case study deepwater horizon oil spill

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• Review Article
• Published: 20 April 2020

The first decade of scientific insights from the Deepwater Horizon oil release

• Elizabeth B. Kujawinski   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-8261-971X 1 ,
• Christopher M. Reddy   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-7814-2071 1 ,
• Ryan P. Rodgers   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-1302-2850 2 ,
• J. Cameron Thrash   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-0896-9986 3 ,
• David L. Valentine   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-5914-9107 4 &
• Helen K. White   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-9428-992X 5  

Nature Reviews Earth & Environment volume  1 ,  pages 237–250 ( 2020 ) Cite this article

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The 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster remains the largest single accidental release of oil and gas into the ocean. During the 87-day release, scientists used oceanographic tools to collect wellhead oil and gas samples, interrogate microbial community shifts and activities, and track the chemical composition of dissolved oil in the ocean’s interior. In the decade since the disaster, field and laboratory investigations studied the physics and chemistry of irrupted oil and gas at high pressure and low temperature, the role of chemical dispersants in oil composition and microbial hydrocarbon degradation, and the impact of combined oil, gas and dispersants on the flora and fauna of coastal and deep-sea environments. The multi-faceted, multidisciplinary scientific response to the released oil, gas and dispersants culminated in a better understanding of the environmental factors that influence the short-term and long-term fate and transport of oil in marine settings. In this Review, we summarize the unique aspects of the Deepwater Horizon release and highlight the advances in oil chemistry and microbiology that resulted from novel applications of emerging technologies. We end with an outlook on the applicability of these findings to possible oil releases in future deep-sea drilling locations and newly-opened high-latitude shipping lanes.

The Deepwater Horizon (DWH) disaster was the largest single accidental release of oil and gas to the ocean. Over 87 days, oil, gas and dispersants impacted 11,000 km 2 of ocean surface and 2,000 km of coastline.

The application of subsurface dispersants was unique to the DWH disaster. Empirical observations, laboratory data and modelling efforts offer conflicting conclusions as to whether dispersants reduced the sea surface expression of released oil.

The DWH disaster was the first wide-scale environmental application of emerging systems biology tools based on microbial gene analysis. These tools provided unprecedented insights into the identity, structure, growth dynamics, succession and overall response of microbial communities to oil, gas and dispersant release to marine ecosystems.

Advanced analytical chemistry technologies provided novel information regarding source oil composition, biodegradation, photochemical oxidation, water-column processes, accurate measurements of biomarkers and identification of oil weathering products.

The Gulf of Mexico coastline and deep ocean were contaminated with oil, gas and dispersants to differing degrees. In many cases, coastal ecosystems recovered as predicted based on previous oil release studies, whereas, in others, the disaster combined with other stressors to deleterious effect. Examination of the disaster’s impacts on the deep sea, and its ongoing recovery, continue.

Insights from the first decade of DWH-related research underscore the need for integrated analytical platforms and data synthesis to understand the complexities of the environmental responses to oil, gas and dispersant release. The spill science community must be ready to work collaboratively across academia, industry and government during possible future oil releases in the deep sea and high latitudes.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank DWH-related funding for establishing collaborations and conversations that enabled this manuscript (the Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative to E.B.K., R.P.R., C.M.R. and H.K.W.; a Henry Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award to H.K.W.; an Early Career Research Fellowship and a Collaborators Grant from the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine Gulf Research Program to JCT; the National Science Foundation to E.B.K. (OCE-1045811), CMR (OCE-1634478 and OCE-1756242), and DLV (OCE-1756947 and OCE-1635562)). Work performed at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory ICR User Facility is supported by the National Science Foundation Division of Chemistry through Cooperative Agreement DMR-1644779, and the State of Florida. The authors thank their research groups and collaborators for spirited discussions and constructive comments on the paper, and Dr Christoph Aeppli for constructive discussions and assistance with conceptualization of figures.

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Chemical mixtures used during oil spill response to break up and decrease the size of oil slicks or oil droplets so that they more easily mix with water.

A chemical compound that has both hydrophilic and hydrophobic properties.

A chemical modification reaction resulting from the absorption of light in the presence of oxygen.

The study of the genes (DNA) present in a mixed community, which provides an assessment of metabolic potential in that community.

The study of the transcripts (RNA) present in a community, which provides a snapshot of the genes being expressed at the time of sampling.

(SIP). A technique to trace the microbial consumption of a substrate through the examination of the stable isotopic composition of the substrate and the resulting biomass of the consumer.

Masses of loosely-associated particles formed from the aggregation of minerals and organic particles suspended in water.

Chemical compounds that are comprised of carbon and hydrogen (hydrocarbons) in which all carbon–carbon bonds are single bonds.

A multistep microbial process that reduces nitrate to molecular nitrogen.

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Kujawinski, E.B., Reddy, C.M., Rodgers, R.P. et al. The first decade of scientific insights from the Deepwater Horizon oil release. Nat Rev Earth Environ 1 , 237–250 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43017-020-0046-x

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The explosion

Leaking oil.

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When did the Deepwater Horizon oil spill happen?

The Deepwater Horizon oil spill began on April 20, 2010, when an explosion damaged the Deepwater Horizon oil rig. The rig's sinking on April 22 began the discharge of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

Who owned the rig responsible for the Deepwater Horizon oil spill?

The oil rig involved in the Deepwater Horizon oil spill was owned and operated by offshore oil-drilling company Transocean and leased by the oil company BP .

The Deepwater Horizon oil spill occurred after a surge of natural gas blasted through a concrete core recently installed to seal an oil well for later use. Once released, the natural gas traveled up a riser to the platform of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig that was over the well, where it ignited, killing 11 workers and injuring 17.

Birds were particularly vulnerable to the effects of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Many died from ingesting oil or because it interfered with their ability to regulate their body temperatures. Brown pelicans and laughing gulls were among the species most affected. A study showed that up to 800,000 birds were thought to have died.

Deepwater Horizon oil spill , largest marine oil spill in history, caused by an April 20, 2010, explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig—located in the Gulf of Mexico , approximately 41 miles (66 km) off the coast of Louisiana —and its subsequent sinking on April 22.

The Deepwater Horizon rig, owned and operated by offshore-oil-drilling company Transocean and leased by oil company BP , was situated in the Macondo oil prospect in the Mississippi Canyon, a valley in the continental shelf . The oil well over which it was positioned was located on the seabed 4,993 feet (1,522 metres) below the surface and extended approximately 18,000 feet (5,486 metres) into the rock . On the night of April 20 a surge of natural gas blasted through a concrete core recently installed by contractor Halliburton in order to seal the well for later use. It later emerged through documents released by Wikileaks that a similar incident had occurred on a BP-owned rig in the Caspian Sea in September 2008. Both cores were likely too weak to withstand the pressure because they were composed of a concrete mixture that used nitrogen gas to accelerate curing.

Once released by the fracture of the core, the natural gas traveled up the Deepwater rig’s riser to the platform, where it ignited, killing 11 workers and injuring 17. The rig capsized and sank on the morning of April 22, rupturing the riser, through which drilling mud had been injected in order to counteract the upward pressure of oil and natural gas. Without any opposing force , oil began to discharge into the gulf. The volume of oil escaping the damaged well—originally estimated by BP to be about 1,000 barrels per day—was thought by U.S. government officials to have peaked at more than 60,000 barrels per day.

Although BP attempted to activate the rig’s blowout preventer (BOP), a fail-safe mechanism designed to close the channel through which oil was drawn, the device malfunctioned. Forensic analysis of the BOP completed the following year determined that a set of massive blades known as blind shear rams—designed to slice through the pipe carrying oil—had malfunctioned because the pipe had bent under the pressure of the rising gas and oil. (A 2014 report by the U.S. Chemical Safety Board claimed that the blind shear rams had activated sooner than previously thought and may have actually punctured the pipe.)

Efforts in May to place a containment dome over the largest leak in the broken riser were thwarted by the buoyant action of gas hydrates —gas molecules in an ice matrix—formed by the reaction of natural gas and cold water. When an attempt to employ a “ top kill,” whereby drilling mud was pumped into the well to stanch the flow of oil, also failed, BP in early June turned to an apparatus called the Lower Marine Riser Package (LMRP) cap. With the damaged riser shorn from the LMRP—the top segment of the BOP—the cap was lowered into place. Though fitted loosely over the BOP and allowing some oil to escape, the cap enabled BP to siphon approximately 15,000 barrels of oil per day to a tanker . The addition of an ancillary collection system comprising several devices, also tapped into the BOP, increased the collection rate to approximately 25,000 barrels of oil a day.

In early July the LMRP cap was removed for several days so that a more permanent seal could be installed; this capping stack was in place by July 12. Though the leak had slowed, it was estimated by a government-commissioned panel of scientists that 4,900,000 barrels of oil had already leaked into the gulf. Only about 800,000 barrels had been captured. On August 3 BP conducted a “ static kill,” a procedure in which drilling mud was pumped into the well through the BOP . Though similar to the failed top kill, mud could be injected at much lower pressures during the static kill because of the stabilizing influence of the capping stack. The defective BOP and the capping stack were removed in early September and replaced by a functioning BOP.

The success of these procedures cleared the way for a “ bottom kill,” considered to be the most likely means of permanently sealing the leak. This entailed pumping cement through a channel—known as a relief well—that paralleled and eventually intersected the original well. Construction of two such wells had begun in May. On September 17 the bottom kill maneuver was successfully executed through the first relief well. The second had been intended to serve as a backup and was not completed. Two days later, following a series of pressure tests, it was announced that the well was completely sealed.

Claims by several research groups that subsurface plumes of dispersed hydrocarbons had been detected in May were initially dismissed by BP and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). However, it was verified in June that the plumes were in fact from the Deepwater spill. The effect of the microscopic oil droplets on the ecosystem was unknown, though their presence, along with that of a layer of oil several inches thick discovered on portions of the seafloor in September, cast doubt on earlier predictions about the speed with which the discharged oil would dissipate. Bacteria that had adapted to consuming naturally occurring gas and oil seeping from the seabed were thought to have consumed a portion of it.

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BP and the Deepwater Horizon Disaster of 2010

Christina Ingersoll

Richard M. Locke

Cate Reavis

Apr 3, 2012

The explosion and sinking of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig on April 20, 2010, resulted from a series of events and decisions involving employees of BP and its contractors. While there does not appear to be one clear culprit or reason that led to the disaster, the case explores issues of organization, information, and decision-making, as well as the ability or inability of individuals to voice their values as contributing factors.

Learning Objectives

To engage students in what it means to act ethically in today’s business world; understand that decisions are strongly influenced by broader factors such as culture, organizational design, and decision-makers’ values; and think critically about ethical dilemmas and how to voice their values in response to those dilemmas.

Appropriate for the Following Course(s) 

leadership, ethics, corporate responsibility, operations management

BP and the Deepwater Horizon Disaster of 2010 

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Deepwater Horizon

Oil spill | gulf of mexico | april 2010, what happened.

On April 20, 2010, an explosion occurred on the Deepwater Horizon drilling platform in the Gulf of Mexico. The explosion, which killed 11 men, caused the rig to sink and started a catastrophic oil leak from the well. Before it was capped three months later, approximately 134 million gallons of oil had spilled into the Gulf, the largest offshore oil spill in U.S. history.

What Were the Impacts?

The trustees Government officials acting on behalf of the public when there is injury to, destruction of, loss of, or threat to natural resources. assessed injuries to natural resources —such as fish, bottom-dwelling organisms, nearshore ecosystems, birds, sea turtles, and marine mammals—and lost recreation resulting from the spill.

