’s biggest oil companies for their views about BP’s safety practices before the catastrophic Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

“BP clearly took actions that were unacceptable and they did so as part of a systematic pattern. What we want to put on the record is whether or not the other companies accept that as a standard,” Markey said on MSNBC Monday afternoon.

Markey’s comment comes a day before oil industry CEOs appear before a panel of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

The senior Democrat's questions will fuel an already charged political atmosphere by, in effect, asking executives to attack BP over the massive Gulf spill or stand with the embattled oil giant.

The CEOs of ExxonMobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips and the U.S. arms of BP and Royal Dutch Shell will testify before the Energy and Environment Subcommittee that Markey chairs.

The Financial Times reported Monday that the executives of Exxon, Chevron, ConocoPhillips and Shell intend to distance themselves from BP and call the spill preventable.

Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) informed BP CEO Tony Hayward on Sunday that the committee's probe of the spill has found that BP “appears to have made multiple decisions for economic reasons that increased the danger of a catastrophic well failure.”

Hayward is slated to appear Thursday before a separate Energy and Commerce subcommittee, his first appearance on Capitol Hill since the April 20 explosion of the BP-leased Deepwater Horizon rig that touched off the worst oil spill in U.S. history.

Lamar McKay, CEO of BP America Inc., will appear with the other companies’ executives Tuesday.

Russell Berman contributed to this report.