Oil spill report lays much blame on BP, who knew of Halliburton weaknesses

The chief counsel of the presidential oil spill commission has issued a final report laying considerable blame on BP for last year's disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. But he also points to flaws in Halliburton's work and errors by rig owner Transocean.

Fred H. Bartlit Jr., a prominent trial lawyer, said that for three years BP had been aware of problems with lab tests of Halliburton cement; that a reorganization of BP's engineering department resulted in delays; and that BP decided not to set a lockdown sleeve, an installation deep in the well, during its preparations for temporary abandonment in order to save 51/2 days and $2 million in costs.

He also said BP's well-site leader was not present, as he should have been, during a critical test known as a negative pressure test that indicated something was wrong.

Bartlit's report is the latest of a series from the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling, which has already faulted a variety of factors, including decisions made by the well operator BP, rig owner Transocean, oil service provider Halliburton and federal regulators.

In a statement Thursday, BP did not dispute the report's specifics. The London-based oil giant said that it "has made every effort to understand the causes of the Deepwater Horizon accident to help prevent similar events from occurring in the future." BP said the presidential commission's findings - "particularly that the accident was the result of multiple causes, involving multiple parties - are largely consistent with those contained in the BP internal investigation report." It added that it is reorganizing its safety operations and reviewing its supervision of contractors.

Halliburton and Transocean did not issue comments.

Bartlit noted that in 2007, a consulting firm issued a quality-control report warning BP that Halliburton's lab technicians "do not have a lot of experience evaluating data" and that BP needed to improve communication with Halliburton "to avoid unnecessary delays or errors in the slurry design testing."

A cementing expert at BP described the "typical Halliburton profile" as "operationally competent and just good enough technically to get by." And BP's engineers said that the Halliburton engineer assigned to the doomed Macondo well was "not cutting it" and that he often waited too long to conduct critical tests. But, Bartlit added, the BP engineers neither reviewed his work at Macondo carefully nor checked to see that he conducted testing in a timely manner - even though they knew that their last-minute changes to the cement design test could cause problems and that using nitrogen-foamed cement could pose "significant stability challenges."

Bartlit also said the blowout preventer was not to blame for the explosion on the drilling rig, the Deepwater Horizon, that killed 11 workers April 20. The report says that by the time the rig crew tried to close the blowout preventer on the sea floor, deadly gas had already slipped into the riser pipe leading to the rig.

Although the route that gas took through the well when it blew out has been a matter of uncertainty, Bartlit's report says physical evidence taken from the well shows that oil and natural gas "almost certainly" came to the surface through a piece of equipment called the "shoe track" and up the production pipe. The report says cement in the shoe track should have blocked that flow, which it says further calls into question the quality of the cement job done by Halliburton.

Bartlit also faults Transocean, whose rig workers missed several signs of trouble in the well. Earlier alarm might have prompted them to close the blowout preventer earlier, avoiding catastrophe.

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BP cost-cutting measures are focus of U.S. inquiry into gulf spill

METAIRIE, LA. - There's been a lot of talk about the "safety culture" at BP in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Now, federal investigators are probing what looks to them like BP's save-money culture.

At a federal hearing this week, an investigator revealed that BP's top manager on a drilling rig is given a performance evaluation that includes the category "Every Dollar Counts and Simplification."

Of 13 employee evaluations reviewed by investigators, 12 had documented ways they had saved the company large sums of money, typically six-figure amounts, and one had put together a spreadsheet showing that he could account for $490,000 in savings, said Jason Mathews, an investigator for the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement, which is conducting the joint inquiry with the Coast Guard.

BP witnesses have acknowledged this week and in previous hearings that oil drilling is a business, and costs have to be taken into account. But they've said safety always comes first, and they denied compromising safety to save money.

