Halliburton Admits Guilt in Gulf of Mexico Cover-Up
JUSTICE, 29 Jul 2013
Richard Smallteacher - CorpWatch
Halliburton has admitted that it destroyed evidence after the April 2010 Deepwater Horizon catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico. The company has agreed to pay a $200,000 fine, make a donation of $55 million to the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation and accept three years of probation.
Deepwater Horizon – jointly owned by oil companies BP and Andarko Petroleum at the time – was deployed to drill oil from Macondo, a mile-deep underwater well in the Gulf of Mexico. In April 2010 the rig, which was being operated by contractor Transocean, caught fire, exploded, and sank, killing 11 workers. Halliburton , which helped plan the drilling operation, was among those investigated for the disaster.
Over the following 87 days the oil well spewed nearly five million barrels into the ocean 40 miles off the Louisiana coast until the well was successfully capped with cement. Almost 70,000 square miles of water and over 1,000 miles of coastline were polluted by oil slicks, scientists say. Coral reefs and dolphins in the area continue to show signs of ill health to this day.
Halliburton is the third company to come before the government. (In January 2013, BP pled guilty and agreed to pay a $4 billion fine. The following month Transocean pled guilty and agreed to pay $400 million and accept five years of probation)
The issue that Houston-based company was investigated and prosecuted for was whether the number of centralizers – metal collars that help keep the well pipe centered —could have contributed to the blowout.
At time of design, Halliburton had told BP to use 21 centralizers at the Macondo well but BP opted to use six instead. After the blowout Halliburton ran two computer simulations to compare the impact of using six versus 21 centralizers which showed that there was little difference between using six and 21 centralizers. Halliburton then told its employees to “get rid of” the simulations, throwing a stumbling block in the way of the government investigators.
Under yesterday’s agreement, the U.S. Department of Justice says it will drop any further prosecution of the Houston-based company in return for the single guilty plea and the fines.
A presidential panel that investigated the accident said that the catastrophe was preventable. The panel determined that the companies involved had taken hazardous and time-saving risks.
Despite a six-month federal moratorium on drilling and a two-year lull after the BP explosion, the oil industry has since bounced back.
Last September, the Wall Street Journal reported that over 4,000 platforms are now pumping oil and gas from 35,000 wells via nearly 30,000 miles of pipelines in the region. BP alone currently has six rigs drilling and is still the largest player operating in the area. Transocean is reportedly negotiating a partnership that would lead to a contract for four ultra-deepwater drillships similar to Deepwater Horizon.
“The only thing Macondo did was delay the entry or delivery of some ultra-deepwater rigs,” Leslie Cook, senior research consultant at Quest Offshore, told AOL Energy.
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