Gulf Oil Blowout BP, Everyone Else’s Fault: Halliburton

We already covered the start of this process, where every company involved in the massive Gulf of Mexico oil drilling blow-up was blaming each other.

Here’s Halliburton’s contribution, putting responsibility on BP for their crappy cement job.

Halliburton, whose failed cement job on the BP well in the Gulf of Mexico

was identified as a contributing factor to the deadly blowout by a Presidential investigative panel last week,

We already covered the start of this process, where every company involved in the massive Gulf of Mexico oil drilling blow-up was blaming each other.

Here’s Halliburton’s contribution, putting responsibility on BP for their crappy cement job.

Halliburton, whose failed cement job on the BP well in the Gulf of Mexico

was identified as a contributing factor to the deadly blowout by a Presidential investigative panel last week,

is defending its work, and assigning the blame for the accident to BP.

In a six-page statement issued Thursday night, Halliburton questioned tests that showed its cement mixture to be unstable and incapable of holding back the oil and the gas in the well,

saying the tests were conducted on formulas other than what was eventually used on BP’s Macondo well.

It said that a sample of the cement mixture it planned to use on the well, tested shortly before pumping began on April 19, had produced a positive result.

But Halliburton admitted that no stability test was conducted on the actual recipe for the cement used on the well.

The company said that BP had ordered a change in Halliburton’s customary formula for cement by adding a higher proportion of a chemical that slows the hardening of the mixture.

The well blew out on April 20, killing 11 workers and eventually releasing nearly five million barrels of oil into the gulf.

Since then, BP, Halliburton, Transocean and other partners in the well have traded accusations of blame as civil and criminal investigations have proceeded.

The issue of the role of the cement in the blowout may not be fully resolved for some time

because the only surviving sample of the actual cement mixture used in the well is under federal safeguard as evidence in continuing investigations.

The seven-member presidential spill commission cited a failed cement job as a factor in the deadly accident,

basing its findings on previously undisclosed communications between Halliburton and BP

and a round of testing of similar cement performed by Chevron.

In its statement, Halliburton took issue with the Chevron tests,

saying they were not based on the exact cement recipe that was used on the Macondo well.

Halliburton said it was continuing to study the Chevron report, issued earlier this week, and was reserving further comment.

It also clamed that two cement samples that failed internal tests in February

were not studied under the same conditions that existed at the bottom of the well on April 20.

The company also said that a failed April test was likewise “irrelevant” because the laboratory did not use the correct amount of cement blend.

A spokesman for the presidential panel, led by Bob Graham, the former senator and governor of Florida, and William K. Reilly, a former Environmental Protection Agency administrator,

said it would not comment on the Halliburton statement.

But he said that commission investigators would present further evidence on the cement work and other factors that led to the explosion and the spill

when the panel next meets in public on Nov. 8 and 9, according to this article in the New York Times.