Bp must pay 20.8 billion dollars as a penalty for the environmental disaster caused by the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig in April 2010 and the subsequent massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The announcement was made on 5 October by United States Attorney General Loretta Lynch, who described the settlement as the largest ever reached with a single entity in American history.

The final fine, slightly higher than the one anticipated in July (18.7 billion dollars), will compensate the federal government and the states of Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas over the next 18 years, and will resolve all ongoing civil and criminal proceedings, also covering the costs of cleaning up terrestrial and marine ecosystems.

More than three million barrels of crude oil poured into the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, contaminating more than two thousand kilometres of coastline. The penalty of over 20 billion dollars includes 7.1 billion for damage to natural resources, 5.5 billion for fines imposed under the Clean Water Act, the most important federal American law on water pollution, and 4.9 billion dollars in compensation to the states.

The incident involved the Macondo well, located at a depth of approximately 1,500 metres, claimed the lives of eleven workers and triggered an oil spill that lasted more than one hundred days.