Americans across the land can be thankful, at least momentarily, that BP has at last managed to stop the runaway flow of oil that has wreaked such havoc on the Gulf’s ecology and economy and the lives of its people over the last 86 days. It is too soon, of course, to know whether the temporary fix will contain the well’s high pressure until the well-bore can be plugged with cement injections from relief wells now being drilled. Still, the moments that don’t show the gusher continuing on the monitor provide welcome relief, however brief.
BP and government officials, unfortunately, made it plain that the fix may be far more temporary than we would have hoped. BP ratcheted down the valves that shut off the oil plume slowly and with considerable deliberation precisely because the enormous pressure at the well head could easily blow out the valves.
“The intention of the capping stack was never to close in the well per se,” retired Coast Guard admiral Thad W. Allen, the government’s spill response coordinator, said Thursday. “It creates the opportunity to (do so) if we have the right pressure readings to shut in the well. It allows us to abandon the site if there is a hurricane.”
Experts also cited the possibility that a significantly lower pressure reading could mean that oil had begun escaping from the cased pipe in the well bore, which extends 13,000 feet beneath the ocean’s surface. That is far beyond the well head on the floor of the ocean 5,000 feet deep. Low pipe pressure could mean that oil outside the drill pipe in the bore is escaping into surrounding rock fractures, which could compromise the potential of capping the well permanently with cement.
Such considerations surely increase the complexity of fixing the well robotically by remote control in the sub-freezing temperatures at 5,000 feet, where icy crystals of condensation compromise the hydraulic systems that control the critical valves that make the blow-out preventer operable.
They also underscore why Americans have ample reason to be intensely angry over BP’s apparently reckless operational conduct regarding this well, and its other operations in U.S. waters and elsewhere.
A New York Times research team’s report on Tuesday shows more clearly how reckless BP’s conduct has been over the past decade as its executives raced to grow the company from a middle-size oil company to its position today as the world’s second largest oil company, behind only Exxon Mobil.
The Times’ report found that as BP began acquiring other companies (America’s Amoco and Atlantic Richfield were two) it slashed tens of thousands of jobs, including those of technicians and engineers, even as it pushed into increasingly risky deals and exploration in the deep waters of the Gulf and Alaska, and in places like Angola and Azerbaijan.
Its growth strategies from 1995 until 2007 under former CEO John Browne, The Times found, richly rewarded investors and shareholders, but generated greater risks at sites where employees were pushed to the hilt. Some consequences were undeniably negative. A deadly explosion from a careless overfilling of a silo by exhausted overtime workers at its huge Texas City refinery, which had five managers in six years, killed 15 people and injured more than 180 in March 2005. That was far worse than the 2004 accident at the poorly maintained plant that killed two workers and injured another a year earlier.
BP’s showcase Thunder Horse offshore drilling platform nearly sank in the Gulf in 2005 because a valve had been wrongly installed in the rush to bring the platform online. A subsequent inspection revealed massive problems with pipeline welds and cracks that could have caused huge leaks from multiple wells, had the platform been put into operation. Repairs subsequently set back production use of the well by three years.
In 2006, a break in a poorly maintained BP-owned pipeline in Alaska’s North Slope fields was responsible for the largest spill there. Other ventures with Russia, Iraq and China also turned out to be embarrassing for BP and the oil industry.
And this week, BP confirmed that it had lobbied the British government to consent to the early release and return, to Libya, of the only person ever convicted in the 1988 bombing of an American airliner over Lockerbie, Scotland, which killed 270 people, including 189 Americans. Its reason: It wanted to secure a $900 million offshore oil-and-gas project in Libyan waters.
BP took another entirely justified hit this week when the House Natural Resources Committee approved a measure that would ban companies from getting new offshore oil and gas leases in U.S. waters due to excessively poor safety records and past violations. BP’s record would fall under the ban’s criteria of violations of state and federal safety standards at a rate five times higher than the industry average for the past seven years.
With a record like this, plus the worst spill ever in U.S. waters, BP has earned the penalty. Which makes us wonder why so many Republicans jumped to BP’s defense when the Obama administration got the company to set aside a down payment of $20 billion for damages from its spill in the Gulf.