With BP's know-how and U.S. authority, the Macondo well was plugged

It was awkward from the start, this marriage of necessity between BP and the federal government. The government had ultimate authority; BP had the technology to plug the Macondo well. Something known as the National Contingency Plan called for a "unified command" in which government officials would issue orders and make pronouncements but BP would do the most crucial work and be the "responsible party."

People got confused. Who was in charge, really? The well kept gushing; everyone looked bad. Reporters asked top officials why the government didn't simply take over. But we're in charge already, the officials said.

The fact is, the two sides formed a team, weird as that might be at times. That is true today, still, with the Macondo well looking rather dead -- choked by a mile of cement -- but not yet terminated to everyone's satisfaction.

Government scientists and BP engineers have been devising a complex endgame. Before Macondo receives a conclusive dose of mud and cement at its base via a relief well, engineers want to take the old, damaged blowout preventer off the wellhead and replace it with a new blowout preventer. That will delay the "bottom kill" until after Labor Day, according to retired Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, the national incident commander.

BP engineers and the government scientists come from different cultures. In general, the engineers want to plunge ahead, and the scientists want to go slower.

"We helped them see that there are dangers lurking here, and there and everywhere," Energy Secretary Steven Chu told The Washington Post. "The Department of Energy is in charge of the nuclear arsenal. . . . This is no messing around. In our culture, you want to make sure that nothing can go wrong."

The Obama administration has claimed credit for turning an uncontrolled calamity into something managed and mastered. The response to the disaster would have been different, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said after the well had been plugged with cement, had the administration not "pushed at every step of the way" for BP to "do things more comprehensively and faster."

BP has stayed clear of that debate.

"I've got a philosophy that when you're in the middle of the response, you stay focused on the response. When the response is over, that's a good time to analyze how the response went and decide what could have been done better," Kent Wells, BP senior vice president, said recently.

But the broader truth seems to be that BP and the government have overcome their natural antagonism to create a functioning partnership. The two sides had testy moments, but again and again they found a path to agreement. When Allen was asked whether a recent pressure test was conceived by the government scientists or the BP engineers, he replied: "It's hard to say anymore, we've been together so long. Some of these conversations start around the coffeepot."

The government needed BP because the company had the tools to plug the hole. BP benefited from the outsider perspective of government scientists and needed officials of the Environmental Protection Agency to run interference on such contentious issues as the use of chemical dispersants, a subject on which BP was viewed as having zero credibility.

Keeping everyone moving in the same direction has been Allen, perhaps the least-excitable person in American public life. Allen said in a recent interview that his goal was to "produce unity of effort" and added, "You can't do that by polarizing, or creating conflict, or getting caught up in a personal agenda or getting too excited about things."

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'Culture of complacency' at BP set stage for oil spill, commission chief says

Monday was a relatively good day for BP in the glare of oil spill inquiries. Tuesday was a bad day.

Drilling experts and corporate rivals testifying before a presidential oil spill commission blasted BP Tuesday for decisions about the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig that might have removed obstacles to the April 20 blowout that led to the massive Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

BP's final well designs were "deficient in detail," said Steve Lewis, a drilling engineer with Seldovia Marine Services, who later added that the "the operational detail in my mind was totally deficient" and "totally inadequate."

Shell Oil's chief well scientist Charlie Williams said his company typically uses three to five plugs when temporarily abandoning a well. BP used one. And John Rogers Smith, associate professor of petroleum engineering at Louisiana State University, said the way BP replaced drilling mud with seawater was "not prudent."

The commission's co-chairman William K. Reilly opened the day saying that a "suite of bad decisions" revealed "a culture of complacency" at BP as well as its main contractors Transocean and Halliburton. He concluded the day saying that the deepwater drilling disaster was the result of systemic problems, not isolated ones.

The renewed criticism of BP came one day after Fred H. Bartlit Jr., the general counsel of the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling, seemed to absolve BP of allegations that it let cost worries trump safety concerns. Bartlit said Monday that "to date, we have not seen a single instance where a human being made a conscious decision to favor dollars over safety."

