Welcome back to the Deep Dive. You know, I was
looking at the calendar just before we started
rolling, and it is. It's just hard to believe
how much time has passed since April of 2010.
It really is. For a lot of us, I think that spring
and summer is just a blur of those orange news
chyrons and that, you know, that grainy underwater
video feed on a loop. The spill cam. Yeah, it
was mesmerizing and horrifying all at once. Exactly.
But today. We're not just, you know, reminiscing.
We're going back to the Macondo Prospect. It's
a place that really, before April 20th, 2010,
was just a set of coordinates on a map. Mississippi
Canyon Block 252, just another block in the Gulf.
And I think to really understand what happened,
we almost have to strip away that disaster movie
montage we all have in our heads and look at
the machine itself. The Deepwater Horizon. This
wasn't just some bo -bobbing in the water. This
was a semi -submersible drilling rig. It was
a monster. It was a floating city, essentially.
I mean, a massive dynamically positioned structure
designed for the ultra deep water environment.
OK, so when you say dynamically positioned, break
that down. You mean it doesn't use anchors, right?
Yeah. It's actively fighting the ocean to stay
still. That's it. Exactly. It has these enormous
thrusters, all computer controlled, that are
constantly making micro adjustments against the
wind, the waves, the current. all to keep the
rig perfectly still over a single point on the
seafloor, thousands of feet below. That's an
incredible feat of engineering in itself. It's
unbelievable. And this rig, it was capable of
operating in water up to 10 ,000 feet deep. On
that day, it was drilling, well, 18 ,360 feet
into the Earth's crust. It was really the pinnacle
of offshore technology. And that's... That is
what makes this story so unsettling, right? We're
not talking about some rusty bucket from the
1970s. This was supposed to be the best of the
best. Absolutely. And yet, on April 20th, 41
miles off the Louisiana coast, it became the
site of the largest marine oil spill in the history
of the petroleum industry. It just completely
eclipsed everything that came before it. To give
you some sense of scale, the... Previous record
holder in the Gulf, that was the Oxtockeye spill
back in 79. The Deepwater Horizon event, the
final estimates put it at anywhere from 8 to
31 percent larger than even that massive spill.
So our mission today is pretty specific. We've
all seen the photos, you know, the oil slick
pelicans. We know it was bad, but we want to
look at the how. How? Does a billion -dollar
rig like this fail so catastrophically? What
were the mechanics behind it? Yes, the engineering
mechanics of the explosion. And then in the aftermath,
we need to unpack the experimental and, frankly,
really controversial methods they used to try
and stop it. Because when you look at the source
material, it truly feels like they were just...
making it up as they went along. In many ways,
they were. They had to. They were rewriting the
rulebook for deep sea salvage and disaster response
in real time, all under the glare of the entire
world's media. But before we even get to the
response, we have to start with the catalyst.
Yeah. The blowout itself. Right. Because rigs
don't just explode for no reason. There's a sequence
of events here. And tragically, like we have
to acknowledge, it starts with the human cost.
It does. We can't. We can't just gloss over that.