Through the Natural Resource Damage Assessment (NRDA) Investigation performed by trustees to identify injuries to natural resources caused by oil spills, hazardous substance releases, and grounding incidents in National Marine Sanctuaries, and plan restoration activities. The goal of NRDA is to restore natural resources and compensate the public for lost recreational use. , we evaluated the type and amount of restoration needed in order to return the Gulf to the condition it would have been in before the spill and to compensate the public for the natural resource services that were injured or lost. The Deepwater Horizon spill resulted in the largest natural resource damage assessment ever undertaken.

What's Happening Now?

In 2011, one year after the spill, BP agreed to provide up to $1 billion toward early restoration projects in the Gulf of Mexico. Since then, we have worked with the public and BP to identify and implement early restoration projects . 

We conducted dozens of public meetings and received thousands of comments which have helped us shape each phase of early restoration. These projects allowed restoration of the Gulf to begin immediately.

On October 5, 2015, we proposed a comprehensive, integrated, ecosystem restoration plan to address impacts from the spill to the Gulf of Mexico . The draft plan allocated up to $8.8 billion for restoration from a proposed settlement with BP. It was based on our thorough assessment of impacts to the Gulf's natural resources and the services they provide. 

On April 4, 2016, the court approved a settlement with BP for natural resource injuries stemming from the spill. This settlement concludes the largest civil settlement ever awarded. We will now begin implementing restoration as laid out in the Trustees’ final comprehensive restoration plan . Under this settlement, BP will pay the Trustees up to $8.8 billion for restoration to address natural resource injuries.

For more information, visit the Gulf Spill Restoration website. 

Visit the Gulf Spill Restoration website for a list of contacts. 

• Deepwater Horizon Collection of NOAA Science Literature Now Available
• 30 Years of Restoration After Oil Spills
• NOAA and the Gulf States Marine Fisheries Commission Partner to Restore Recreational Fish
• Rescued from Deepwater Horizon, a Resilient Native Returns to Queen Bess Island
• $226 Million in Projects Approved in Gulf Open Ocean Restoration Plan
• Two Partners Recommended for Funding to Restore Habitat From Oil and Hazardous Waste Spills
• Comments Welcomed on Deepwater Horizon Open Ocean Draft Restoration Plan
• Deepwater Horizon Open Ocean Restoration Plan 1 Finalized
• Mississippi Acquires Land in Grand Bay with Deepwater Horizon Settlement Funds
• NOAA Announces Latest Partnership to Restore Habitats Damaged by Oil and Hazardous Waste

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Deepwater Horizon – BP Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill

On April 20, 2010, the oil drilling rig Deepwater Horizon , operating in the Macondo Prospect in the Gulf of Mexico, exploded and sank resulting in the death of 11 workers on the Deepwater Horizon and the largest spill of oil in the history of marine oil drilling operations.  4 million barrels of oil flowed from the damaged Macondo well over an 87-day period, before it was finally capped on July 15, 2010.  On December 15, 2010, the United States filed a complaint in District Court against BP Exploration & Production and several other defendants alleged to be responsible for the spill.  

This webpage provides information and materials on EPA’s enforcement response to the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill, settlements with several of the defendants, including the record-setting settlement with BP Exploration & Production for an unprecedented $5.5 billion Clean Water Act penalty and up to $8.8 billion in natural resource damages.  

This webpage is limited to EPA’s enforcement-related activities only, and does not cover all legal or other actions against BP Exploration & Production and other parties for the spill, such as private party/class action settlements for medical claims and economic damages, or other actions against those responsible for the spill.  The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana has established the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill website for this purpose.  In addition, links for additional information on the spill, cleanup activities and other responses are provided below.

On this page:

Case and Settlement Information

• Additional Information
• December 15, 2010: Civil complaint of the United States
• February 17, 2012: $90 million civil settlement with MOEX Offshore 2007 LLC 
• June 4, 2014: 5 th Circuit decision affirming ruling on summary judgment - 5th Circuit Decision June 4, 2014  
• November 5, 2014:  5 th Circuit decision denying panel reconsideration and affirming summary judgment ruling - Nondispositive Panel Opinion  
• January 9, 2015: 5 th Circuit order denying petition for rehearing en banc - Deepwater Horizon order denying petition for rehearing en banc  
• November 15, 2012: $4 billion criminal plea agreement with BP Exploration & Production  
• January 3, 2013: $1 billion civil settlement with Transocean Offshore Deepwater Drilling Inc., Transocean Deepwater Inc., Transocean Holdings LLC, and Triton Asset Leasing GmbH (“Transocean”)
• January 3, 2013: $400 million criminal plea agreement with Transocean  
• September 4, 2014:   Phase One Trial:  Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law on Gross Negligence and Willful Misconduct
• January 15, 2015: Phase Two Trial: Findings of Fact on Source Control and the Amount of Oil Spilled
• February 19, 2015:  Ruling on Maximum Dollars-Per-Barrel Penalty Amount, as Adjusted by the Penalty Inflation Act
• October 5, 2015:  $14.9 billion civil settlement with BP Exploration & Production
• November 30, 2015: $159.5 million Civil Penalty Ruling Against Anadarko Petroleum Co.

Additional Information on the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill

• Restoring the Gulf of Mexico After the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill
• 2010 National Coastal Condition Assessment Results and Report
• RestoreTheGulf: official federal government site for spill response and recovery  
• Final Report of the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill 
• Deepwater Horizon Joint Investigation Team 
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Academy Case Study: The Deepwater Horizon Accident Lessons for NASA

Sunlight illuminated the lingering oil slick off the Mississippi Delta on May 24, 2010. Photo Credit: NASA

May 10, 2011 Vol. 4, Issue 3

The events leading up to the Deepwater Horizon accident offers several cautionary lessons for NASA.

Offshore oil drilling is complex work that employs state-of-the art technology in an extremely dynamic environment. It involves using a drilling rig to penetrate the ocean floor, and installing and cementing pipe to secure the wellbore (well hole). Drilling mud is used to lubricate the drill bit and control pressure exerted by hydrocarbons unearthed during drilling. The rig drills progressively deeper until it reaches a depth where returns from the well can be maximized. At that point, drilling stops, the well is cemented and capped, and the rig is removed. The well owner returns later (typically with a less expensive production rig) to collect the oil.

On April 20, 2010, the Deepwater Horizon rig was finishing up a drilling job at the Macondo lease site, a plot in the Gulf of Mexico 49 miles off the coast of Louisiana. At the time, the job was 43 days over schedule and $21 million over budget due to additional leasing fees. At 9:49 p.m., the rig exploded, leading to 11 deaths and the worst oil spill in U.S. history.

The lessons from this tragedy are potent reminders of the pitfalls that can plague complex programs and projects in any industry, even (perhaps especially) those with long track records of success. Prior to the accident, Deepwater Horizon was one of the best-performing deepwater rigs in BP’s fleet. In September 2009, it had drilled to a world-record total depth of 35,055 feet. As of April 2010, it had not had a single “lost-time incident” in seven years of drilling. The deficiencies that set the stage for this tragedy—government oversight, disregard for data, testing, changes to processes and procedures, safety culture, and communications—are common to other high-stakes, high-visibility accidents and failures.

The text below includes edited excerpts from “Deep Water: The Gulf Oil Disaster and the Future of Offshore Drilling,” the final report to President Obama by the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling. (The report is in the public domain.)

View a decision timeline for the events leading up to the explosion.

Government Oversight

• The Minerals Management Service (MMS) faced personnel constraints in the Gulf of Mexico region that limited its ability to exercise effective oversight. The Safety Oversight Board found that “the Pacific Region employs 5 inspectors to inspect 23 production facilities—a ratio of 1 inspector for every 5 facilities. By contrast, the [Gulf of Mexico Region] employs 55 inspectors to inspect about 3,000 facilities—a ratio of 1 inspector for every 54 facilities.”
• At the time of the blowout, MMS had not published a rule mandating that all oil rig operators have plans to manage safety and environmental risks—more than 20 years after a rule was first proposed. The agency’s efforts to adopt a more rigorous and effective risk-based safety regulatory regime were repeatedly revisited, refined, delayed, and blocked alternatively by industry or skeptical agency political appointees. MMS thus never achieved the reform of its regulatory oversight of drilling safety consonant with practices that most other countries had embraced decades earlier.
• Other MMS regulatory initiatives critical to safety faced strong and effective opposition. In 2003, the White House stiffly opposed MMSs efforts to update its requirements for the reporting of key risk indicators.
• As MMS’s resources lagged behind the industry’s expansion into deepwater drilling—with its larger-scale and more demanding technology, greater pressures, and increasing distance from shore-based infrastructure and environmental and safety resources—the agency’s ability to do its job was seriously compromised. Of particular concern, MMS was unable to maintain up-to-date technical drilling-safety requirements to keep up with industry’s rapidly evolving deepwater technology. As drilling technology evolved, many aspects of drilling lacked corresponding safety regulations. The regulations increasingly lagged behind industry and what was happening in the field.
• When industry contended that blowout-preventer stacks—the critical last line of defense in maintaining control over a well—were more reliable than the regulations recognized, warranting less frequent pressure testing, MMS conceded and halved the mandated frequency of tests. Soon afterward, a series of third-party technical studies raised the possibility of high failure rates for the blowout preventers’ control systems, annular rams, and blind-shear rams under certain deepwater conditions and due to changes in the configuration and strength of drill pipe used by industry. Two studies commissioned by MMS found that many rig operators, by not testing blowout preventers, were basing their representations that the tool would work “on information not necessarily consistent with the equipment in use.” Yet, MMS never revised its blowout-preventer regulations nor added verification as an independent inspection item in light of this new information.
• The regulations did not mandate that MMS regulators inquire into the specifics of “rupture disks,” “long string” well designs, cementing process, the use of centralizers, lockdown sleeves, or the temporary abandonment procedures. The MMS personnel responsible for deciding whether the necessary drilling permits were granted lacked the expertise that would have been necessary in any event to determine the relative safety of the well based on any of these factors.
• MMS performed no meaningful National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) review (e.g., an environmental impact assessment) of the potentially significant adverse environmental consequences associated with its permitting for drilling of BP’s Macondo well.
• Notwithstanding the enormously important role cementing plays in well construction—especially in the high-pressure conditions often present in deepwater drilling—there were no meaningful regulations governing the requirements for cementing a well and testing the cement used. Nor were there regulations governing negative-pressure testing of the well’s integrity—a fundamental check against dangerous hydrocarbon incursions into an underbalanced well. On many of these critical matters, the federal regulations either failed to account for the particular challenges of deepwater drilling or were silent altogether.

Disregard for Data

• Well design.  BP’s design team originally had planned to use a “long string” production casing—a single continuous wall of steel between the wellhead on the seafloor, and the oil and gas zone at the bottom of the well. But after encountering cracking in the rock formation on the ocean floor on April 9, which limited the depth to which the rig would be able to drill, they were forced to reconsider. As another option, they evaluated a “liner”— a shorter string of casing hung lower in the well and anchored to the next higher string. A liner would result in a more complex—and theoretically more leak-prone—system over the life of the well. But it would be easier to cement into place at Macondo.On April 14 and 15, BP’s engineers, working with a Halliburton engineer, used sophisticated computer programs to model the likely outcome of the cementing process. When early results suggested the long string could not be cemented reliably, BP’s design team switched to a liner. But that shift met resistance within BP. The engineers were encouraged to engage an in-house BP cementing expert to review Halliburton’s recommendations. That BP expert determined that certain inputs should be corrected. Calculations with the new inputs showed that a long string could be cemented properly. The BP engineers accordingly decided that installing a long string was “again the primary option.”

