BP knew its Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico was a "nightmare" in the days leading up to its fatal April 20 blowout, congressional investigators said yesterday, but the company "appears to have made multiple decisions for economic reasons that increased the danger of a catastrophic well failure."
From the company's uncommon well design to its fatal decision not to fully circulate drilling mud -- which could have cleared out pockets of gas -- and the lack of critical testing -- which could have pinpointed problems with the well's cementing -- BP had many opportunities to prevent an explosion, investigators with the House Energy and Commerce Committee have found.
Instead, the company violated industry guidelines and proceeded "despite warnings from BP's own personnel and its contractors," said the chairman of the committee, Rep. Henry Waxman, and the chairman of the investigative subcommittee that handled the probe, Rep. Bart Stupak.
The investigators cite one of BP's own engineers, Brian Morel, who told his colleague Richard Miller in an e-mail six days before the explosion that "this has been [a] nightmare well which has everyone all over the place."
By the day of the explosion, the Transocean-owned rig that was drilling the well was 43 days late for its next job, Waxman and Stupak wrote. At $500,000 in daily leasing fees, financial considerations "may have set the context for the series of decisions that BP made in the days and hours before the blowout," the two wrote in a 14-page letter to BP chief executive officer Tony Hayward that the committee released yesterday.
Those decisions led to 11 deaths and the worst oil spill in U.S. history, and not only will affect the Gulf of Mexico's environment for decades but also will shape the future of deepwater offshore drilling in the U.S.
The committee will ask Hayward to address its findings Thursday, when its members look at five areas that could have contributed to the explosion.
"The common feature of these five decisions is that they posed a tradeoff between cost and well safety," Waxman and Stupak wrote. BP, their investigation found, "repeatedly chose risky procedures in order to reduce costs and save time and made minimal efforts to contain the added risk."
Also yesterday, Obama vowed to protect the way of life of residents in the Gulf of Mexico region, as the U.S. government ramped up efforts to ensure seafood is safe to eat.
Obama announced a multi-agency bid to aid the stricken seafood industry and restore consumer confidence, which includes precautionary closures of Gulf waters that may be contaminated by the oil spill, as well as more rigorous testing of seafood.
"There is a sense that this disaster is not only threatening our fishermen and our shrimpers and oystermen, not only affecting potentially precious marshes and wetlands and estuaries and waters that are part of what makes the Gulf coast so special," Obama said after meeting local officials.
"There's also a fear that it could have a long-term impact on a way of life that has been passed on for generations. And I understand that fear."
It also emerged yesterday that BP PLC may lose control of its U.S. oil and natural gas wells and be barred from doing business with the federal government as punishment for the spill, industry and regulatory analysts said.
Obama and lawmakers are debating penalties that would cripple the company's ability to do business in the U.S. as public outrage intensifies. In addition to BP's culpability in the Gulf of Mexico spill, a 2005 explosion at BP's Texas City refinery that killed 15 workers and a 2006 pipeline leak that dumped 200,000 gallons of crude at Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, will figure in the debate, said Michael Wara, associate professor of environmental law at Stanford University.
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