Run To Failure: BP and the Making of the Deepwater Horizon Disaster

  • Abrahm Lustgarten
W. W. Norton: 2012. 400 pp. $27.95, £19.99 9780393081626 | ISBN: 978-0-3930-8162-6

Many people have wondered how the Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2010 happened, given the technological know-how and industry back-up systems in place to prevent such a catastrophe. In Run To Failure, journalist Abrahm Lustgarten explains how, in his view, the blowout was not only predictable, but inevitable. The book is one of the few that focus on the roots of the disaster — and is refreshingly different from the many looking mainly at the immediate tragedy and its aftermath.

Run to Failure reads like a thriller, complete with whistle-blowers and double agents. On the basis of meticulous investigative reporting during and after the spill, analysis of BP documents and e-mails, and interviews with current and former industry insiders, Lustgarten paints a picture of neglect, hollow proclamations about safety and environmental stewardship, and draconian cost-trimming going back two decades. That history, he believes, helped to pave the way to the disaster.

Oil on the waters of the Gulf of Mexico could alter gene expression in fish and other marine organisms for years to come. Credit: D. BELTRA/GREENPEACE/NATUREPL.COM

The Gulf of Mexico has long been seen as the frontier of oil exploration. In the mid-1990s, most of the oil extracted in the region came from shallow waters. But deep-water wells are much more bountiful. To push into the depths, BP invested tens of billions of dollars in the Gulf, says Lustgarten, and sent in its most technologically advanced drilling rigs and resources. However, to subsidize its investment, Lustgarten alleges, BP made cuts elsewhere, including at its ageing US refineries and on the Alaska North Slope — which had been the source of much of BP's oil production since the 1970s, but where reserves were dwindling.

The oil industry as a whole has a patchy record on safety and the environment, and Lustgarten reveals holes in BP's. He points to internal and government reports that he says corroborate his claims that BP's cuts led to spills, injuries and deaths. Before Deepwater Horizon, the company twice faced potential debarment from US government contracts, and was convicted of three federal crimes. An analysis by ProPublica, the investigative-journalism newsroom in New York for which Lustgarten reports, revealed that between 1990 and 2009, the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration recorded 518 violations at BP refineries — several times the numbers for comparable companies.

Lustgarten argues that a lax approach to safety permeated BP's actions in the Gulf. The company's spill-preparedness plan seemed to downplay the difficulties of drilling in deep waters, despite fears in the industry that the oil field's unusual geology and extreme pressures and temperatures posed exceptional challenges. In 2000, the US Minerals Management Service (renamed the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement (BOEMRE) after the spill), prepared an environmental impact study for Shell, which was also issued as an industry standard. The report warned that a blown-out well in the deep waters of the Gulf might be uncontrollable, and could take months to contain. And BP's senior vice-president for drilling operations in the Gulf resigned from the company months before the spill because he did not believe that BP was committed to safety, according to papers filed in a lawsuit last year.

A BOEMRE report found that Transocean (which owned the drilling rig) and Halliburton (which injected the well's cement casing) were partly culpable for the events that led to the disaster. Ultimately, however, the agency found that BP overrode standard industry practices and made judgement calls that led unintentionally to the blowout.

Lustgarten delves into the Gulf spill itself in only the last two chapters of his book, and handles subsequent events in a brief postscript. That has drawbacks as well as strengths. The environmental costs of the spill and the ongoing scientific inquiries are not explored. The jury is still out on the extent of the environmental damage; for example, it is unclear how marine organisms exposed to oil and dispersants during vulnerable embryonic and larval stages will be affected. Even trace levels of crude oil can alter gene expression in fish, and the widespread, unprecedented use of dispersants below the sea surface may have increased the oil's toxicity to marine organisms. Some scientists say that the full effects will not be understood for years.

Lustgarten also reflects little on the ramifications for public perception of the oil industry. But he does ask why the US government allowed BP to lead the push into deep-water oil exploration. He suggests that the US citizenry's voracious appetite for energy and complacent assumptions about government oversight make it partially culpable.

He ends by noting that little has changed since the disaster. BP's Alaska pipelines are still deteriorating, he suggests. And in the Gulf, drilling resumed in October 2010, after a five-month moratorium on new leases in deep water. US President Barack Obama pledged in his State of the Union address in January to open more than 75% of offshore oil and gas resources to exploration, and environmentalists say that the industry is not making enough progress on safety to merit public trust. It seems that history may well be destined to repeat itself.