BP engineers might have misread results of well stability test
Report says data showed blowout was imminent
CHICAGO — BP’s internal investigation of the Deepwater Horizon rig disaster found that company engineers misinterpreted pressure data that indicated a blowout was imminent, according to a person familiar with the report.
The seawater was too light to prevent natural gas that had begun leaking into the well from shooting up the pipe to the rig, where it exploded and killed 11 workers. The damaged well eventually spewed more than 4 million barrels of crude into the sea, enough to fill two supertankers.
BP intends to announce the findings of their internal inquiry in the next 10 days, the person said. Scott Dean, a US-based spokesman for BP, didn’t return messages left after regular business hours on his office and cellular phones.
The 200-page report was compiled by a team of BP investigators led by Mark Bly, the London-based company’s head of safety and operations. The report concluded BP bears at least partial responsibility for the incident that led to the largest oil spill in US history, the person said.
Bly’s team also found that Transocean shares the blame, the person said.
Bly’s team began conducting interviews and reviewing internal documents just days after the Macondo well erupted about 40 miles off the Louisiana coast in the Gulf of Mexico.
Interviewees included BP vice presidents, offshore managers and engineers who designed the well in the company’s Houston office, according to testimony last week at a joint Coast Guard-Interior Department investigative hearing.
The catastrophe spurred inquiries by the Justice Department and several Congressional committees. BP suspended billions of dollars in dividends to preserve cash to pay for damages from the oil spill and efforts to stop the flow of crude a mile beneath the sea surface.
Four months after the incident, deep-water oil exploration remains on hold in the Gulf while federal regulators mull tougher safety rules to prevent future accidents. The Macondo field held an estimated 50 million barrels of crude before the spill.
The findings in BP’s internal report track the same series of events and decisions being examined by the Coast Guard and Interior Department panel, which finished its fourth round of public hearings last week in Houston. A fifth round of sessions is scheduled for early October.
The eight-member panel asked BP representatives on Aug. 26 to turn over a copy of the Bly report as soon as possible. The panel has been relying in part on notes from interviews BP conducted with employees involved in the Macondo well, including Donald Vidrine, the senior manager overseeing the project aboard the Deepwater Horizon on the night of the disaster.
Engineers are scheduled to remove the temporary cap on the BP well starting today so they can raise the failed blowout preventer. The blowout preventer is considered a key piece of evidence in determining what caused the rig explosion that unleashed the oil.
The leak was first contained when engineers were able to place the cap on the well. Workers then pumped mud and cement in through the top in a so-called “static kill’’ operation that significantly reduced pressure inside the well.
The blowout preventer, a 50-foot, 600,000-pound device designed to prevent such a catastrophe, will be taken out of the water with the well pipe still inside to ensure the pipe doesn’t break apart any more than it already has.