But the government this week raised the question of whether BP took incremental shortcuts because it felt rushed to finish the problem-plagued Macondo exploration well, a job costing BP about a million dollars a day. Simply leasing the Deepwater Horizon rig from Transocean was costing $525,000 a day. Eleven people died when the mile-deep well blew out April 20, and more than 4 million barrels of oil spewed into the Gulf of Mexico in the nation's worst offshore oil spill.

The hearing at a Holiday Inn conference room was packed with lawyers for oil companies and rig workers. Although not a trial, but rather a fact-finding inquiry, the hearings have had plenty of courtroom theatrics, including turbo-charged lawyers leaping to their feet to belt objections. There has been a smattering of accusations lobbed across the room to the effect that some attorneys are trolling for material for civil lawsuits.

One document introduced into evidence this week showed that the Macondo job, originally projected as a $96 million operation, was on track to cost $58 million more than anticipated.

BP kept track of estimated completion dates for drilling jobs, and tried to figure out where the rig could go next so that it could stay active and have minimal down time. E-mails discussed by attorneys this week showed that BP hoped to squeeze in a quick job in May - plugging a well called Nile - before tackling a more complex job at another site, the Kaskida well, that might take six months.

"I know you all are under pressure to finish Macondo so we can get Nile P&A moving and not jeopardize the Kaskida well," one BP employee, Merrick Kelley, wrote to Macondo well team member Brian Morel a week before the blowout.

On April 9, David Sims, a BP manager, explained to colleagues in an e-mail that the Nile job was a "gap-filler" between Macondo and Kaskida, and that he hoped the government regulatory agency, the Minerals Management Service, would provide some flexibility in its approved date for starting the Kaskida job because of delays in completing Macondo.

The Macondo well had been a "nightmare," in the words of one team member. The widow of a worker killed in the explosion testified this summer that her husband had told her that "Mother Nature just doesn't want to be drilled here." The first rig to drill the well was damaged in a hurricane and had to quit the job. The Deepwater Horizon, drilling fast, suffered a stuck drill pipe March 8 when the hole collapsed. The crew had to start over, drilling a new hole.

Mathews, the investigator, asked John Guide, the BP well team leader for the Macondo job, whether cost-consciousness colored decisions involving safety.

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As offshore drilling moratorium nears an end, questions about what's next

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar is getting ready to take his finger off what he has called the "pause" button on deepwater oil drilling, with environmentalists and oil industry executives alike worried about what comes next.

Salazar received recommendations Thursday from Michael Bromwich, head of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement, based on information gathered at public forums and private meetings in the wake of the BP oil spill. Salazar could act on the BOEMRE report well before the drilling ban's expiration date, Nov. 30.

While many Gulf Coast lawmakers and residents have been badgering the Obama administration to lift the deepwater moratorium, key industry and administration officials are struggling with the larger questions: not when drilling will resume, but how and where.

"We're stuck between 'drill, baby, drill' and the 'BP drilling disaster,' and no one knows which argument will win," said Athan Manuel, director of the Sierra Club's lands protection program.

Separate from Bromwich's report, Salazar on Thursday announced the federal government was adopting two new regulations for offshore drilling, including a drilling safety rule and a workplace safety rule. Both would impose new requirements on operators in the gulf and elsewhere.

The drilling rule dictates specific procedures aimed at preventing a blowout, including cementing and casing practices and the appropriate use of drilling fluids. It also increases oversight of mechanisms--such as the blowout preventer--that would shut off the flow of oil and gas in an accident, and requires operators to secure independent and expert reviews of their well design, construction and flow intervention mechanisms.

The workplace safety rule forces offshore operators to have what an Interior Department statement describes as "clear programs in place to identify potential hazards when they drill, clear protocol for addressing those hazards, and strong procedures and risk-reduction strategies for all phases of activity, from well design and construction to operation, maintenance, and decommissioning."