Gagliano told BP engineers Mark Hafle and Brett Cocales about the problem on the afternoon of April 15. With de facto leader John Guide out of the office, Gregory Walz, the BP Drilling Engineering Team Leader, obtained permission from senior manager David Sims to order 15 additional slip-on centralizers—the most BP could transport immediately in a helicopter. That evening, Gagliano reran his simulations and found that channeling due to gas flow would be less severe with 21 centralizers in place. Late that night, Walz sent an e-mail to Guide explaining that he and Sims felt that BP needed to “honor the [OptiCem] modeling to be consistent with our previous decisions to go with the long string.”

When Guide learned the next day of the decision to add more centralizers, he initially deferred, but then challenged the decision. Walz had earlier assured Guide that the 15 additional centralizers would be custom-designed one-piece units that BP had used on a prior well and would limit the potential for centralizer “hang up.” But when the centralizers arrived, BP engineer Brian Morel, who happened to be out on the rig, reported that the centralizers were of conventional design with separate stop collars. Morel e-mailed BP drilling engineer Brett Cocales to question the need for additional centralizers. Cocales responded that the team would “probably be fine” even without the additional centralizers and that “Guide is right on the risk/reward equation.”

Documents identified after the blowout reveal that Halliburton personnel had also conducted another foam stability test earlier in February. The earlier test had been conducted under slightly different conditions than the later one and had failed more severely. It appears that Halliburton never reported the results of the earlier February test to BP.

Halliburton conducted another round of tests in mid-April, just before pumping the final cement job. By then, the BP team had given Halliburton more accurate information about the temperatures and pressures at the bottom of the Macondo well, and Halliburton had progressed further with its cementing plan. Using this information, the laboratory personnel conducted several tests, including a foam stability test, starting on approximately April 13. The first test Halliburton conducted showed once again that the cement slurry would be unstable. The Commission concluded that Halliburton did not report this information to BP. Instead, it appeared that Halliburton personnel subsequently ran a second foam stability test, this time doubling the pre-test “conditioning time” to three hours.

The crew had noticed that the fluid level inside the riser was dropping, suggesting that spacer was leaking down past the annular preventer, out of the riser, and into the well. A manager from Transocean ordered the annular preventer closed more tightly to stop the leak.

With that problem solved, the crew refilled the riser and once again opened up the drill pipe and attempted a second time to bleed the pressure down to 0 psi. This time, they were able to do so. But when they shut the drill pipe in again, the pressure built back up to at least 773 psi. The crew then attempted a third time to bleed off the pressure from the drill pipe, and was again able to get it down to 0 psi. When the crew shut the well back in, however, the pressure increased to 1,400 psi. At this point, the crew had bled the drill-pipe pressure down three times, but each time it had built back up. For a successful negative-pressure test, the pressure must remain at 0 psi when the pipe is closed after the pressure is bled off.

The Transocean crew and BP Well Site Leaders met on the rig floor to discuss the readings. According to post-incident statements from both Well Site Leaders, one of the technicians suggested that the 1,400 psi pressure on the drill pipe was being caused by a phenomenon called the “bladder effect”— heavy mud in the riser was exerting pressure on the annular preventer, which in turn transmitted pressure to the drill pipe.

According to the Transocean manager, after a lengthy discussion, BP Well Site Leader Vidrine then insisted on running a second negative-pressure test, this time monitoring pressure and flow on the kill line rather than the drill pipe. (The kill line is one of three pipes, each approximately 3 inches in diameter, that run from the rig to the BOP to allow the crew to circulate fluids into and out of the well at the sea floor.) The pressure on the kill line during the negative- pressure test should have been identical to the pressure on the drill pipe, as both flow paths went to the same place (and both should have been filled with seawater). Vidrine apparently insisted the negative test be repeated on the kill line because BP had specified that the test would be performed on the kill line in a permit application it submitted earlier to MMS.

Changes to Processes and Procedures

• BP did not have adequate controls in place to ensure that key decisions in the months leading up to the blowout were safe or sound from an engineering perspective. While initial well design decisions undergo a serious peer review process and changes to well design are subsequently subject to a management of change (MOC) process, changes to drilling procedures in the weeks and days before implementation are typically not subject to any such peer-review or MOC process. At Macondo, such decisions appear to have been made by the BP Macondo team in ad hoc fashion without any formal risk analysis or internal expert review.
• Temporary Abandonment Procedures. Drilling the Macondo well had required a giant offshore rig of Deepwater Horizon’s capabilities. By contrast, BP, like most operators, would give the job of “completing” the well to a smaller (and less costly) rig, which would install hydrocarbon-collection and -production equipment. To make way for the new rig, the Deepwater Horizon would have to remove its riser and blowout preventer from the wellhead—and before it could do those things, the crew had to secure the well through a process called “temporary abandonment.”
• BP’s Macondo team had made numerous changes to the temporary abandonment procedures in the two weeks leading up to April 20. For example, in its April 12 drilling plan, BP had planned (1) to set the lockdown sleeve before setting the surface cement plug and (2) to set the surface cement plug in seawater only 6,000 feet below sea level (as opposed to 8,367 feet). The April 12 plan did not include a negative- pressure test. On April 14, Morel sent an e-mail entitled “Forward Ops” setting forth a different procedure, which included a negative-pressure test but would require setting the surface cement plug in mud before displacement of the riser with seawater. On April 16, BP sent an Application for Permit to Modify to MMS describing a temporary abandonment procedure that was different from the procedure in either the April 12 drilling plan, the April 14 e-mail, or the April 20 “Ops Note” (see below). There is no evidence that these changes went through any sort of formal risk assessment or management of change process.
• At 10:43 a.m. on April 20, a BP engineer e-mailed an “Ops Note” to the rest of the Macondo team listing the temporary abandonment procedures for the well. It was the first time the BP Well Site Leaders on the rig had seen the procedures they would use that day. BP first shared the procedures with the rig crew at the 11 a.m. pre-tour meeting that morning.

Safety Culture

• Between May 29 and June 10, 2000, BP’s Grangemouth Complex on Scotland’s Firth of Forth suffered three potentially life-threatening accidents: a power- distribution failure leading to the emergency shutdown of the oil refinery; the rupture of a main steam pipe; and a fire in the refinery’s fluidized catalytic cracker unit (which turns petroleum into gasoline).
• In November 2003, a gas line ruptured on BP Forties Alpha platform in the North Sea, flooding the platform with methane. It was a windy day and there was no spark to ignite the gas.
• On March 23, 2005, a blast at BP’s Texas City refinery—the third largest refinery in the United States—killed 15 people and injured more than 170.
• In March 2006—one year after the Texas City refinery explosion and one year before the Chemical Safety Board report on it—BP had yet another significant industrial accident. Its network of pipelines in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, leaked 212,252 gallons of oil into the delicate tundra environment—the worst spill ever recorded on the North Slope.22 The leak went undetected for as long as five days. Upon analysis, the pipes were found to have been poorly maintained and inspected.
• A survey of the Transocean crew regarding “safety management and safety culture” on the Deepwater Horizon conducted just a few weeks before the accident hints at the organizational roots of the problem. The research, conducted at Transocean’s request, involved surveys and interviews with hundreds of employees onshore and on four rigs, including Deepwater Horizon, which was surveyed from March 12 to March 16. The reviewers found Deepwater Horizon “relatively strong in many of the core aspects of safety management.” But there were also weaknesses. Some 46 percent of crew members surveyed felt that some of the workforce feared reprisals for reporting unsafe situations, and 15 percent felt that there were not always enough people available to carry out work safely. Some Transocean crews complained that the safety manual was “unstructured,” “hard to navigate,” and “not written with the end user in mind”; and that there is “poor distinction between what is required and how this should be achieved.” According to the final survey report, Transocean’s crews “don’t always know what they don’t know. Front line crews are potentially working with a mindset that they believe they are fully aware of all the hazards when it’s highly likely that they are not.”

Communications

• All of the issues above — government oversight, disregard for data, testing, changes to processes and procedures, and safety culture — have communications implications.
• BP, Transocean, and Halliburton failed to communicate adequately. Information appears to have been excessively compartmentalized at Macondo as a result of poor communication. BP did not share important information with its contractors, or sometimes internally even with members of its own team. Contractors did not share important information with BP or each other. (See, for example, the subhead “Cement Testing” above.) As a result, individuals often found themselves making critical decisions without a full appreciation for the context in which they were being made (or even without recognition that the decisions were critical).
• Transocean failed to adequately communicate to its crew lessons learned from an eerily similar near-miss on one of its rigs in the North Sea four months prior to the Macondo blowout. On December 23, 2009, gas entered the riser on that rig while the crew was displacing a well with seawater during a completion operation. As at Macondo, the rig’s crew had already run a negative-pressure test on the lone physical barrier between the pay zone and the rig, and had declared the test a success. The tested barrier nevertheless failed during displacement, resulting in an influx of hydrocarbons. Mud spewed onto the rig floor—but fortunately the crew was able to shut in the well before a blowout occurred.

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Case Study: The 2010 Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Its Environmental Developmental Impacts

• September 2018
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We still don’t know the full impacts of the BP oil spill, 10 years later

The spill drove a push in science and some changes in regulations, but the dangers of offshore drilling remain.

Smoke rises from surface oil being burned by cleanup crews in the Gulf of Mexico after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in April 2010.

The BP oil spill of 2010 started suddenly, explosively, and with deadly force. But the response has stretched out for years and scientists say there’s still much more we need to learn.

As a crew on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig worked to close up an exploratory oil well deep under the Gulf of Mexico, a pulse of gas shot up, buckling the drill pipe. The emergency valve designed to cap the well in case of an accident, the “blowout protector,” failed, and the gas reached the drill rig, triggering an explosion that killed 11 crewmembers.

Over the next three months, the uncapped well leaked more than 300 Olympic-sized swimming pools of oil into the Gulf’s waters, making it the biggest oil spill in United States history. The leak pumped out 12 times more oil than the Exxon Valdez spill of 1989.

U.S. Coast Guard fire boats crews battle the blazing remnants of the offshore oil rig Deepwater Horizon on April 21, 2010 near New Orleans. An estimated 1,000 barrels of oil a day were still leaking into the Gulf at the time.

The spill opened many people’s eyes to the risks of drilling for oil in one of the most ecologically rich, culturally important, and economically valuable parts of the world. But 10 years and billions of dollars in cleanup efforts later, many of the same risks that allowed the disaster to occur remain.

“It took the better part of six to seven years [after the disaster] to get in place the inspection of blowout preventers and rules about making drilling plans safer and putting commonsense regulations in place, but those have been rescinded,” says Ian MacDonald , a scientist at Florida State University. “So basically we’re back to where we were in 2010, in terms of regulatory environment.”

And in some ways, more is known now than ever before about the Gulf and how the spill affected its ecosystems.

“We’re just to the point now where we have enough data to recognize things we missed earlier, and there’s still a lot we don’t know,” says Samantha Joye , a marine scientist at the University of Georgia. “This is a marathon, not a sprint.”

Can this kind of spill happen again?

About 17 percent of the U.S.’s total crude oil production comes from offshore projects in the Gulf . Pipelines—26,000 miles of them—connect wells to the processing infrastructure that lines the coast. Before plummeting demand from the coronavirus pandemic drove already-low oil prices lower, the Gulf of Mexico was producing as much crude oil as it had in years.

“Even in times of low prices like today, offshore just keeps going on,” says Gregory Upton, Jr ., an energy economist at Louisiana State University.

A severely oiled brown pelican is rescued in Queen Bess Island, Louisiana, after the oil spill.

And drilling for oil in deep offshore waters is inherently dangerous for the people working the platforms, as well as potentially for the environments they’re drilling in.

“Working on the ultra-deep stuff is pretty much like working in outer space,” say Mark Davis, a water law expert at Tulane University.

But conditions on the Deepwater Horizon rig were particularly concerning. After the spill, the commission created by the Obama administration to investigate the spill reached stark, damning conclusions. Many lapses in safety had contributed to the disaster , many of which traced back to a culture both within BP and the industry more broadly that did not value safety enough.

