After the 2010 Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil spill resulted in 11 men losing their lives, thousands more suffering economic losses and considerable harm to the U.S. Gulf Coast environment, BP Global pledged to help the Gulf recover and to become a safer company. It’s a pledge that’s been realized but hasn’t come cheap.
“In the five years since the spill, we’ve spent nearly $14 billion compensating those harmed by the spill and have paid more than 600,000 claims,” said BP CEO Robert Dudley. “We also spent another $14 billion on response and cleanup efforts that involved more than 100,000 people who collectively worked more than 70 million hours.”
Another $1 billion has been committed to early restoration projects throughout the Gulf Coast region, bringing BP’s total compensation for the accident, considered the largest accidental marine oil spill in the history of the petroleum industry, to $44 billion.
Addressing delegates at IHS CERAWeek 2015, held recently in Houston, Dudley said he believes “the results are encouraging,” adding he also believes no other company finding itself in similar dire circumstances has ever done more — or faster — to respond to an industrial accident of Deepwater Horizon’s magnitude.
According to Dudley, data collected by Natural Resource Damage Assessment indicates while the spill did have an impact on many species and habitats, most of the impact was of relatively short duration, primarily limited in 2010 to areas near the wellhead and along the oiled beaches and marshes.
While stressing damage assessment is still ongoing, Dudley credits both “natural processes” and the extensive response and cleanup effort as responsible for the quicker-than-expected recovery.
“The Gulf of Mexico has proven to be resilient,” he said. “I’m proud we kept our commitment to the Gulf, and I believe we’ve kept our commitment to become a safer company.”
Additional layers of protection
According to Dudley, tougher standards, enhanced training, sharper oversight and new technology have created “additional layers of protection” not only making BP a safer company but also reducing the risk of another Deepwater-level incident occurring in the future.
“BP has fundamentally transformed our upstream organization into a global, functional-based business to promote uniformity around the world,” Dudley said, elaborating on those additional layers of protection. “Now we have one team in charge of how wells are drilled for BP everywhere from the Gulf of Mexico to the Caspian Sea.”
Additionally, more safety experts have been recruited from high hazard industries, augmenting BP’s team with different perspectives on how to operate more safely.
“We’ve strengthened our training pro-grams with an emphasis on making it much more practical. Not theoretical, practical,” Dudley continued. “In Houston, we bring employees and contractors together to train in drilling simulator rooms before they go offshore. They learn how to respond to difficult situations that might occur in the real world.”
Citing an example of better oversight, Dudley explained after BP teams are deployed to the Gulf, they’re watched on a ’round-the-clock basis from a monitoring center in Houston where a team of experts observe rig operations from live video and data feeds.
“Together they can help track a well’s behavior in real time and address any problems that might arise,” he said.
Regardless of increased investments and improvements in technology, the fact remains safety is the responsibility of individuals.
“It was true before the spill, and it is even more so today,” Dudley said. “Each and every one of our employees in the industry and contractors feels not just the right but also the responsibility to stop any job if it seems unsafe.”
Overall, BP’s response to the accident in the Gulf has profoundly changed the company in its full range of business operations, Dudley said.
“I believe we’ve become a safer, stronger and better-performing company,” he concluded. “We’ve done all of this while keeping our commitments to the United States and to the Gulf.”
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