Letter to BP CEO Tony Hayward From Congress Before His Testimony

Posted in BP British Petroleum,Government,Gulf Coast on June 16, 2010

BP CEO, Tony Hayward, is scheduled to appear at a House Energy and Commerce oversight and investigations subcommittee hearing, Thursday June 17. The subject of the hearing is the role of BP in the Deepwater Horizon explosion  and oil spill.

BP CEO, Tony Hayward, will testify before US Congress on June 17, 2010

The following are excerpts from a letter to Hayward from Congress dated June 14, identifying areas he will be asked to explain in his testimony.

The beginning of the letter reads:

The Committee’s investigation is raising serious questions about the decisions made by BP in the days and hours before the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon. On April 15, five days before the explosion, BP’s drilling engineer called Macondo a “nightmare well.” In spite of the well’s difficulties, BP appears to have made multiple decisions for economic reasons that increased the danger of a catastrophic well failure. In several instances, these decisions appear to violate industry guidelines and were made despite warnings from BP’s own personnel and its contractors. In effect, it appears that BP repeatedly chose risky procedures in order to reduce costs and save time and made minimal efforts to contain the added risk.

At the time of the blowout, the Macondo well was significantly behind schedule. This appears to have created pressure to take shortcuts to speed finishing the well. In particular, the Committee is focusing on five crucial decisions made by BP:

1. The decision to use a well design with few barriers to gas flow
2. The failure to use a sufficient number of “centralizers” to prevent channeling during the cement process
3. The failure to run a cement bond log to evaluate the effectiveness of the cement job
4. The failure to circulate potentially gas-bearing drilling muds out of the well, and
5. The failure to secure the wellhead with a lockdown sleeve before allowing pressure on the seal from below.

The common feature of these five decisions is that they posed a trade-off between cost and well safety.

Read the entire letter to Tony Hayward from Congress