The Daily Mail UK
written by Richard Pendlebury
Last updated on June 18, 2010 at 8:08am
The men from MI-Swaco were providing other engineering services. Their employer is another Texas-based multi-national, owned by another oil services giant, Schlumberger, which is itself incorporated for tax reasons in the Netherlands antilles, with an HQ in Houston.
The exact causes of the Gulf of Mexico disaster might never be known, but it is now clear that the rig was destroyed by what is known as a 'blowout.' A bubble of highly inflammable methane gas escaped up the shaft and ignited. A firestorm swept the rig and in a matter of minutes 11 men died and 17 were seriously injured. Nine of those killed worked for Transocean. The other two were employed by MI Swaco. All the dead were local americans.
The Deepwater Horizon sank two days later. Efforts to cap the ruptured pipe failed and as the slick spread ever wider, at a rate of up to 40,000 barrels a day, the blame game began.
BP has attempted to steer a good deal of the blame towards Transocean. Lamar McKay, the American chairman of BP America told a congressional hearing that Transocean had been carrying out the drilling, owned the rig and a crucial piece of safety equipment - the 450-ton blowout preventer - which failed to stop the accident.
The blowout preventer was manufactured and supplied by Cameron International, another Houston-based, American firm.
In turn, Transocean blamed BP and its contractor Halliburton, for a 'catastrophic' failure of the cement in the wellhead.
Cementing of wellheads has been the cause of 18 out of 39 blowouts in the U.S. between 1992 and 2006. At the same time,Transocean has attempted to limit its liability to just $27 million, citing a 159-year-old U.S. maritime law.
This move caused a firestorm of new criticism. a lawyer acting for injured rig workers said: 'Transocean has accepted more than $430 million in insurance proceeds related to the deepwater Horizon explosion and oil spill, but has asked a Houston federal court to limit its liability to only $27 million ... This is a despicable action.
'This dishonors the families of the 11 men who were lost on April 20, but also those who were injured on the rig, and the many more affected by the oil spill.'
Transocean's attempt was thrown out by a judge earlier this week.
For its part, Halliburton has blamed BP for ignoring the advice of its staff on the rig, skimping on safety devices and design in order that further delays, costing $1 million a day, could be saved.
It said it had warned BP the well would have 'severe gas flow problems'. Other documents revealed that a BP employee had reported before the accident that the Mocando was a 'nightmare well'. It has also been alleged that the BP manager in charge of rig operations was not sufficiently experienced.
This week a congressional committee accused BP of a variety of risky corner-cutting decisions regarding the wellhead.
The federal government is also facing questions over its own role leading up to the blowout.
The Mineral Management Service had reportedly exempted BP's Gulf of Mexico drilling operation from a detailed environmental impact study 'after concluding that a massive oil spill was unlikely'.
MMS, which had already been tainted by allegations of kickbacks from the industries it was supposedly supervising - President Obama has called the relationship 'cosy' - is to be broken up. The lease-awarding, revenue collecting and safety maintaining arms will be separated at last.
Liz Birnbaum, director of the MMS, resigned at the end of last month. She obviously felt the 'British' were not entirely to blame.
But how British is BP? The answer is 'not very'.
Its shortened name and considerable presence in U.S. waters is a legacy of its 1998 merger with the American oil giant Amoco, founded as the Standard oil Company (of Indiana) by John D Rockefeller in 1889.
In 2000 the Anglo-American giant then snapped up Arco, another American oil firm.
Today, while its HQ remains in London, BP's corporate statistics are weighted towards the United States.
The board of 12 directors is split evenly between British and American nationals. But almost 23,000 of its other employees are American, compared to only 10,000 Brits. BP has 7,000 staff in Houston alone.
CEO Tony Hayward may be English, but BP chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg, who met President Obama yesterday, is Swedish. Ownership of BP is split evenly between Yanks and Brits; around 40 per cent of BP's shares are held on either side of the atlantic. More than $4 billion of BP's now disputed dividend was due to be paid to American pensioners and investors this year. Oil and politics are both dirty, reckless businesses.
While global oil reserves decline, the great maw that is the U.S. economy must still be fed. Where it comes from doesn't matter much.
Until things go wrong. In times of domestic political woe, pinning the blame on foreign interests is one of the oldest, most cynical tricks in the book. This week, congressmen have found that the disaster plans of all the big Gulf oil firms are as bad as each other. America's President has taken short-term advantage of the fact that the one involved in Deepwater Horizon used to have 'British' in its name.
But ultimately this transatlantic 'blame game' won't wash and it will be American jobs and pensions most at stake if he forces BP under.
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