Boats used absorbent booms to corral the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

A new agency, the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE), was created to track and enforce offshore drilling safety issues, something that had been handled by the same agency that approved leases to oil companies.

“Before Deepwater, there was this mentality that had set in in the 1990s and 2000s, that the oil and gas industry, as it was going farther offshore, was capable of self-regulating,” says Matt Lee Ashley , a researcher at the Center for American Progress. “Then Deepwater happened and burst that set of assumptions.”

BSEE announced a new set of safety rules for offshore operations in 2016. Among those rules was one that required blowout protectors—the piece that had failed at Deepwater Horizon—to be inspected by a third party, rather than self-certified by the drilling companies. But many of those rules, as well as other safety practices put in place after the disaster, have been weakened in recent years. Most notably, in 2019 the Trump administration finalized rollbacks of several components of the 2016 rules, including the independent safety certification for blowout protectors and bi-weekly testing.

Inspections and safety checks by BSEE have also declined some 13 percent between 2017 and 2019 and there have been nearly 40 percent less enforcement activities in that time compared to previous years, according to Lee Ashley’s analysis.

Today, more than 50 percent of Gulf oil production comes from ultra-deep wells drilled in 4,500 feet or more of water, compared with about 4,000 feet for Deepwater Horizon. The deeper the well, the more the risk: A 2013 study showed that for every hundred feet deeper a well is drilled, the likelihood of a company self-reported incident like a spill or an injury increased by more than 8 percent.

Terry Garcia, former deputy administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and a member of a major safety commission convened after the Deepwater Horizon disaster, worries that the safety changes in the years after the disaster didn’t extend broadly enough, either.

“We have this tendency to fight the last war, to prepare for the last incident that occurred,” he says. After the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill, for example, new laws and regulations were enacted to deal with future tanker spills. But that focus on the future didn’t happen for oil rigs, and the next disaster is unlikely to look exactly like Deepwater.

A dead black drum fish floats through oiled waters in Grand Isle, Louisiana.

Another concern, says Scott Eustis, the science director at the Louisiana-based Healthy Gulf, a group that focuses on marine protection, comes from the ever-increasing pressures of climate change. Louisiana, which has the most comprehensive climate adaptation plan in the region, is expecting the number and intensity of major hurricanes to increase within the next 50 years. Each storm that blows through the Gulf threatens offshore drilling infrastructure.

“Since Deepwater Horizon, we’ve taken two steps forward and one step back, and that one step back is worrying because we could very much end up in a similar situation,” says Lee Ashley.

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What we know about the spill’s effect s.

After the spill, BP agreed to pay out more than $20 billion in penalties and damages, with around $13 billion directed toward restoration and a vast research effort in the region.

But scientists realized they lacked much of the basic background science necessary to predict where, when, and how the oil would spread or what its impacts on the region would be.

At first, it was difficult even to assess how much oil spilled from the well. Early initial assessments were low—but satellite imagery revealed that there was much more oil than had been reported. The final tally showed that the spill dumped more than 200 million gallons of oil.

Oil continued to sink to the ocean floor for more than a year, a recent study shows . It changed the amounts of sediment collecting on the bottom of the sea for years afterward and choked them of oxygen . Immediately after the spill, the 1,300 miles of contaminated coasts saw oil concentrations 100 times higher than background levelsl even eight years later , concentrations were 10 times higher than before the spill. And In February of this year, a study showed that the footprint of the oil spread some 30 percent wider than previously estimated, potentially contaminating many more fish communities than previously thought.

Scientists are still figuring out exactly how the oil impacted the biology of the Gulf, but the immediate effect was to turn the seafloor near the well site into a “toxic waste dump,” one study said. Studies are also showing that reef fish changed drastically after the spill; that fish absorbed some of the oil-sourced contaminants ; and that ecological communities throughout the water column, from tiny bacteria to deep sea corals to arthropods , could take decades to recover .

( Read about how the effects of the spill are still reverberating in dolphins ).

“It’s astounding,” says Joye . “We underestimated so many of the impacts when we were first looking.” Only after a decade of sustained observation, she says, have the true impacts of the spill started to become clear.

( Read about how pelican habitat on the Louisiana coast is being restored after the spill).

What we learned about the Gulf

The paradoxical effect of the spill is that scientists know more about the Gulf of Mexico, as well as the physics, ecology, and chemistry of oil spills, than they ever would have otherwise.

The white sand beaches of Orange Beach, Alabama are covered with oil.

It was clear from the moment the spill began that there were many basic science questions that were unknown about this area of the world, like ocean currents and wind patterns, knowledge gaps that hindered the recovery process.

“The first fundamental issue we faced in 2010 was a chronic lack of baseline data,” says Joye.

For example, no high-resolution map of the seafloor existed, information that would have helped scientists understand where the bottom-dwelling creatures of the Gulf might be affected. Driven by the disaster, federal scientists produced a map in 2016.

“It was crucial to be able to detect and predict where the oil would go,” says Oscar Garcia Pineda, a satellite expert. In 2010, it took days to get satellite images downloaded and processed; today the response time is about 20 minutes, he says. In conjunction with studies that used drifters , boats, drones , and other techniques, scientists have deepened their understanding of the Gulf’s restless movements.

But there’s much more still to learn, say Joye and MacDonald; it’s crucial to set up long-term monitoring programs so scientists can be better prepared for the inevitable next disaster.

“We need much better oceanographic data,” says MacDonald, “so we’re not trying to model after the fact whether Florida is going to get hit by this oil spill, or if it’ll go the other way.”

And other knowledge gaps also engender risk. For example, a 2004 hurricane triggered underwater landslides at another drilling site in the Gulf. The mudslide broke the drilling rig away from the well, leaving it leaking hundreds of barrels a day . But the mudslide risk across the Gulf hasn’t yet been thoroughly mapped out.

“There was a dearth of knowledge. It’s that old adage, ‘you can’t manage what you don’t understand’—well, you can’t protect what you don’t understand , ” says Garcia.

Why is there drilling in the Gulf of Mexico?

The reason the Deepwater Horizon well existed in the first place? Hundreds of billions of barrels of fossil fuel energy are buried deep beneath the Gulf’s seafloor.

Oil seeps from the floor of the Gulf naturally, in small volumes. Th e phenomenon has been long known to people who lived and traveled along its marshy shores and coastlines. Hernan de Soto, a Spanish explorer who sailed through the Gulf in 1543, used the gummy oil his sailors collected from the beaches to patch up his wooden ships. Tribal communities gathered tar that caught in the tangled cordgrass of the sandy barrier islands and used it for art and to waterproof pots.

Offshore drilling began in the late 1930s. The first site, Louisiana’s Creole platform, squatted just a mile and a half off the coast, its wooden legs sprouting up through water 14 feet deep.

By the 1950s, engineers were gaining ambition and confidence, nudging the limits of their drilling activities deeper and deeper, following the long, broad slope of the seafloor that tilted away from the Gulf’s shores. By 2000, over 300 operating oil rigs and thousands of platforms dotted the wide, shallow slope. But they pushed further, out to where the ground drops away sharply. Geologists’ glimpses into that underground world, from seismic observations and experimental drill holes, hinted at millions of barrels of oil lurking below, if only the drillers could get to it.

The Deepwater Horizon well, drilled in 2009, pushed the limits of that deep drilling. At its creation, it was the deepest well ever drilled, punching over 35,000 feet down into the ground below the sea, in water over 4,000 feet deep.

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A deep dive into BP’s Deepwater Horizon Spill: a case study

Under pressure – the disaster

Considered as the biggest marine disaster in history, on April 20 th , 2010, the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, killing 11 crew members working onsite. The rig eventually sank and damaged the pipe underneath and started to spew millions of barrels of crude oil into the gulf over the next four months. It contaminated about 400 square miles of the sea floor and 1,300 miles of shoreline of the Gulf of Mexico (DOI: 10.1002/jcaf.22306).

Search-and-rescue operations were executed on April 22 nd and within the same day, BP’s CEO Tony Hayward released a statement that they were determined to do everything to contain the oil spill and resolve the situation . When the rig capsized, BP’s initial response comprised of: 1) releasing of a small fleet of response vessels, 2) relief well planning, 3) skimming of oily surface water, 4) implementing protective boom to prevent oil from reaching the shoreline, and 5) placing chemical dispersants in the spill site to break up the oil and keep them from damaging marshes, mangroves, and beaches .

Efforts were made to seal the leaking well but were initially unsuccessful, and as a back-up, they have started drilling relief well in May. To reduce the leak, a tube tool was inserted into the ruptured riser pipe and containment cap was used to collect the oil and pump it to the gulf surface. On July 15 th , BP was able to stop the flow of oil for the first time in 87 days but was still under monitoring to ensure that the cap would stay in place. More than 2 weeks later, the US government announced that almost three-quarters of the spilled oil had been cleaned up, and on September 19 th , BP reported that the leak had been successfully and permanently plugged .

Several service providers (DOI: 10.1002/jcaf.22306) were involved in the offshore drilling operations of the Macondo well, the area of exploration where BP is operating. BP leased the rig from TransOcean, while the processes such as cementing the well and other critical functions were done by Sperry-Sun, Halliburton’s subsidiary. Other companies involved were Dril-Wuip, Oceaneering, M-I-SWACO, Cameron, and Weatherford.

Numerous investigations were held to find the root cause of the disaster, as well as the parties responsible for the damages. The BP report 2010, the Commission Report 2011 and the Joint Report 2011 concluded that the tragedy occurred due to a series of failures from the multiple parties involved in the operation. BP had been identified as the primary responsible for ensuring the safety and protection of personnel, equipment, natural resources, and the environment under the Oil Pollution Act (OPA). The other companies also shared the same accountability for violating several offshore safety regulations based on the Joint Report 2011.

It was revealed that the crisis has cost BP more than US$65 billion covering the total charges, net of reimbursements and recoveries, as well as insurance claims. However, a study (DOI: 10.1002/jcaf.22306) showed that the ultimate cost of the oil spill was twice what was reported in BP’s income statement, amounting to US$144.89 billion. The detailed computation included not just those mentioned above but also the hidden costs such as the revenue lost, unearned profit, and reputational damage. Needless to say, the spill also damaged fisheries, beaches, and coastal wetlands, including several species of birds, sea turtles, marine mammals, fishes, oysters, and other sea animals. A recent study showed that Gulf inhabitants such as brown pelican and menhaden fish have showed robust recovery while many species such as deep-sea coral, common loons, and spotted sea trout are still struggling to multiply.

The Deepwater Horizon spill also brought significant impacts to the economic activity in the surrounding communities. A research (DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-11605-7_33) revealed that the total economic costs during the period of 2010-2020 of the foregone commercial fishing revenues and recreational fishing expenditures are loss of 25,000 jobs, US$2.3 billion worth of industry output, US$1.2 billion gross regional product, US$700 million labor income, US$160 million state and local tax revenues, and US$160 million federal tax revenues.

A deep well of learnings

Oil spills are not uncommon in the Gulf of Mexico but the magnitude of impact of BP’s Deepwater Horizon had been massive that it attracted so much attention from various stakeholders, not to mention the several missteps BP took as they navigated through the whole crisis. Here is the list of some lessons learned from the accident that, in some way or another, brought lasting impact on the safety of succeeding oil operations in the industry.

