Disagreement lingers—and always will—over a troubling question raised by the Macondo tragedy of last Apr. 20: Does the fatal blowout condemn all safety habits of an entire industry? During the IHS-CERA Week conference in Houston last week, three interesting views emerged.
The oil and gas industry has bristled from sweeping criticism it received in a report delivered in January to President Barack Obama by the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling.
"The immediate causes of the Macondo well blowout can be traced to a series of identifiable mistakes made by BP, Halliburton, and Transocean that reveal such systematic failures in risk management that they place in doubt the safety culture of an entire industry," the report said, calling for "no less than a fundamental transformation of its safety culture."
'Plenty of evidence'
William Reilly, the former Environmental Protection Agency administrator who co-chaired the commission, said in an IHS-CERA Week panel session that the accident produced "plenty of evidence that it was a systemic problem."
He pointed out that the commission faulted cement-service provider Halliburton and drilling contractor Transocean along with BP, the operator.
And offshore operators obviously lacked the ability to respond promptly to a deepwater blowout and spill, yet they claimed otherwise on "pro forma response plans."
They also hadn't updated spill cleanup equipment installed after the Exxon Valdez tanker spill off Alaska in 1989, Reilly said.
These are stinging truths. They make painfully clear the need to redress lapses that Reilly rightly described as inexcusable and to review practices, business relationships, and regulation made obsolete in a rapidly evolving realm of operation.
Much less certain is whether they warrant wholesale doubt about the safety culture of an entire, technically complex industry.
The oil and gas business will encounter the commission's extrapolation whenever opposition arises to its work, meaning frequently.
Commissioners didn't have to worry about exploitation of their words the toxic climate of energy politics; industry officials do. Industry officials also have reason to defend their safety culture and record, notwithstanding dreadful lapses revealed by Macondo. In its zeal for change, the commission seems dangerously willing to discard what works well.
Ali Moshiri, president of Chevron Africa & Latin America E&P Co., thus may have given voice to what other industry executives may be thinking when he said, in the session at which Reilly spoke, that the tragedy "was not a systematic problem; it was an accident that never should have happened."
Moshiri didn't refute the need for improvement. But his view clearly differed from that of the commission report, which at one point said, "The blowout was not the product of a series of aberrational decisions made by rogue industry or government officials…. Rather, the root causes are systemic and, absent significant reform in both industry practices and government policies, might well recur."
At the IHS-CERA Week session, Moshiri said, "It was an isolated problem."
BP, of course, benefits from any interpretation of Macondo as something beyond a BP problem. In a luncheon speech that began with a personal apology, BP Chief Executive Robert Dudley steered hard toward such a view.
He noted the commission finding that the accident had "multiple causes, involving multiple parties." He pointed to "lessons for the industry as a whole" and the "challenge to work together more effectively."
Offer to share
Dudley also listed some of the many capabilities BP now possesses that no company could claim before the accident.
And he made an offer: "We believe we have a responsibility to share our learning with those who can benefit from it, including our competitors, partners, governments, regulators."
Yes, an entire industry can benefit from BP's lessons learned the hard way.
If Macondo makes oil and gas work safer, the question whether pre-Macondo practices deserve wholesale condemnation will not have mattered beyond the extent to which asking it, and arguing over the answer, drove improvement.
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