Energy industry officials said they would review the regulations and offer comments as part of the rule-making process. The drilling safety rule will take effect immediately on publication. Erik Milito, upstream director for the American Petroleum Institute, said, "Getting a good offshore safety rule in place is critical to the nation's energy future. The gulf and other parts of the nation's offshore areas are vitally important to helping meet the nation's future energy needs. The rule will affect every offshore energy project for years to come. It has to be right."

In the report Bromwich submitted to Salazar Thursday, he proposed new rules for drilling, as well as contingency measures to bolster the industry's response to any future spills.

Oil and gas executives are steeling for a slower and more costly permitting process that could hinder drilling even after the moratorium is lifted. And they worry that they won't be able to develop new areas - from Alaska to the East Coast - that President Obama outlined when he unveiled his five-year leasing plan on March 31, a few weeks before the BP blowout.

Environmentalists, in contrast, are hoping that the congressional limits on offshore drilling that expired two years ago are reimposed, or at least that the pace of development is slowed.

And the administration faces difficult questions about whether - and under what circumstances - it will allow leasing in areas from Alaska to off the coast of Virginia before Obama's first term ends.

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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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BP finishes pumping cement in final stage of 'static kill'

BP has finished pumping cement into the blown-out Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico as part of its efforts to permanently plug the source of the nation's worst oil spill, the company said Thursday.

Engineers started the cementing operation at 10:15 a.m. EDT and completed it at 3:15 EDT. It was the second step in the "static kill," in which heavy mud was first pumped into the well from the surface to stop it from leaking crude into the gulf.

BP said in a statement that the static kill procedure will "complement" a separate effort to plug the well through a relief well that is nearing completion in a technique known as the "bottom kill."

Earlier, the company announced that retired Coast Guard Adm. Thad W. Allen, the national incident commander for the disaster, had authorized the cementing operation, which was under consideration following the successful effort to pump mud into the well.

The development comes a day after the Macondo well became an apparently harmless hole in the seafloor, clogged with 13-pound-per-gallon gunk, and barely more of a threat to spew oil into the Gulf of Mexico than to start gushing lemonade.

On the 107th day of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, the well that tormented the nation had flatlined. Federal officials then green-lighted the cementing of the well, already jammed with mud, late Wednesday. Federal waters are reopening gradually to fishing. The oil slick, the once-horrific expanse of red-orange mousse and silver sheen, has largely disappeared, federal scientists said Wednesday, even though the amount of oil left is more than four times that dumped by the Exxon Valdez.

The Obama administration breathed a sigh of relief, holding a midday news conference featuring top officials who claimed credit for guiding BP in getting the well under control. Officials hastened to remind the public that Macondo won't be incontrovertibly dead until a relief well drills into it near its base and plugs it with cement. But even the cautious Allen, the official in charge of the federal response to the disaster, called the static kill a "fairly consequential" event and a "very significant step."

About three-quarters of the nearly 5 million barrels of oil that escaped Macondo has evaporated, dissolved or been dispersed by chemicals, skimmed by boats, burned, weathered and, most important, devoured by the Gulf of Mexico's permanent oil-eating microbial workforce, according to a study released Wednesday by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and Interior Department.

"Mother Nature is assisting here considerably," said NOAA administrator Jane Lubchenco.

This should terminate, once and for all, the more apocalyptic scenarios for the demise of the gulf and the spread of oil to Atlantic shores. There is no sign that the oil is going to ride the Loop Current onto the beaches of South Florida, the Outer Banks, Bermuda, Ireland and so on.

Just a month ago, the spill was an uncontrolled calamity: Macondo mocked the technological skills of the world's petroleum engineers, and oil was slathering birds and turtles and tar-balling hundreds of miles of coastline. The turning point came when BP put a new tight-fitting cap on the well July 12 and closed the valves three days later, cutting off the ugly geyser of oil that had become a dominant image of the summer.

Federal scientists have said that vigilance would be called for even after the static kill procedure worked, which, according to BP in a 2 a.m. announcement, it did. BP sent out a bulletin declaring success after spending eight hours pumping mud into the well from surface ships.

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