• Never learning enough from previous mistakes. In a high-risk business like oil-drilling, it is expected that large companies such as BP would have anticipated negative events in many of its operations. Even more so when there had been several accidents that happened prior the major oil spill. In 2005, BP’s refinery in Texas City exploded and their Thunder Horse rig in the same gulf got into an accident. In the following year, BP’s pipeline leaked in Prudhoe Bay. It was reported that BP was still paying for the violations in these previous disasters when the Deepwater Horizon spill happened .
• Culture of safety must be embraced by the whole industry. The disaster showed how neither the industry, nor the governments were prepared for risks involved in oil exploration. The investigations revealed how failures in following procedures to mitigate risks, and loose coordination among operators and regulatory bodies led to this disaster. It is important for organizations to understand that regulations are for their benefit, and it can provide level playing field for all stakeholders, especially during a crisis. In addition, regulations must be well-enforced, and penalties must be tantamount to the damages incurred in a disaster. Lax safety enforcement for the part of Minerals Management Service (MMS), the regulating body for offshore oil drilling, was found in the investigations. In fact, in the report released by the General Accountability Office (GAO), MMS showed a series of inconsistencies and omissions in their National Environmental Policy Act analyses and was described to lack organization, guidance, technical expertise, and qualified personnel .
• Plans must be prepared and reviewed to the highest standard possible. BP had MMS-approved Gulf Oil Spill Response Plan that detailed cleanup equipment and techniques, surface containment methods, and the use of chemical dispersants while missing out the more important parts of preventing or stopping a blowout. It was later found that BP’s response plan was written by the same contractor that prepared the plans for other oil companies such as ExxonMobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, and Shell Oil. Congressional inquiry described the plans as “cookie-cutter” that similar errors were found in some of the companies’ response plan . Furthermore, BP received a categorical exclusion for exploration plan for Macondo Prospect, allowing them to drill without preparing detailed site-specific environmental assessment based on the outdated assumption that “the impacts from the common operations are expected to be negligible to non-existent…”.
• Ensure that Business Continuity Plan includes third-party agreement. Several subcontractors involved in the Deepwater Horizon operations had made the already complex nature of the business even more complicated. Complex risks may arise from third party contractors and their capability to continue their operations. This is why it is important that critical suppliers must have Business Continuity Management arrangement in place. Furthermore, a robust action plans as part of collective response among suppliers in case of a disruption must be included in their contractual obligations. Had the employees well-informed of their responsibilities and safety actions, the death of 11 crew members would have been prevented. Had BP and its contractors have pre-arrangement contracts that included BCM, they would have not blamed each other and engaged in multi-billion dollar litigation after the accident.
• Communication is an integral aspect of crisis management. BP has become a textbook example of how not to handle public relations. Several studies evaluating BP’s actions in terms of crisis communication have been published following the major incident. Below is a quick rundown of both weaknesses and strengths of BP’s campaign (DOI: 10.1080/13527266.2018.1559218).

Digging deeper

Initially, BP’s several mishaps in managing the disaster making it easy for environmentalists, politicians, media, and other concerned individuals to paint the company as uncaring and greedy organization that cares for profits more than anything else . When the rig exploded and oil spill happened, BP was quick to shift the blame to TransOcean through their official statements, and the former CEO Hayward’s media interview. He said: “ This wasn’t our accident. This was a drilling rig operated by another company. It was their people, their systems, their processes. We are responsible not for the accident, but we are responsible for the oil and for dealing with it and cleaning the situation up.”

Lack of concern for the victims was also seen by many when there were reports that BP asked the cleanup workers and those who were affected by the spill to sign a waiver that would limit BP’s liability. This was during the ironic time that BP reported their 135% first quarter profit of $5.6 billion. The company also failed to be transparent, hindering people to build confidence and trust that they were on top of the situation early on. For example, the initial estimate of the leak was only 1,000 barrels per day, increased it to 5,000 barrel per day after more than a week, then later submitted a figure of 100,000 barrels per day to the Congress for investigation.

Lastly, former CEO Tony Hayward’s statements and actions attracted a lot of negative attention. In an interview with The Times of London, he mentioned that some victims would try to scam them for profit (Ibid) “I could give you lots of examples. This is America – come on. We’re going to have lots of illegitimate claims. We all know that.” Furthermore, he tried to downplay the damage caused by the accident by saying “ the Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of volume of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume.” He was also recorded saying in front of many reporters, “The first thing to say is I’m sorry. We’re sorry for the massive disruption it’s caused their lives. There’s no one who wants this over more than I do. I would like my life back.” He was later seen on a yacht off the Isle of Wight, 2 days after testifying before Congress.

The reputation repair

As BP struggled to find solution to stop the oil spill and its dwindling reputation, its share price and credit rating also grappled. The shareholder value of BP plummeted by 55% after the incident, from US$59.48 per share on April 19 th , 2010 to US$27 per share on June 25 th , 2010 . Furthermore, Fitch cut its credit rating from AA to BBB after US politicians demanded US$20 billion deposits in an escrow account to fund the damage claims for the oil spill as the agency was concerned about the ratio between long-term and near-term cost payments would become skewed towards the near-term cost . However, the meeting of BP’s executives with Obama in June was considered a turning point. BP’s Chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg told Obama: “ Our boat is keeling over right now. We’re not taking on water but we’re not far away. If you and the administration can be supportive going forward, that would help us do the right thing.” Obama responded that it is the country’s interest for the company to remain strong and viable to be able to fulfill its commitments . It was on this meeting that BP agreed to fund the US$20 billion escrow account, which investors received positively .

In the same month, BP hired Purple Strategies, a public affairs firm run by a Democratic and a Republican strategist, for its US campaign, alongside Anne Womack Kolton, a former US Energy Department official, to manage its US media relations. The new strategy team was able to showcase what BP had been doing for those affected by the crisis. Television, radio, and print campaign featured BP workers and Gulf Coast locals, volunteers, and BP officials. They were able to put faces on the real and human stories related to the incident. After the leak was plugged, they expanded the communication strategies to image-building by highlighting how BP was helping the Gulf Coast residents to get back to business as usual. They created two major campaigns – “Voices from the Gulf” and “My Gulf”.

Voices from the Gulf: Mississippi Fishermen

Voices from the Gulf: Louisiana’s Restaurant Owners

Voices from the Gulf: Florida Business Owners

My Gulf: Dawn Moliterno – Walton Tourism Development

My Gulf: New Orleans, Louisiana – Cooking the Perfect Gumbo

My Gulf: Josephine, Alabama: Shrimpin’ with Papa Roy

Another unprecedented albeit necessary decision happened in the following month, Tony Hayward, whose gaffes had enraged a lot of Americans, announced that he was stepping down as CEO and would be replaced in October by Bob Dudley, a Mississippi native who was in charge of BP’s clean-up response .

A year of change – the post crisis phase

Changing leadership amidst the crisis was a pivotal step for BP to redirect its direction through the crisis. Bob Dudley’s first tasks as the CEO were: 1) securing the company’s finances, 2) ensuring the safety of BP’s operations worldwide, and 3) restoring the environment of the Gulf Coast . He needed to sell BP’s oil and gas assets quickly, including their prized assets such as the Texas City refinery, Gulf of Mexico oilfields and Russian joint venture , and also do forward sale oil to safeguard BP’s future while meeting its commitment to the Gulf.

Guided by his principle of “value over volume”, Dudley cut the number of BP-operated upstream installation by 50%, the number of wells by more than 30%, and oil and gas reserves by 10%. In addition, he formed a new global Safety and Operational Risk team to instill the culture of safety in the company . Apart from the operation and culture, he mentioned in an interview that capital allocation and decision-making were also reformed . BP became “ inclusive, and modern place to work where leaders were encouraged to listen to the quietest voices in the room ”.

BP’s support to its business partners and people during the crisis did not wane but even strengthened. Dudley found that while several of BP’s partners such as banks were pulling away, there were some partners that were supportive and willing to help. Moreover, he also felt the need to rebuild the confidence of their employees in their company as he was worried that competitors might try to hire their talent away .

The oil company remained committed to environmental restoration. They provided up to US$1 billion for restoring natural resources that were impacted by the accident. In addition, BP has allocated US$500 million for a decade of support to independent research designed to provide better understanding of the Gulf ecosystem and industry. With the help of experts in high-hazard sectors such as nuclear energy, chemicals and the military, BP strengthened their operational risk function. Furthermore, they were able to design and prepare a capping stack that can be used in case another leak in deep water happens .

BP: A year of change

Rising above pressure

The post-crisis organizational reform was able to regain the investors’ trust as shown by the share price increase from June 29 th , 2010. Although the share has not gone back to its pre-oil spill crisis price at around US$60, it did not go below US$27 until the COVID-19 pandemic hit.

BP strengthened its finances after the crisis by cutting costs to reduce breakeven point while improving oil production . In 2017, Moody’s increased BP’s credit rating for the first time in 19 years citing the company’s resilience to oil price volatility and increased clarity in terms of the remaining cash payments related to the US$20 billion Deepwater Horizon settlement .

BP continued to acquire various projects including those that focus on natural gas such as shale gas production from about 200 wells in Oman , the natural gas production at Atoll gas field in Egypt , and several American oil and shale projects bought from mining firm BHP, its first major US investment since the oil spill ,  among others. Although only a small fraction of their total spending, BP started investing in renewable energy at around US$400 million a year. They invested in startup firms like Freewire, which possesses a technology that allow charging electric vehicles faster. It also acquired Chargemaster, UK’s biggest network of EV charging stations, as well as 43% share of Lightsource, Europe’s largest solar development firm . Like other oil companies, BP received several criticisms for doing inadequate efforts to reduce carbon emissions and increase renewable energy, especially that between 2016 and 2019, BP expanded its oil and gas production by 20% .

In 2020, BP announced that it aims to become a net-zero emissions company by 2050 or sooner. It revealed their commitment to a 10-fold increase in low-carbon investment or an estimate of US$5 billion per year, and a 20-fold increase in renewable generating capacity to 50 gigawatts . Headed by the current CEO Bernard Looney, who succeeded Dudley in February 2020, the oil giant plans US$25 billion in fossil-fuel asset sales by 2025, with US$15 billions of which has already been liquidated by unloading the Oman deal, oil and gas field in Alaska and the North Sea, and BP’s entire petrochemical operation . Although the company does not expect profits from its clean-energy business such as solar, EV-charging, and wind ventures until 2025, Looney continues to spend on renewable energy.

The Final Cap

To keep its commitment to meet its obligations in the Gulf of Mexico in spite of almost losing its whole business to the accident is praiseworthy; to move forward, learn its lessons, and transform into a better organization is even more admirable; but nothing can beat a well-prepared company that can prevent a crisis to happen, or at least mitigate the risks. The BP’s Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill is a great example of how return on investment of robust emergency response and business continuity programs can worth priceless.

In addition, the accident showed us that the most critical aspect of crisis leadership is clear and trustworthy communication. The goal of communicating during a crisis is not to lessen the uncertainty but to acknowledge it and the fear that comes with it. Transparency, honesty, and empathy are always the best policy.

If you liked this case study, you might also want to read this one .

Author: Lucil Aguada

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The Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill: The Politics of Crisis Response (B)

• Crisis Management
• Environment, Energy, and Agriculture
• Government - Federal
• National and International Security

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Abstract: Following the sinking of the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig in late April 2010, the Obama administration organized a massive response operation to contain the enormous amount of oil spreading across the Gulf of Mexico. Attracting intense public attention and, eventually, widespread criticism, the response adhered to the Oil Pollution Act of 1990, a federal law that the crisis would soon reveal was not well understood--or even accepted--by all relevant parties. This two-part case profiles the efforts of senior officials from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security as they struggled to coordinate the actions of a myriad of actors, ranging from numerous federal partners (including key members of the Obama White House); the political leadership of the affected Gulf States and sub-state jurisdictions; and the private sector. Case A provides an overview of the disaster and early response; discusses the formation of the National Incident Command (NIC), which had responsibility for directing response activities; and explores the NIC's efforts to coordinate the actions of various federal entities. Case B focuses on the challenges the NIC encountered as it sought to engage with state and local actors--an effort that would grow increasingly complicated as the crisis deepened throughout the spring and summer of 2010. Learning Objective: This case highlights how officials from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security handled the complex political dynamics associated with the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. It prompts students of public administration and management to think about the difficulties of navigating intergovernmental and interagency relations and asks them to consider how public officials can facilitate the involvement of political leaders representing different constituencies and competing interests during major crises.