On the night of the explosion, there were 126
people on board that rig. Wow. When that gas
ignited, 11 workers were killed. They were never
found. Another 17 were critically injured. So
you have 94 people who were rescued. But the
trauma of that night, I mean, can you imagine
jumping from a burning rig into a pitch black
ocean that's also covered in burning oil? It's
imaginable. Just a horrific choice to have to
make. And the rig itself, it didn't sink right
away. It fought for two days. It burned for almost
two full days before it finally succumbed and
sang on April 22nd. And that that is the moment
the narrative really shifted. It went from a
search and rescue mission to a full blown ecological
catastrophe. So let's get into the physics of
it. Walk us through the blowout. What is actually
happening, you know, miles under the surface
in the dark? OK, so it's really a battle of pressures
deep down in that oil reservoir. You have oil
and natural gas that are trapped under immense
geological pressure, just enormous. The whole
drilling. operation is designed to manage that
pressure. They pump a heavy fluid basically engineered
mud down the drill pipe and the weight of that
mud is supposed to act as a counterweight. It
pushes down to keep the oil and gas from coming
up. It's like it's like putting a really heavy
lid on a boiling pot. That's a perfect analogy
precisely. But on April 20th that balance was
lost. A surge of high -pressure methane gas escaped
the reservoir. It found a pathway, probably through
faulty cement work we'll get into later, and
it shot up the wellbore. And here's the critical
physics lesson. As that gas bubble rises, the
pressure of the ocean above it decreases. And
thanks to Boyle's law, as pressure goes down,
volume goes way, way up. So this bubble of methane
is getting bigger and bigger and faster and faster
the higher it gets. Exponentially bigger. It
expanded into the marine riser. That's the main
pipe connecting the seabed to the rig. It shot
up to the surface like a cannonball. It engulfed
the entire rig floor in flammable gas, found
an ignition source, most likely the engine room,
and it detonated. Just a catastrophe. instantaneous
explosion. A series of them, really. Okay, so
the rig is gone. It's sunk. We're now looking
at April 22nd. There's just an empty patch of
ocean where this massive rig used to be. And
this. This is where the story gets incredibly
murky. Did they know right away that the well
was just wide open at the bottom of the sea?
Publicly, no. Initially, the hope, or maybe the
corporate spin, was that the well had sealed
itself during the collapse or that the amount
leaking was just residual oil from the riser
pipe. Wishful thinking. Very wishful thinking.
The leak wasn't formally discovered and announced
until the afternoon of April 22nd, once they
got ROVs down there and could see it. But once
they saw that slick spreading on the fists, the
numbers game began. And this is truly one of
the most contentious parts of this whole deep
dive. The flow rate controversy. I remember this
so vividly. You'd turn on the news and BP would
say one number. And then, you know, some scientists
from a university would come on and say something
10 times higher. It was confusing. It was a masterclass
in obfuscation, is what it was. BP's initial
public estimate for the flow rate was 1 ,000
to 5 ,000 barrels per day. 5 ,000 barrels. OK,
that sounds like a lot. It is a lot. But the
government assembled its own team. the Flow Rate
Technical Group, the FRTG. They weren't relying
on BP's data. They were looking at satellite
imagery, the physics of the plume from the video,
the surface area of the slick. The actual evidence.
The independent evidence. Their initial estimate,
62 ,000 barrels per day. Wait, so... 5 ,000 versus
62 ,000. That's not a margin of error. That's
a completely different reality. It's a completely
different disaster. And it matters so much because
of the logistics of the response. I mean, if
you tell the Coast Guard you're fighting a 5
,000 barrel a day fire, they bring a garden hose.
Right. If you tell them it's 62 ,000 barrels
a day, they bring the entire fire department
from three states. The scale of the response
is dictated by that number. So the big question
is, did BP know? Did they have their own data?
that suggested the higher number while publicly
saying the lower one. And that's the smoking
gun. Years later, in 2013, during the litigation,
internal emails finally came to light. And they
showed that BP's own engineers had internal models
and calculations that matched the government's
higher estimates almost perfectly. They were
sharing these worst -case scenarios with their
supervisors, but publicly. The company line held
at 5 ,000 for a very, very long time. That is
just maddening to hear. So in the end, after
all the analysis, how much oil are we actually
talking about? What was the final tally? The
final, court -agreed -upon number is approximately
4 .9 million barrels of oil. I have a hard time
visualizing barrels. Can you put that in other
terms? Sure. Think of it as 210 million U .S.
gallons. Or, maybe better, think about the geography.
The slick, at its largest extent, covered 70
,000 square miles of ocean. 70 ,000. That is
roughly the size of the entire state of Oklahoma.
Just imagine the whole state of Oklahoma paved
in a layer of crude oil. And it wasn't static.
That slick was moving. It was a tide of oil.
It was. It hit the marshes of Louisiana first,
then Mississippi, Alabama, the white sand beaches
of Florida. Eventually, weathered tar balls were
washing up as far west as Texas. It became a
truly transnational disaster. So we have this
open wound in the planet, 5 ,000 feet down. It's
bleeding oil. And now we enter the phase that,
for me, was the most fascinating part of the
research, the man versus pressure phase. This
was 87 straight days of just... engineering trial
and error on live television. Trial and error
is a very polite way to put it. It was desperation.
