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.
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