One chief executive overboard, a $17bn loss over the past three months and $32bn in clear-up costs. No doubt about it: BP has got off lightly for its part in the Gulf of Mexico disaster.

Think about it: the multinational is ultimately responsible for spewing anywhere between 35,000 and 60,000 barrels off the Louisiana coastline – every day for months. The result has been a human tragedy, killing 11 workers and leaving others involved with the clear-up bill. It has been an environmental disaster, with thousands of dead animals. It has also been an economic catastrophe, leading to a seven-week fishing ban in an area with a huge fishing industry and to a plunge in tourism. And it has caused a convulsion in American politics, with Barack Obama coming under heavy artillery for not being hard enough on the oil giant behind the entire tragedy. It even blew up into a diplomatic issue, featuring in those initial discussions between the US president and David Cameron. With a rap sheet like this, other companies would not just have racked up a multibillion-dollar loss; they would have suffered the corporate equivalent of a public lynching and gone under.

None of this is to play down what has actually happened to BP. The explosion of the Deepwater Horizon will cause the oil giant to pay out billions in the months and years to come (hence the setting aside of $32bn); it will have to sell off its own holdings and will shrink as a result. But having had a near-death experience, it now looks as if the worst is behind it.

That must certainly be the thinking of executives, or else they would not have dared to acclaim boss Tony Hayward as the "model of corporate social responsibility", and packed him off with a year's extra salary and benefits (worth £1m) and a pension pot valued at about £11m. That must also be why they held on to chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg, whose invisibility as chairman during his company's existential crisis was swiftly explained by the crassness of his comments when he did surface (referring to the locals whose livelihoods were devastated by the Gulf oil spill as "the small people", indeed). If Mr Hayward's exit from the top job is a case of career destruction by disastrous publicity and thoughtless comments ("It may not have been a great PR success," he said yesterday, which should go in the OED below the entry for "understatement") then Mr Svanberg surely deserves the same fate.

Despite BP's attempt yesterday to draw a $32bn line underneath the Deepwater affair, there is still the possibility that it may haunt oil executives for a few more months. If investigations into the oil rig's explosion find that BP has been guilty of gross negligence (an accusation the company denies) then the penalty payout will rocket. And the multinational will have to work hard and long to repair relations with politicians, officials and customers in a market worth some 40% of its business.

But in other respects it could have been so much worse for BP. For a start, the US shows no sign of weaning itself off its addiction to oil, as demonstrated by the collapse last week of the Democrats' plan for a bold new energy bill. That just adds to the upward pressure on oil prices for the next 10 to 15 years, as sources of plentiful and cheap crude continue to dry up. That is no bad result for oil-exploration companies like BP. And it is also worth noting that other countries are perfectly willing to have Tony Hayward's firm come and drill off their coasts; by this Christmas, the big BP offshore-drilling project we will all be talking about will be Libyan, not American.

So a dreadful episode for one of the world's biggest companies draws to a close, costing tens of billions of dollars, yet business carries on as usual. The only lessons learned will be minor ones, about PR. But we have still to learn the big one – that the world needs more alternatives to costly, disaster-prone oil exploration.