30 October,2010 08:09 AM IST | | Agencies
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.
In the first official finding of responsibility for the blowout, which killed 11 workers and led to the biggest offshore oil spill in US history, the commission staff determined that Halliburton had conducted three laboratory tests that indicated that the cement mixture did not meet industry standards.
Failure to act
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 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," Bartlit said in his report.
Another Halliburton cement test, carried out about a week before the blowout of the well April 20, also found the mixture to be unstable, meaning it was unlikely to set properly in the well.
Although 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 pressurised 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.
Number game
53,000: The number of barrels of crude oil that was escaping into the sea on an everyday basis during the spill
4.9 million: Total number of barrels of oil leaked from the well
11: The number of people killed in the initial explosion. 17 others were injured
184,181: The number of times you could drive a Toyota Prius around the Earth at the equator using the lost oil
665: Miles of coastline contaminated by oil