Other Details

Related cases.

The Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill: The Politics of Crisis Response (A)

Valerie Jarrett and the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill Response

The Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill: Responding to the Crisis in the Gulf of Mexico

Black Wednesday in Britain: The Politics of ERM Crisis

What was the Deepwater Horizon disaster?

The 2010 event killed 11 people and smothered the Gulf of Mexico in the largest marine oil spill in history.

• Investigation and causes
• Ecological damage
• Economic damage
• Legal consequences and regulation

On April 20, 2010, the Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico exploded, killing 11 people. Two days later, the rig capsized, and the damaged pipe below the rig began spewing oil into the surrounding water. Oil continued to spill from the pipe for 87 days, releasing an estimated 377,514 metric tonnes into the Gulf, according to court findings . The fallout of the spill included economic hardship for people living on the Gulf Coast and environmental damage that persists today.

Drilling for oil and gas in the Gulf of Mexico

Oil and gas companies have been drilling in the Gulf of Mexico for fuel since the 1930s, according to a 2018 Consensus Report published by the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine . Today, the region provides more than a fifth of U.S. oil and gas production, the U.S. Energy Information Administration estimates.

Related: Why is there so much oil in the Gulf of Mexico?

The oil below the ocean floor formed from organic materials, such as the remains of plants and animals, trapped below ground millions of years ago. Over time, pressure and heat transformed the molecules of those organic materials into hydrocarbons — compounds made of hydrogen and carbon, which form the building blocks of oil and natural gas. The oil and gas accumulates underground into cracks and pockets between layers of rock tens to hundreds of feet thick called "pay zones" by the oil and gas industry. Energy companies have drilled more than 2,000 oil wells in the Gulf of Mexico.

BP (formerly known as The British Petroleum Company ltd.) is one of the world's largest oil companies, with headquarters in London. The company leased the Deepwater Horizon rig from the world's biggest oil rig contractor, TransOcean, beginning in 2001, to search for oil in an area of the Gulf that BP named the Macondo Prospect. BP hired Halliburton, an oil field services company, to help operate the rig and carry out the exploration.

What caused the Deepwater Horizon disaster?

The ultimate cause of the Deepwater Horizon disaster was a series of preventable missteps by engineers and workers designing and carrying out a drill plan in the weeks and hours preceding the event. The errors were later described in detail in a January 2011 report to the president created by the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling — a team of engineers, politicians and scientists tasked by President Barack Obama with investigating what caused the explosion and oil spill.

Crew members on Deepwater Horizon stood 4,992 feet (1,521 meters) above the sea bed and had to rely on data from underwater instruments to make decisions. The crew worked with large, heavy steel materials and flammable oil in a natural system that can be unpredictable. On top of that, the operation was managed by a slew of contractors and subcontractors, which meant the opportunity for miscommunication was great.

The Deepwater Horizon oil rig left its previous post in the Gulf of Mexico and arrived at the Macondo well in January 2010. By early April 2011, the rig's crew was assembled and prepared to complete the three tasks required before oil could be regularly pulled from the Macondo Prospect: First, they had to drill into the bedrock and fit a metal tube into the tunnel; next, they had to pour cement down the tube to seal it in place; and finally, they would carefully remove the Deepwater Horizon rig from the well and replace it with a smaller, less expensive production rig to extract oil regularly.

Related: Gallery: Exploring the Gulf of Mexico

Problems began during drilling. BP had to stop drilling into the seabed about 2,000 feet (610 m) higher than expected because the pressure was too high. Next, they had to line the hole with a casing — a concrete pipe that prevents the hole from caving in. A shorter casing would be easier to cement into place and was deemed safer by computer models, but the company ultimately decided to use a longer casing, which would be less prone to leaks. In order to hold the casing in place, concrete would be pumped into the space between the casing and the surrounding Earth. For this to work, the concrete must surround the casing evenly, otherwise it could be unstable and vulnerable to oil leaking in from the sides. To ensure an even, snug fit, engineers fit the casing with centralizers, which are metal tubes with strips of metal sticking out on each side. Computer models recommended that the casing be fit with 21 centralizers, but BP engineers chose to insert only six centralizers because of a supply shortage. This increased the risk that the cement would surround the casing unevenly.

With the casing and centralizers in place, it was time to pour the concrete. BP engineers made several choices during this step that further increased the risk of error. First, they cut pre-cementing tests short, which prevented technicians from checking for leaked oil at the bottom of the well; they pumped the cement slower than recommended, further increasing the risk that the cement would not fill the space around the casing evenly; and they limited the amount of cement used, which can cut the risk of lost oil but increases the risk of contamination by leaving more casing exposed. 

In the months leading up to the disaster, Halliburton had conducted several tests showing that the type of cement used wasn't stable, meaning that it might form pores that allow liquids and gasses to pass through it. Halliburton shared some of these test results with BP, but the company decided to proceed. 

The crew, made of Transocean and Haliburton employees, finished cementing just after midnight on April 20. At that point, BP and Halliburton representatives checked a valve to be sure that the pressure from the cement was not pushing too much liquid up out of it. After a couple of hours, the BP and Halliburton representatives emailed members of their respective teams to confirm that the cementing job had been a success.

The operation went awry during the final step, when the crew planned to follow a set of precarious procedures to detach Deepwater Horizon from the well to make room for a smaller rig, the report describes. During the process, crew members conducted positive and negative pressure tests to ensure no gas had leaked into the well. The negative pressure test should have alerted them that there was a leak, but they misinterpreted the results. At 8:00 p.m. local time, the crew concluded that everything was fine. But that was a mistake — gaseous hydrocarbons had leaked into the well. 

When gaseous hydrocarbons enter a well, they expand to fill up the space, shooting up the pipe in what is called a "kick," and this is what happened at Deepwater Horizon. The crew closed the blowout preventer — a seal that is designed to stop the expanding molecules from climbing up the well to the rig — but it was too late. 

The molecules climbed with increasing speed up the pipe until, at around 9:40 p.m., the force of the rising gases in the pipe pushed mud out onto the rig's floor. A few minutes later, the gaseous hydrocarbons enveloped large areas of the rig and met at least one ignition source (could have been heat or sparks from on-board equipment), which then erupted in an explosion that could be seen from miles away.

Eleven workers went missing during the explosion and were presumed dead three days later. The entire Deepwater Horizon rig capsized 36 hours after the explosion, on the morning of April 22, which is coincidentally Earth Day, a globally recognized day promoting environmental protection. 

As the rig sank, it damaged the pipe leading down to the well. Oil began spilling from the well and did not stop for 87 days.

How bad was the Deepwater Horizon disaster?

The Deepwater Horizon spill is considered the largest marine oil spill in history, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency . Court proceedings following the spill estimated that 3.19 million barrels of oil were poured into the Gulf of Mexico — that's about half the total amount of oil the U.S. was producing per day in the Gulf of Mexico at the time of the disaster. 

People in the United States watched the entire disaster unfold on the news. By June, a Pew Research Center survey showed that more people opposed the government allowing more offshore oil and gas drilling in U.S. waters than favored it — a sharp flip in public opinion that lasted only a couple of months.

Related: BP oil spill changed some minds on environmental issues.

In the weeks following the explosion and spill, environmental first responders and scientists tried several ways to reduce the harm to the environment, according to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) . They sprayed dispersants, liquids that help microbes break down oil; they set surface oil on fire to burn it up quickly, and surrounded oil with floating booms to prevent its spread; and they dispatched underwater chambers to contain leaking oil. Meanwhile, BP made three attempts to cap the well before it was finally closed on Sept. 19, 2010.

How did the Deepwater Horizon spill hurt wildlife?

Oil spill aftermath: Why baby dolphins may be rare in Gulf waters

Turtles' wayward travels may mean BP oil spill's impact was global

Coral miles away still show effects years after BP oil spill

Experts are still researching the extent of the damage, but all contend that it is extensive and long-lasting. After the spill, images of oil-slicked birds and turtles filled the news, according to a 2012 analysis in The Journal of American History . Oiled animals may die because they can't fly or swim well, which can exhaust them and make them vulnerable to predators, according to NOAA . NOAA researchers found that at least 14,000 sea turtles and hatchlings died because of the spill. Every species of crustacean in the Gulf was exposed to the oil, and many dolphins and whales suffered injuries, the researchers found. 

Oil can enter animals through their skin or orifices. This can be harmful and even deadly because hydrocarbons, in particular a type called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, are toxic to animals, according to Isabel Romero, an organic geochemist and research assistant at the University of South Florida in St. Petersburg, Florida. 

Romero has found these compounds in deepwater fish species that live in the Gulf. "People are used to looking for evidence [of the spill] on the surface of the ocean," Romero said, which seems logical, because oil floats. But much of the oil from the Deepwater Horizon spill mixed with microalgae and marine debris and then sunk to the seafloor, Romero explained, and chemicals from the oil can still be found in the sediments and animals at the bottom of the ocean.

How did the Deepwater Horizon spill hurt the economy?

The effects of the spill also rippled through the economy, particularly on the Gulf Coast. The U.S. Department of the Interior temporarily halted offshore deepwater drilling for about 5 months after the spill. The halt caused some wage and job losses, especially in Florida, according to a 2014 policy brief from a researcher at Harvard's Taubman Center for State and Local Government. However, jobs and wages increased in oil-intensive portions of Louisiana, which was the state closest to the spill.

Concerns over seafood safety caused fisheries to close in the months after the spill — at one point, 36% of federal waters in the Gulf were closed, according to the nonprofit ocean conservation organization Oceana . A 2019 study in the journal Deep Oil Spills found that the commercial and recreational fishing industry lost 25,000 jobs and $2.3 billion in industry output. 

Hotels, restaurants and fishing charters along the Gulf Coast lost business as tourists cancelled their trips, according to a 2014 study by the U.S. Department of the Interior . But tourism rebounded by 2011, possibly because of the marketing money BP gave the affected communities, The Times-Picayune reported .

What were the consequences for the BP oil spill?

The explosion and spill launched a tangled web of legal lawsuits against BP, TransOcean, Halliburton and Anadarko, an oil company BP partnered with on the well. In 2011, before all of the damage had been assessed, NOAA reached an agreement with BP that the company would pay $1 billion for early restoration projects, like cleaning up beaches, marshes and wetlands. Eventually, the majority of lawsuits against BP were settled in 2016 for $20.8 billion, which is the largest environmental damage settlement in U.S. history, according to NOAA .

The settlement covered a civil penalty, natural resource damages and economic claims, among other charges, according to the U.S. Department of Justice . Most of the money was allocated to projects for economic and ecological restoration. Five hundred million dollars were given to the National Academy of Sciences to create the Gulf Research Program , a 30-year program meant to support the Gulf environment and community and explore the safety of the offshore energy industry. 

Drilling for oil out at sea is an inherently risky business, said Richard Sears, the chief scientist for the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling, and member of one of the Gulf Research Program's committees studying how to decrease risk in offshore energy operations. 

But oil and gas production in the Gulf of Mexico doesn't appear to be going away anytime soon, despite the Deepwater Horizon disaster. In fact, oil production continues to climb, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement . 

"There are a lot of reasons to say things have probably improved since Deepwater Horizon," Sears told Live Science. For one thing, negative pressure tests are now required and must be reported to the U.S. Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE). This forces operators to think more carefully about the test results and it gives BSEE regulators the chance to ask questions and seek explanations if they aren't satisfied, Sears said. 

