BP and Halliburton knew weeks before an explosion tore through a BP rig in the Gulf of Mexico that the cement mix they planned to pump into an undersea BP well was faulty, a probe found on Thursday.
However, they went ahead regardless and the unstable cement that Halliburton poured into BP’s Macondo well to secure the casing on the sea floor was cited by a commission set up by US President Barack Obama as one of the key causes of the April accident.
“Halliburton and BP both had results in March showing that a very similar foam slurry design to the one actually pumped at the Macondo well would be unstable, but neither acted upon that data,” Fred Bartlit, chief counsel to the oil spill commission, said in a letter outlining the commission’s first findings.
The findings jar with statements made by Halliburton in the weeks following the accident. The oil services company said it had tested the cement before pumping it on April 19 and Arpil 20 and found it to be stable.
BP’s undersea Macondo well ruptured on April 20, causing an explosion on the oil rig at the surface that killed 11 workers.
Experts have long suspected that “the cement used to secure the production casing and isolate the hydrocarbon zone at the bottom of the well, must have failed in some way,” the commission, which Obama tasked with finding the root causes of the disaster, said in a preliminary report.
Halliburton provided the committee with the results of three tests of the nitrogen foam cement that was eventually pumped into the BP well to prevent hydrocarbons from entering it and potentially causing an explosion.
Two of the tests were conducted in February and one at the beginning of April, just days before the rig exploded. None found the cement to be stable.
However, the results of a fourth test would not have been available before the blowout on the well, meaning that when Halliburton pumped cement into the BP well, it probably did so “without any lab results indicating that” what it was doing was safe, the report said.
“This is like building a car when you know the brakes could fail, but you sell the cars anyway,” US Congressman Edward Markey said.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
China would train thousands of foreign law enforcement officers to see the world order “develop in a more fair, reasonable and efficient direction,” its minister for public security has said. “We will [also] send police consultants to countries in need to conduct training to help them quickly and effectively improve their law enforcement capabilities,” Chinese Minister of Public Security Wang Xiaohong (王小洪) told an annual global security forum. Wang made the announcement in the eastern city of Lianyungang on Monday in front of law enforcement representatives from 122 countries, regions and international organizations such as Interpol. The forum is part of ongoing