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New Orleans, Louisiana, United States (AHN) – Petroleum company BP accepted only a small part of the blame in its report Wednesday on the April 20 Deepwater Horizon explosion and nearly three-month oil spill that followed.

Negligence by its contractors who built the oil rig and leased it to BP was mostly at fault in the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history, the company’s 190-page report said.

The report listed eight failures that led to the accident that killed 11 people and injured 17, some of which indicate the oil industry’s offshore drilling is not properly regulated.

“There is no single action or inaction that caused the Deepwater Horizon accident,” said Mark Bly, BP’s head of safety and operations, who led the internal investigation. “This involved a number of companies, including BP.”

The report pins much of the blame on lapses by the oil rig’s work crew employed by owner Transocean Ltd. and substandard cement supplied by Halliburton Co.

Halliburton built the oil rig and Transocean leased it to BP, which designed the rig, transported the oil and refined it for sale to consumers.

Transocean and Halliburton reacted to the report with denials about the extent of their negligence.

“This is a self-serving report that attempts to conceal the critical factor that set the stage for the Macondo incident: BP’s fatally flawed well design,” Transocean said in a statement.

Transocean said BP overlooked its own negligence in using less than one-third of the centralizers that might have prevented hydrocarbons from rising in the well. Centralizers surround drilling pipe to stop it from bumping into a well’s outer wall.

Halliburton said in a statement the BP report contained a “number of substantial omissions and inaccuracies.” Among them was the fact that Halliburton built the rig “in accordance with BP’s specifications.”

The BP report said cement with “weaknesses” used by Halliburton failed to stop pressurized oil and gas from seeping into the well from a three-mile deep reservoir under the ocean floor.

In addition, two valves at the base of the well failed to block the flow of hydrocarbons.

“To put it simply, there was a bad cement job and a failure of the shoe track barrier at the bottom of the well, which let hydrocarbons from the reservoir into the production casing,” Tony Hayward, BP’s chief executive at the time of the explosion, said in statement.

The rig’s crew then misread pressure test results that showed there was a problem inside the well the day of the accident. They interpreted the test results to mean pressure levels were normal, the BP report said.

The crew had equipment that could have diverted the gas away from any sources of ignition on the rig. Instead, they allowed the gas to spread into the engine room.

The blowout preventer, a last line of defense to prevent an explosion, also failed from malfunctioning electronics and leaking hydraulics. A blowout preventer is a large steel structure designed to block oil and gas from flowing upward in a well in an emergency.

The blowout preventer was pulled from the ocean floor last week and is being checked by federal investigators, who are preparing their own report.

BP denied Halliburton and Transocean’s assertions that it designed the oil rig poorly.

“It would appear unlikely that the well design contributed to the incident, as the investigation found that the hydrocarbons flowed up the production casing through the bottom of the well,” the BP report said.

Admiral Thad Allen, the government’s National Incident Commander, said BP’s report was important but not the final statement on the accident.

BP has capped the leak from the top of the well. The company plans to permanently plug the well beginning as soon as next week if test results prove the timing is right.

The value of BP’s stock (BP) rose slightly Wednesday after the company released its report.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, September 9th, 2010 at 2:34 pm and is filed under Green Industry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.