WASHINGTON — Halliburton officials knew weeks before the fatal explosion of the BP well in the Gulf of Mexico that the cement mixture they planned to use to seal the bottom of the well was unstable but still went ahead with the job, the presidential commission investigating the accident said on Thursday. In the first official finding of responsibility for the blowout, which killed 11 workers and led to the biggest offshore oil spill in American history, the commission staff determined that Halliburton had conducted three laboratory tests that indicated that the cement mixture did not meet industry standards. The result of at least one of those tests was given on March 8 to BP, which failed to act upon it, the panel’s lead investigator, Fred H. Bartlit Jr., said in a letter delivered to the commissioners on Thursday. “There is no indication that Halliburton highlighted to BP the significance of the foam stability data or that BP personnel raised any questions about it,” Mr. Bartlit said in his report. Another Halliburton cement test, carried out about a week before the blowout of the well on April 20, also found the mixture to be unstable, meaning it was unlikely to set properly in the well, but those findings were never sent to BP, Mr. Bartlit found after reviewing previously undisclosed documents.
Although Mr. Bartlit did not specifically identify the cement failure as the sole or even primary cause of the blowout, he made clear in his letter that if the cement had done its job and kept the highly pressurized oil and gas out of the well bore, there would have been no accident. “We have known for some time that the cement used to secure the production casing and isolate the hydrocarbon zone at the bottom of the Macondo well must have failed in some manner,” he said in his letter to the seven members of the presidential commission. “The cement should have prevented hydrocarbons from entering the well.”
The failure of the cement set off a complex and ultimately deadly cascade of events as oil and gas exploded upward from the 18,000-foot-deep well. The blowout preventer, which sits on the ocean floor atop a well and is supposed to contain a well bore breach, also failed…
[see
uh-oh… on May 4, 2010] When the details of the April 20th Deepwater Horizon Explosion started being reported, many of us zero’d in on Halliburton as the culprit. They had just "cemented" the well. The way that works is that cement is forced down the casing and flows upward between the casing and the hole in the ocean floor to seal that space. I’m no expert on cementing, but I know that getting cement "right" is a delicate process. One has to make sure it doesn’t set in the casing itself, but does set outside the casing. So the first suspect when the thing blew was that the cement didn’t set.
I, of course, couldn’t trust my thoughts because, to me:
Halliburton = Cheney = War profiteering in Iraq = asbestos claims. I was quick to jump on
if-something’s-wrong and halliburton-is-involved then halliburton-did-it. But, in spite of my bias, it really looked like
halliburton-did-it was right. And this report seems to nail it for me. At the time,
they said:
Halliburton had completed the cementing of the final production casing string in accordance with the well design approximately 20 hours prior to the incident. The cement slurry design was consistent with that utilized in other similar applications.
Not true. Just plain not true according to this report.
Halliburton had conducted three laboratory tests that indicated that the cement mixture did not meet industry standards. The result of at least one of those tests was given on March 8 to BP, which failed to act upon it, the panel’s lead investigator, Fred H. Bartlit Jr., said in a letter delivered to the commissioners on Thursday. “There is no indication that Halliburton highlighted to BP the significance of the foam stability data or that BP personnel raised any questions about it,” Mr. Bartlit said in his report. Another Halliburton cement test, carried out about a week before the blowout of the well on April 20, also found the mixture to be unstable, meaning it was unlikely to set properly in the well, but those findings were never sent to BP…
So, like I said, "if-something’s-wrong and halliburton-is-involved then halliburton-did-it."
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