The commission members backpedaled from that assessment and even Bartlit sought to explain himself. Reilly said that the commission staff "did not ascribe motive to any of those decisions." Bartlit said the commission was still investigating and could draw inferences about whether time- and money-saving measures had increased risks on the Deepwater Horizon, where 11 workers died in the April 20 explosion.

But the question of motive - whether BP was rushing to finish a costly and tardy well - hung over the entire day. A representative of a plaintiffs' attorney group noted that several lawyers at Bartlit's firm are doing work for Halliburton.

Lewis said he had seen copies of internal BP communications suggesting that the London-based oil giant was worried about finishing the Macondo oil well and moving the drilling rig to Kaskida, another Gulf of Mexico location, where a BP lease would expire by May 16 if certain work weren't done there.

"They had commitments to wells, regulatory commitments, that were required to maintain in the one case a viable lease that required well work," Lewis said.

Commission staff attempted to rebut Lewis later. Bartlit said that "we have more facts than Mr. Lewis" and that "it does not appear to us that there was a rush to get to another lease."

Commission sources and those close to BP later added that by early April BP had weighed the option of dropping a plan for work that was originally to have been done after Macondo but before Kaskida. That intermediate job would have permanently plugged the Nile well, not far from Macondo, and would have taken about a month.

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Development in once-rural areas put populations closer to natural gas pipelines

On Sept. 9, a 30-inch natural gas pipeline exploded in the suburban community of San Bruno, Calif., creating a 2,000-degree fireball that killed eight people, destroyed 37 homes and left more than 60 people injured. A gaping crater replaced homes at the center of the blast.

Could it happen here?

A pipeline rupture of approximately the same magnitude did occur not far from the Washington area a couple of years ago, but with less-dire consequences.

On Sept. 14, 2008, a 30-inch span of the Transco pipeline ruptured in Appomattox County, Va., creating a fireball that destroyed two homes and caused five injuries. Twenty-three families were evacuated.

The Appomattox explosion was larger than the explosion in San Bruno, but it occurred in a less-populated area, said Carl Weimer, executive director of the Pipeline Safety Trust, a watchdog organization based in Bellingham, Wash.

The Appomattox rupture was caused by corrosion of the 53-year-old pipeline, which had been inspected three months earlier by a "smart pig," a computerized scanning device that travels through a pipeline searching for dings, dents or corrosion, but had not yet been repaired. Transco's owner, the Williams Cos., paid the U.S. Transportation Department a $952,000 fine, replaced 2,500 feet of the pipeline, "smart pigged" all of its pipelines in Virginia, and performed pressurized water tests to validate the repairs.

Aging pipelines - and growing populations in the once-rural areas where pipelines were routed decades ago - have increased the risks associated with ruptures throughout the United States.

"The average transmission pipe is 50 years old," Weimer said. "If you put a steel pipe in the ground 50 years ago, you can have problems. It's not the same strength as steel today, and it doesn't have the anti-corrosive coating. But the more important factor is how the company has operated and maintained the pipes."

Some of the largest interstate pipelines in the United States run through the Washington area. The massive Transco pipeline, which consists of three and four parallel pipelines of 30 to 42 inches each, runs through Culpeper, Fauquier, Prince William, Fairfax, Montgomery and Howard counties on its way north from the Gulf of Mexico and shale resources in Alabama to supply natural gas up the East Coast to New York City.

One of the largest import facilities for liquefied natural gas in the United States is at Cove Point in Calvert County. Tankers travel up the Chesapeake Bay to deliver gas from abroad; from Cove Point it is distributed via transmission pipelines throughout the region.

Columbia Gas Transmission also runs major gas pipelines across the western edge of the metro area. Washington Gas taps into these resources with 200 miles of high-pressure transmission pipelines, which run through every county in the metro area and even beneath the Mall. The pipelines connect to a 26,000-mile web of smaller distribution pipelines, typically three-quarters of a foot to one foot in diameter, where the pressure is reduced so the fuel can enter homes and businesses.

Digging up trouble

The majority of pipeline incidents in the D.C. metro area, however, are not from the large transmission pipelines. In fact, there haven't been any incidents on the 20 miles of 24-inch transmission pipelines in the District (most of which date to the 1960s) "as far back as anyone can remember," said Betty Ann Kane, chairman of the D.C. Public Service Commission.

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