[midnite902]

WASHINGTON -A Halliburton Co. executive on Sunday challenged BP PLC (BP, BP.LN)'s claims that the worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history started with faulty cement.

"There were a number of red flags that should have given pause to BP," Thomas Roth, vice president of cementing for Halliburton, told a National Academy of Engineering panel investigating the causes of the April 20 Deepwater Horizon rig explosion. He said that "BP proceeded with well operations without establishing well integrity."

BP has said that the April 20 explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig began because the cement foam that Halliburton developed and pumped in the well was likely unstable. Though the oil company has also identified other failures, BP's analysis of what went wrong has put a large share of the blame on Halliburton.

BP has said that "fluid loss control additives" were not used in the cement, and that the cement mix was "not fully tested" before the cement job.

Halliburton's Roth said that testing in advance showed that "the foam system was stable." He said that foam cement has "very good fluid loss control by its basic design," and that more than 400 hours of lab testing were conducted in the planning of the well. Roth reiterated Halliburton's claim that BP should have conducted a test known as a cement bond-log test. Mark Bly, BP's head of safety and operations, has said that deciding not to conduct the test "wasn't a wrong choice." He said the rig workers should have more fully evaluated the risks that the well was not intact, but "the fact of not using a cement bond log at that point--we didn't see was in and of itself a problem."

 

[Vette_Newb]

They were all responsible.. some maybe a little more than others. We will never know the exact specifics, because it will damage the companies and their regulators.

I do think someone should do some jail time for the lost lives.

 

[DarthAWM]

They were all responsible.. some maybe a little more than others. We will never know the exact specifics, because it will damage the companies and their regulators.

I do think someone should do some jail time for the lost lives.

I've been paying attention to what has been relased about the cementing of that well since i have a dog in that fight. With Halliburton there is only so much you can do as a service company to make a company do all that is necessary to ensure proper completion of their well.

The BP company man opted out of the bond-log test. The BP company man opted to to set the casing with less than the designed centralizers.

There maybe seem to be alot of blame to go around but ultimately the descisions of what happend comes down to the company man on that well. BP owns this.