BP Cared About Safety All Along

The internal BP documents released during the Deepwater Horizon litigation tell a story that contradicts almost everything the company said publicly in the months following the April 2010 blowout. While executives gave interviews about BP's deep commitment to safety culture, engineers and safety officers inside the company were sending emails warning that the Macondo well was proceeding under conditions that made a blowout not just possible but likely.

One email from BP drilling engineer Brian Morel, sent six days before the explosion, described the Macondo well as a "nightmare well" that had been giving the company problems. The memo circulated within the organization. No significant changes were made to the drilling plan.

This is the pattern that emerges from the Deepwater Horizon documents: not the story of a sudden, unforeseeable catastrophe but of a company that received repeated warnings from its own people and consistently prioritized schedule and cost over the safety measures that might have prevented the blowout.

The Macondo well was already behind schedule and over budget when BP made a series of decisions in the final days before the explosion that investigators would later identify as critical contributors to the disaster. The company chose a cheaper casing design that provided less protection against blowout. It reduced the number of centralizers used to center the casing in the wellbore, despite a warning from its own engineers that this increased the risk of a poor cement job. It misinterpreted a pressure test that should have indicated the well was not properly sealed.

Eleven workers died when the Deepwater Horizon exploded. The Gulf of Mexico sustained ecological damage that researchers are still measuring years later. The "safety culture" that BP described in its annual reports turned out to be, in the crucial moments, subordinate to the pressure to produce oil on schedule and under budget.