Nonetheless, he said, the systemic problems that led to the disaster persist today. "The rigs are operated by a contractor, and they're staffed by people from different companies doing all these specialist jobs. There may be nobody on the rig that really understands in great detail what each specialty is doing." 

Companies like BP that lease drilling sites from the Federal government deploy onboard representatives who talk to contractors and onshore specialists to make sure work is being carried out safely. But how effectively these representatives interact with contractors and specialists is determined by the company, and according to Sears, that's "not easy to regulate."

Additional resources

• Learn more about the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling at their archived website . 
• Find real-time location data for oil and gas platforms in the Gulf of Mexico and surrounding states on this interactive map from the U.S. Energy Information Administration . 
• Read more about the various aspects of the oil spill and its effects on the environment from the Smithsonian Institute . 

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Jen Monnier is a journalist in Seattle covering the environment and public health. Her work has appeared in Scientific American, CityLab, the Los Angeles Times, Hakai Magazine and Ensia. She earned her master's degree in science, health, and environmental reporting at New York University and a bachelor's degree in philosophy from Western Washington University.

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Case Study: The 2010 Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Its Environmental Developmental Impacts

• First Online: 25 September 2018

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• Nathaniel L. Scholz 3  

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Field and laboratory studies following the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill in Prince William Sound, Alaska, revealed new insights into the interactions between aquatic pollution and heart development in fish. The observation of cardiac-related defects in wild herring and salmon spawned near oiled shorelines led to more than two decades of research to characterize the developmental toxicity of crude oil and crude oil-derived compounds, especially polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). By the time of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon incident, this mechanistic understanding had advanced to the point where potential impacts to the developing heart were a key focus for natural resource injury assessment activities focused on mahi mahi, tunas, and other species that spawn in the northern Gulf of Mexico. For both types of crude oil, subclasses of PAHs containing three aromatic rings, as well as complex mixtures, were found to have disruptive effects on cardiomyocyte physiology, blocking key ion channels involved in excitation-contraction (E-C) coupling. Disruption of E-C coupling by crude oil leads to rhythm and contractility defects at the whole-heart level, which concomitantly leads to abnormal development if exposure occurs during cardiac morphogenesis. Studies spanning a range of oil exposure concentrations have now identified a spectrum of developmental defects, from acute embryo-larval heart failure and related secondary malformations to more subtle anatomical changes in outflow tract and ventricular structure, the latter corresponding to a permanent reduction of cardiorespiratory performance later in life. The state of the science now indicates that virtually all teleosts show a cardiotoxic response to crude oils. Moreover, nuanced differences in the nature of the cardiotoxicity across taxa are likely to be more influenced by species life history than by the geological origins of different oils. This is attributable to variations in the roles of specific macromolecular targets for PAHs in the hearts of fish with different swimming physiologies. Specifically, these targets include ion channels that control cardiomyocyte repolarization (e.g., rectifying potassium channels) and contraction (e.g., sarcoplasmic reticulum calcium channels). Overall, research on oil spills has shown how the early development and ecophysiology of fishes shape their vulnerability to a global environmental threat.

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A Novel Cardiotoxic Mechanism for a Pervasive Global Pollutant

Corresponding morphological and molecular indicators of crude oil toxicity to the developing hearts of mahi mahi

Very low embryonic crude oil exposures cause lasting cardiac defects in salmon and herring

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Incardona, J.P., Scholz, N.L. (2018). Case Study: The 2010 Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Its Environmental Developmental Impacts. In: Burggren, W., Dubansky, B. (eds) Development and Environment. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75935-7_10

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Case Studies

Deepwater horizon oil spill, location: gulf of mexico, usa.

On April 20, 2010, an explosion and subsequent oil spill from the Deepwater Horizon oil well drilling platform started the largest marine oil spill in US history, releasing about 180 million gallons of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico (GOM). The result was a massive oil spill and response involving federal, state, local governments, and private resources to combat the uncontrolled well release over a 3-month period. NRC was one of two national Oil Spill Removal Organizations (OSROs) under contract by the Responsible Party (RP) that responded to the event.

NRC launched a massive response effort for the RP and was primarily involved with the oil spill containment, recovery, dispersant application, decontamination operations, and on-site safety supervision for the event. As part of the response, NRC deployed six of its GOM response vessels and 2 oil spill recovery barges and chartered another 300 third party skimming vessels for the immense response effort.

The response effort for this historic oil spill brought many “firsts.” Many new skimming systems were tried and there was an unprecedented use of chemical dispersants on and below the ocean’s surface during the response. Since dispersants had not been used in large quantities in past US spills, their use raised much discussion within the scientific, public, and political arenas. While questions about the effectiveness in minimizing impacts from oil remain, few debate that the use of dispersants was successful in minimizing the shore side impacts of this spill event.

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10 Corporate Crisis Management Case Studies [2024]

In an era where corporate operations are under the microscope, and the potential for a crisis looms large, effective crisis management is not just preferable—it is imperative. From environmental disasters to cyber attacks, companies across various industries have faced significant challenges that tested their resilience and operational integrity. This article delves into 10 definitive case studies of corporate crisis management, offering insights into the strategies employed by major organizations when stakes were high. These real-world examples illustrate how companies like Volkswagen, Johnson & Johnson, and Sony Pictures navigated complex crises, providing valuable lessons on the importance of rapid response, transparent communication, and a commitment to rectifying errors. By examining these cases, we aim to highlight the critical components of successful crisis management and the long-term impact of these events on corporate reputation and consumer trust.

10 Corporate Crisis Management Case Studies

1. crisis management at johnson & johnson: the 1982 tylenol poisoning, company profile.

Johnson & Johnson, a renowned global healthcare company, has been a significant player in the pharmaceutical and consumer goods sector since its founding in 1886. With products ranging from baby care to medical devices, Johnson & Johnson has built a reputation for quality and trust, adhering to a philosophy emphasizing first responsibility to the consumers, doctors, and nurses who use their products.

In the autumn of 1982, a severe crisis hit Johnson & Johnson when cyanide-laced Extra-Strength Tylenol resulted in the deaths of seven individuals around Chicago. This sabotage endangered public health and threatened the reputation of one of its most trusted products, Tylenol, which accounted for a significant portion of the company’s profits.

The manner in which Johnson & Johnson managed this situation became a standard-setting example in corporate crisis resolution. The company immediately alerted consumers nationwide not to consume any of its Tylenol products, which was unprecedented. The company undertook a comprehensive recall of Tylenol, withdrawing around 31 million bottles from the market, which led to financial losses exceeding $100 million. Furthermore, the company cooperated fully with law enforcement agencies and the media to manage the situation transparently and keep the public informed. To restore consumer confidence, Johnson & Johnson developed tamper-resistant packaging, which included a triple-sealed package that would make it obvious if tampering had occurred.

Johnson & Johnson’s handling of the crisis resulted in a quick recovery for the Tylenol brand. The company’s swift and consumer-focused actions maintained and even bolstered consumer trust in the brand. Within a year of the crisis, Tylenol’s market share returned close to its pre-crisis level. Through its decisive actions, the company prevented further damage and established innovative safety benchmarks for the industry. The approach taken by Johnson & Johnson during the Tylenol crisis is frequently highlighted as a prime example of successful crisis handling.

Related: Women Leadership Case Studies

2. Crisis Management at Toyota: The 2010 Accelerator Pedal Crisis

Founded in 1937 in Japan, Toyota Motor Corporation is renowned globally for manufacturing durable and premium-quality vehicles. Toyota has built a strong brand reputation on innovation, sustainability, and reliability principles, with a global presence and a commitment to pioneering advancements in automotive technology.

In 2010, Toyota faced a severe crisis when reports of unintended acceleration in several vehicle models surfaced. This issue was linked to several accidents, including fatalities, which raised serious safety concerns. The crisis was exacerbated by allegations of delayed response from Toyota, which damaged the company’s reputation for safety and reliability.

Toyota’s response involved multiple steps to address the crisis effectively. The company recalled over 8 million vehicles worldwide, one of the largest in automotive history, to fix the faulty accelerator pedals and floor mats causing unintended acceleration. Toyota also halted the production and sale of eight models affected by the issue. To regain consumer trust, Toyota extended its warranties and set up a new rapid-response team to deal with safety complaints more quickly. It increased its focus on quality control and customer communication. The company’s president issued a public apology and testified before the U.S. Congress, committing to greater transparency and improved safety standards.

Toyota’s proactive measures and transparent communications gradually restored consumer trust. The company implemented stringent quality controls and revamped its safety technology, which led to introducing enhanced safety features in future models. Although Toyota initially faced significant financial losses, including fines from the U.S. government for handling the recalls, the company recovered over the following years. Toyota’s commitment to addressing the issues comprehensively helped it regain its position as a leader in the global automotive market, showcasing the importance of prompt and effective crisis management in maintaining brand integrity.

3. Crisis Management at Pepsi: The 1993 Syringe Hoax

PepsiCo, founded in 1898, is one of the world’s leading food and beverage companies. Known for its flagship product, Pepsi, the company offers various popular brands across more than 200 countries. PepsiCo is strongly committed to corporate responsibility and consumer satisfaction, which has helped it maintain a leading position in the competitive beverage industry.

In 1993, Pepsi faced a public relations crisis when claims surfaced about syringes allegedly found in cans of Diet Pepsi. The accusations quickly gained national attention, creating a potential consumer safety scare and threatening the brand’s image and trust.

PepsiCo responded swiftly and strategically to the crisis. The company immediately collaborated with the FDA to investigate the claims and quickly determined that the syringe reports were a hoax. PepsiCo used a transparent approach in its crisis management, utilizing the media to communicate directly with the public. The company produced videos showing the canning process to demonstrate that foreign objects couldn’t be inserted during production. These videos were shared with news outlets and played a crucial role in educating the public and dispelling the rumors.

PepsiCo’s effective use of media and quick response helped to quickly mitigate the impact of the hoax. Consumer confidence was restored, and the company’s transparent and proactive approach was praised in the media and by regulatory bodies. Sales, which had initially dipped sharply, rebounded within a few weeks. The 1993 syringe hoax case is often cited as a textbook example of effective crisis management, demonstrating how decisive action and clear communication can protect and even enhance a company’s reputation in the face of potential disaster.

Related: Pros and Cons of Career in Hedge Fund Management

4. Crisis Management at British Petroleum (BP): The Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill

British Petroleum, a leading global entity in the oil and gas sector, provides energy and retail services besides fuel for transportation. Founded in 1909, BP has operations in nearly 80 countries worldwide, with a strong commitment to delivering energy in a responsible manner, advancing low-carbon living, and improving every aspect of the energy system.

In April 2010, BP was embroiled in one of the most significant environmental and PR crises to date. An explosion on the BP-operated Deepwater Horizon oil rig led to a catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, marking one of the gravest environmental disasters. Eleven workers lost their lives, and millions of barrels of oil spilled into the Gulf over 87 days, causing extensive environmental damage to marine and wildlife habitats and tarnishing BP’s environmental and safety reputation.

BP’s response involved multiple strategies to manage the unfolding crisis. The company committed $20 billion to a fund for damages and initiated a massive cleanup operation involving thousands of people. BP also created a claims process for businesses and individuals affected by the spill. The company’s public relations tactics involved regular updates and leveraging social media to keep the public informed about their response measures. BP’s CEO then made several high-profile media appearances to manage public perception, though some were criticized for poor handling.

The cleanup efforts lasted several years, with BP spending over $65 billion in cleanup costs, fines, and settlements. Despite initial heavy criticism and financial losses, BP restored some public trust through its response efforts and commitment to restoring the Gulf. The company overhauled its safety procedures and corporate governance structures to prevent future disasters. The crisis significantly impacted BP’s market value and reputation, but the firm remains a major player in the energy sector, with ongoing efforts aimed at safer energy practices and sustainability.

