Transocean, the Swiss company that owned the rig lost in last year’s oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, issued an extensive report on the disaster on Wednesday that largely blames BP, the well’s owner.
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The conclusions of the 854-page, two-volume report may not be particularly surprising, considering the enormous liability in civil lawsuits and possible federal criminal charges.
The report does attribute some errors to Transocean, but the “incident,” it states, was caused by “a succession of interrelated well design, construction and temporary abandonment decisions that compromised the integrity of the well and compounded the risk of failure.”
Temporary abandonment is the process of plugging the well after the initial drilling so that new equipment can be brought in to complete the well in order for production to begin; the report states that BP engineers produced at least five such plans for the well from April 12 to April 20, the day of the blast.
All of those decisions, “many made by the operator, BP, in the two weeks leading up to the incident,” were “driven by BP’s knowledge that the geological window for safe drilling was becoming increasingly narrow.” Halliburton, which was in charge of the operation to seal off the well, did not properly test the cement used in that process, and BP did not verify the results, according to the Transocean report.
The report stated it did not “represent the legal position of Transocean, nor does it attempt to assign legal responsibility or fault,” a statement that was greeted with seeming incredulity by a spokesman for BP.
The spokesman, Scott Dean, called the report an “advocacy piece” that underplayed Transocean’s role and “cherry-picked the facts in support of its litigation strategy.”
BP, he said, “has stepped up to its responsibilities and cooperated with all official investigations regarding the accident,” while Transocean “continues to take every opportunity to avoid its responsibilities.”
Other reports, including BP’s own, have found a larger role for Transocean. A report in April by the United States Coast Guard spread the blame broadly among companies involved in the well, citing problems at Transocean that included inadequate maintenance and training and a “poor safety culture.”
The blowout of the Deepwater Horizon rig killed 11 workers and spread millions of gallons of oil across gulf waters and beaches.
James P. Roy, a lead lawyer for lawsuits against BP and others in federal court over the spill, called the new report “a valuable addition to the search” for why the rig blew out, although “it is not 100 percent comprehensive.”
