Another internal BP document has emerged that won't exactly add to the energy giant's credibility, according to the following story on NPR.
Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) who is perhaps BP’s biggest Capitol Hill nemesis (which is saying a lot given how many there are) has released an undated BP’s document that indicates the company's engineers estimated that a malfunction of their equipment at the Macondo [Deepwater Horizon] site could lead to a worst-case release of 100,000 barrels a day of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico.
Markey explains in a news release on his web site the significance of the document:
“Considering what is now known about BP’s problems with this well prior to the Deepwater Horizon explosion, including cementing issues, leaks in the blowout preventer and gas kicks, BP should have been more honest about the dangerous condition of the well bore,” said Markey, the chairman of the Energy and Environment Subcommittee in the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
"On Thursday, Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen was asked in his daily briefing about the condition of the well bore. He said there, 'So what I would tell you is we don’t know exactly the condition of the well bore. And that’s one of the unknowns that we’re managing around in terms of risks. And that’s the reason we didn’t go, didn’t go to excessive pressures on the top kill and decided that we’d deal with containment and then go for the final relief well.'
According to Admiral Allen: 'I think that one thing that nobody knows is the condition of the well bore from below the blowout preventer down to the actual oil field itself. And we don’t know, we don’t know if the well bore has been compromised or not.'
'What the BP document suggests that if the well bore is compromised or becomes compromised, we now know we could be looking at a flow rate 100 times BP's initial estimate. Even if we can't know for certain the condition of the well bore, we should have known how much oil could flow from it— BP did.'
Oil & Gas Journal (19 June 2010) reports that, "In a strongly worded press statement, Anadarko Petroleum Corp. Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Jim Hackett, whose company holds a 25% interest in the ill-fated well, directly criticized BP, the operator.
“The mounting evidence clearly demonstrates that this tragedy was preventable and the direct result of BP's reckless decisions and actions,” Hackett said. “Frankly, we are shocked by the publicly available information that has been disclosed in recent investigations and during this week's testimony that, among other things, indicates BP operated unsafely and failed to monitor and react to several critical warning signs during the drilling of the Macondo well. BP's behavior and actions likely represent gross negligence or willful misconduct and thus affect the obligations of the parties under the operating agreement."
Factoid
Interesting yet somehow strangely scary and familiar: The site of the BP catastrophe, Macondo, takes its name from a fictional village in One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
One source says that Macondo grew "from a tiny settlement with almost no contact with the outside world, to eventually become a large and thriving place, before a banana plantation is set up. The establishment of the banana plantation lead to Macondo's downfall, followed by a gigantic windstorm that wipes it from the map."
Anyone besides me see any irony in that choice of names?
Additional Links
Climate Progress: An Ounce of Prevention is Worth 100 Million Gallons of Cure
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