Report by BP Finds Several Companies at Fault in Spill

Report by BP Finds Several Companies at Fault in Spill
By IAN URBINA
Copyright by The Associated Press
Published: September 8, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/09/us/09spill.html?emc=na


The oil giant BP said Wednesday in its internal report that a series of failures involving a number of companies ultimately led to the huge oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

“No single factor caused the Macondo well tragedy,” BP said in a statement about the report. “Rather, a sequence of failures involving a number of different parties led to the explosion and fire which killed 11 people and caused widespread pollution in the Gulf of Mexico earlier this year.”

Conducted by the company’s safety chief, Mark Bly, and a team of about 50 mostly BP employees, the inquiry was initiated almost immediately after the April 20 explosion that killed 11 and spilled almost five million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

Citing “a complex and interlinked series of mechanical failures, human judgments, engineering design, operational implementation and team interfaces,” the 193-page report deflects attention away from BP and back onto its contractors, especially Transocean, which owned the rig, and Halliburton, which performed cement jobs on the well.

The report focuses less on decisions that BP made in designing and drilling the well than on what rig workers, mostly from Transocean, did after the blowout occurred.

“To put it simply, there was a bad cement job and a failure of the shoe track barrier at the bottom of the well, which let hydrocarbons from the reservoir into the production casing,” BP’s outgoing chief executive, Tony Hayward, said in a statement on Wednesday. “Based on the report, it would appear unlikely that the well design contributed to the incident, as the investigation found that the hydrocarbons flowed up the production casing through the bottom of the well.”

While it puts some responsibility on BP for errors made — such as misreading pressure data that indicated a blowout was imminent — the report tries to undermine the notion that the company acted with gross negligence.

Among its most significant conclusions, the report said that the blowout came up the center of the pipe and not up the outside of the well casing, the area known as the annulus.

If true, the finding is significant because it plays down the importance of certain BP decisions that have been criticized as negligent. One such decision was BP’s choice of a type of well casing that internal documents indicated the company knew was cheaper but riskier. Another such decision was BP’s use of fewer-than-advised centralizers, devices that are meant to keep the casing properly positioned.

Because of its authorship, the report is unlikely to carry much weight in influencing the Department of Justice, which is considering criminal and civil charges. It is, however, a first glimpse at BP’s probable legal strategy in defending itself and it represents the first in a series of such reports in the coming months.

The report faults Transocean workers for failing to recognize and act on the influx of hydrocarbons into the well for more than 40 minutes until the hydrocarbons were in the riser and rapidly flowing to the surface.

And the report adds that the well-flow was routed to a mud-gas separator after it reached the rig, causing gas to be vented directly onto the rig rather than diverted overboard.

The flow of gas into the engine rooms through the ventilation system created a potential for ignition that the rig’s fire and gas system did not prevent, BP investigators found.

In recent testimony, BP executives have pointed out the blowout preventer did not go through an extensive certification as required by federal regulations, a fact which was earlier documented in internal Transocean equipment reports

“Even after explosion and fire had disabled its crew-operated controls, the rig’s blow-out preventer on the seabed should have activated automatically to seal the well,” the report concludes. “But it failed to operate, probably because critical components were not working.”

BP did not have a chance to analyze the blowout preventer before the company released its report. The failed device was removed from the sea floor on Saturday and sent to a NASA facility in New Orleans where federal investigators are waiting to inspect it.

In recent weeks, BP has attempted to shift blame by claiming Halliburton should be held responsible for the failures in cement work. Halliburton designed and pumped a cement seal that investigators have said may have allowed explosive natural gas to enter the well and rush up toward the rig.

In federal testimony, Halliburton executives have responded by arguing that they were following BP’s orders and they pointed to e-mails from April 18 in which Halliburton executives warned BP of a potential “severe gas flow problem.” But BP executives have highlighted other internal documents provided to The New York Times that they say show Halliburton’s confidence in its cementing job.

“We have completed the job and it went well,” one Halliburton worker wrote about the cement work in an e-mail only hours before the explosion. “Full returns were observed throughout.”

Several engineers who were asked to review the documents said however that the warnings from Halliburton were clear and firm. The engineers also pointed out that ultimate responsibility for decision-making on the rig rested with BP.