5. Crisis Management at Samsung Electronics: The Galaxy Note 7 Battery Fires

Established in 1969, Samsung Electronics has emerged as a technological and consumer electronics leader globally. Samsung, a pioneer in innovation, is recognized as a major producer of electronic components, including digital media devices, semiconductors, and integrated systems.

In August 2016, Samsung faced a severe crisis when reports emerged of its newly released Galaxy Note 7 smartphones catching fire due to faulty batteries. The incidents posed serious safety risks to consumers and led to negative media coverage, severely impacting Samsung’s reputation for quality and safety in the highly competitive tech market.

Samsung immediately recalled over 2.5 million Galaxy Note 7 devices just weeks after the product’s launch. The company issued replacements, but some of the new devices also caught fire, leading to a second recall and the eventual discontinuation of the product. Samsung set up investigation teams to find the cause of the battery failures, enhancing their quality assurance processes. The company was transparent in its communications, regularly updating the public and stakeholders about the steps to resolve the issue.

The Galaxy Note 7 crisis cost Samsung an estimated $17 billion and significantly dented the brand’s image. However, Samsung’s comprehensive recall and commitment to addressing all consumer concerns helped salvage customer loyalty. The company’s rapid response and transparency were crucial in managing the crisis. Samsung enhanced its battery safety protocols and quality assurance processes to avert similar future problems. By addressing the technical flaws and revamping their safety protocols, Samsung managed to recover and maintain its position as a leading innovator in the smartphone market.

Related: Worst Corporate Negotiation Failures

6. Crisis Management at Chipotle: The E. coli Outbreaks

Chipotle Mexican Grill, founded in 1993 in Denver, Colorado, quickly became a popular chain known for its fresh, high-quality ingredients and commitment to sustainable and ethical food sourcing. Chipotle, known for its fast-casual dining concept, is committed to integrity in food sourcing, ensuring that its ingredients are both fresh and ethically sourced.

In late 2015, Chipotle faced a major crisis when multiple E. coli outbreaks linked to several restaurants surfaced across the United States. The outbreaks affected customers in over 14 states and led to a significant public health scare, severely tarnishing the brand’s reputation for food safety and quality. This crisis resulted in a sharp decline in customer visits and a significant drop in stock prices, threatening the company’s profitability and brand image.

Chipotle responded to the crisis by closing affected restaurants to conduct deep cleaning and full sanitation. The company cooperated with health officials to trace the source of the E. coli outbreak and overhauled its food safety procedures. Chipotle rolled out an extensive food safety initiative, modifying food handling and preparation techniques across its outlets. Chipotle launched a marketing campaign to regain customer trust and issued public apologies through various media platforms, reassuring the public about the safety measures being taken. The company also offered free food promotions to encourage customers to return.

Chipotle’s proactive measures and transparency in addressing the food safety issues helped slowly rebuild consumer trust. Although the company faced a steep initial decline in sales, it gradually recovered customer loyalty through its enhanced food safety protocols and ongoing customer engagement in its improvements. The crisis also prompted Chipotle to invest more heavily in food safety training and technology to ensure such an incident would not recur, thereby strengthening the brand’s commitment to quality and safety in the long term.

7. Crisis Management at United Airlines: The Passenger Removal Incident

United Airlines, established in 1926, is one of the world’s largest airlines, offering comprehensive flight schedules and serving millions of passengers annually. With a global network, United is known for its significant contributions to the aviation industry, including pioneering developments in customer service and safety.

In April 2017, a significant controversy arose when United Airlines forcibly ejected a passenger from an overbooked plane at Chicago O’Hare International Airport. This event, widely viewed and shared across social platforms, showed the passenger being forcibly moved along the airplane aisle, resulting in significant injuries. This event sparked international outrage, highlighting issues with United’s customer service and policies on overbooking.

United Airlines initially struggled with its response, with a series of statements seen as insincere or defensive. However, the company soon shifted its approach by issuing a full apology from the CEO, who took personal responsibility for the incident. United announced a thorough review of its policies, especially concerning handling overbooked flights and interactions with passengers. The airline also introduced changes, including increased compensation for bumped passengers, reduced overbooking, and more employee training on customer service. Additionally, United settled a lawsuit with the affected passenger, which helped mitigate some of the negative publicity.

The crisis immediately negatively impacted United’s reputation and stock value, but the comprehensive policy changes and public relations efforts helped the airline recover over time. United Airlines’ enhanced commitment to customer service and revised policies served to regain public trust and demonstrated the airline’s dedication to improving passenger experiences. The incident led to broader industry changes, prompting other airlines to modify their overbooking and customer service practices.

Related: Infamous CEO Frauds

8. Crisis Management at Volkswagen: The Diesel Emissions Scandal

Volkswagen, founded in 1937 and headquartered in Wolfsburg, Germany, is one of the world’s largest and most recognized automobile manufacturers. Volkswagen has been renowned for its iconic vehicles, such as the Beetle and the Golf, which symbolize the company’s commitment to quality, reliability, and innovative design. Volkswagen stands committed to sustainability and the advancement of clean energy solutions within the auto industry.

In 2015, Volkswagen faced a monumental crisis when it was discovered that the company had installed software in diesel engine vehicles to manipulate emissions tests in the United States. This software made it appear that the vehicles met environmental standards when, in fact, they emitted pollutants at levels up to 40 times higher than what is allowed in the U.S. The scandal, known as “Dieselgate,” affected nearly 11 million vehicles worldwide and severely damaged Volkswagen’s reputation for trustworthiness and environmental stewardship.

Volkswagen took several steps to manage the crisis. The company immediately issued a public apology and admitted wrongdoing. Matthias Müller was appointed as the new CEO to replace Martin Winterkorn, who resigned amid the scandal. Volkswagen committed to recalling millions of affected vehicles and retrofitting them to meet environmental standards properly. The company allocated over €6.5 billion to cover costs related to the scandal, including settlements and fines. Volkswagen also launched a comprehensive internal investigation to hold responsible parties accountable and revamped its compliance and regulatory procedures to prevent future violations.

Volkswagen’s initial reaction to the crisis was condemned for lacking transparency and being slow. However, the company’s subsequent actions helped to stabilize the situation. Financially, Volkswagen suffered substantial losses, with billions in fines and legal costs and a significant drop in stock prices. However, Volkswagen has regained some of its market position by committing to electric vehicle technology and discontinuing much of its diesel model offerings. The company’s strategic pivot to electric vehicles and its investments in clean energy technologies have begun to restore consumer and investor confidence, positioning Volkswagen as a leader in the electric mobility future.

9. Crisis Management at Equifax: The 2017 Data Breach

Equifax Inc., one of the premier credit reporting agencies globally, offers analytical and financial data services to individuals and businesses. Founded in 1899 and based in Atlanta, Georgia, Equifax operates or has investments in 24 countries and is a pivotal component of the global financial infrastructure, tasked with managing and protecting the personal data of millions of people.

In September 2017, Equifax disclosed a severe data breach that compromised sensitive data of roughly 147m people, including driver’s license and Social Security numbers. The breach was one of the largest in history to threaten personal identity security, severely damaging Equifax’s credibility and leading to widespread public outrage, especially due to delayed disclosure and inadequate security measures that failed to prevent the breach.

Equifax responded by waiving credit freeze fees for consumers who needed to protect their credit histories and offering free credit monitoring services. CEO Richard Smith retired, and Equifax appointed a new CEO to lead the crisis response and recovery efforts. The company overhauled its security infrastructure and increased technology and data protection investments. Equifax cooperated fully with various government investigations and committed to enhancing transparency and customer service to rebuild trust.

The data breach had far-reaching consequences for Equifax, including numerous lawsuits, Congressional hearings, and a significant decline in stock value. The company’s efforts to repair its reputation focused on rebuilding trust through better security practices and improved customer relations. Despite these efforts, recovery has been ongoing, with Equifax continuing to face challenges in fully restoring its image. The crisis highlighted the critical need for stringent cybersecurity measures and transparent corporate practices, especially for firms handling sensitive personal data.

Related: Business Analysis Case Studies

10. Crisis Management at Sony Pictures: The 2014 Cyber Attack

Sony Pictures Entertainment, a major division of Sony Corporation, is a globally prominent entertainment firm based in Culver City, California. Sony Pictures, a dominant force in the media sector, significantly influences global culture and entertainment with its extensive range of film and television productions.

In November 2014, Sony Pictures experienced a devastating cyber attack by a group calling themselves the Guardians of Peace. The breach resulted in the exposure of extensive confidential data such as personal employee details, executive communications, and multiple unreleased films. The cyber attackers demanded the cancellation of “The Interview,” a film satirizing the North Korean leader’s attempted assassination. This film allegedly motivated the attack, leading to international tensions and a significant crisis for Sony Pictures.

Sony initially pulled “The Interview” from its release schedule, citing threats to theaters and safety concerns. However, this decision faced widespread criticism for capitulating the hackers’ demands. Sony reversed its decision, releasing the film online and in select theaters. The company also worked closely with the FBI and cybersecurity experts to address the vulnerabilities and enhance its digital security infrastructure. Sony Pictures’ executives issued public apologies, particularly for the sensitive content revealed in emails, and took steps to bolster internal and external communications.

Sony Pictures’ handling of the cyber attack drew mixed reactions. While some criticized the initial decision to pull the release of “The Interview,” others praised the eventual release strategy as a stand for creative freedom. The incident led to a reevaluation of security strategies across the entertainment industry. Financially, the cyber attack cost Sony Pictures an estimated $100 million, not including the damage to its reputation. Over time, Sony Pictures managed to recover, implementing stronger cybersecurity measures and continuing to produce successful films and TV shows. The crisis underscored the importance of robust digital security practices and crisis management in the digital age.

The journey through these 10 corporate crisis management case studies reveals a common theme: the paramount importance of handling crises with strategic foresight and ethical consideration. These companies faced various repercussions, from financial losses to reputational damage, yet those who emerged stronger did so through comprehensive planning, clear communication, and genuine accountability. This collection not only showcases the trials faced by organizations during critical times but also highlights how crises can serve as catalysts for organizational recovery and enhancement. For businesses worldwide, these narratives offer more than cautionary tales; they provide a blueprint for developing robust mechanisms to weather storms and safeguard both stakeholders’ interests and corporate legacies.

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Developing a comprehensive oil spill detection model for marine environments.

1. Introduction

• Creation of a custom oil spill dataset.
• A deep YOLO-v8-based SOTA oil spill detection model is constructed.
• Optimization of oil spill detection with integration of K-means and Truncated Linear Stretching methods.

2. Related Works

2.1. color attributes for object detection, 2.2. you only look once (yolo), 3. proposed method, 3.1. k-means clustering for color segmentation, 3.2. truncated linear stretching (tls), 3.3. oil spill detection with yolo-v8, 3.4. data preparation, 4. experimental results, evaluation metrics, 5. discussion, 6. conclusions, author contributions, data availability statement, conflicts of interest.

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Akhmedov, F.; Nasimov, R.; Abdusalomov, A. Developing a Comprehensive Oil Spill Detection Model for Marine Environments. Remote Sens. 2024 , 16 , 3080. https://doi.org/10.3390/rs16163080

Akhmedov F, Nasimov R, Abdusalomov A. Developing a Comprehensive Oil Spill Detection Model for Marine Environments. Remote Sensing . 2024; 16(16):3080. https://doi.org/10.3390/rs16163080

Akhmedov, Farkhod, Rashid Nasimov, and Akmalbek Abdusalomov. 2024. "Developing a Comprehensive Oil Spill Detection Model for Marine Environments" Remote Sensing 16, no. 16: 3080. https://doi.org/10.3390/rs16163080

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