You have to remember the environment they were
working in. It's 5 ,000 feet down. The pressure
is over 2 ,200 PSI. It is pitch black. The water
temperature is near freezing. You can't send
a human diver down there. They would be crushed
into jelly instantly. So this is a robot war.
It's exclusively a robot war. It was all done
via ROVs, remotely operated vehicles, little
underwater drones with cameras and manipulator
arms. And I think people assume, oh, it's a robot.
It's precise. Yeah. But piloting an ROV at that
depth, trying to turn a valve with a hydraulic
arm while you're fighting deep sea currents and
looking through a muddy camera feed from a boat
that's pitching and rolling on the surface. It's
like trying to thread a needle while you're wearing
boxing gloves in the dark during an earthquake.
It is. unbelievably difficult okay so attempt
number one what was plan a plan a was to use
the thing that was supposed to have prevented
the accident in the first place the blowout preventer
The BOP. Right, the big stack of valves on the
seafloor. It's this 50 -foot -tall, 450 -ton
stack of valves. The ROVs went down and tried
to manually trigger the blind shear rams. These
are basically a set of giant hydraulic scissors
designed to slice through the drill pipe and
crimp it shut, sealing the well. But the pipe
was already bent from the explosion, wasn't it?
That was the problem. The force of the explosion
and the sinking of the rig had bent and buckled
the pipe inside the BOP. couldn't get a clean
cut. On top of that, investigations later found
there was a hydraulic leak in the system and
a dead battery in one of the control pods. The
ROVs pushed and pulled and tried hot stabbing
it with hydraulic fluid, but the BOP was a brick.
It wasn't going to close. So plan A is a total
bust. On to plan B, the containment dome. Now
this one sounded like a pretty good idea on paper.
It's a classic engineering solution, right? If
you have a leak, you put a bucket over it. They
built this massive 125 -ton steel and concrete
coffer dam. The plan was to lower it over the
main leak, collect the oil, and then funnel it
up a pipe to a ship on the surface. Simple. But
they forgot about the... The chemistry of the
deep ocean. They completely underestimated the
problem of methane hydrates. This is a fascinating
and in this case destructive chemical reaction.
OK. When you have high pressure methane gas mixing
with very cold water under immense pressure,
it doesn't just bubble. It crystallizes. It forms
a kind of slushy, flammable ice. It turns into
ice, like solid. Basically, yes. Flammable ice
is what the Roughnecks call it. And these hydrate
crystals formed almost instantly inside the dome
as soon as it was lowered over the leak. They
looked like champagne bubbles freezing in midair,
and they clogged the opening at the top of the
dome. So the funnel just gets completely plugged
with this methane ice. Even worse, the crystals
are actually buoyant. They have a lower density
than water. So they made the whole 125 -ton dome
start to get light. It started to lift off the
seafloor and became unstable. They had to scrap
the entire project. and lift it back up. It was
this massive televised failure caused by the
fundamental laws of thermodynamics. I can't imagine
the mood in the control room watching this giant
dome just float away because of ice. They have
to move on. Plan C, top kill. Top kill. Now,
this is a brute force attack. The theory is if
the well is pushing up with a certain amount
of pressure, we'll just push down harder from
the top. Right. They hooked up these massive
pumps on ships at the surface and tried to fire
thousands of barrels of heavy drilling mud directly
into the blowout preventer, hoping to overcome
the pressure of the oil and choke it off. It
sounds like trying to shove the genie back into
the bottle. And the genie was just too strong.
They pumped and pumped for three days straight.
But the flow rate, remember that. 62 ,000 barrels
a day number they didn't want to admit to was
just too high. The well spit the mud right back
out. It wouldn't take it. And then we get to
my personal favorite, the junk shot. I honestly
thought this was a joke when I first read about
it years ago. It sounds like a joke, doesn't
it? But the junk shot is exactly what it sounds
like. They gathered up literal debris pieces
of shredded tire, knotted rope. Golf balls. Golf
balls. I'm stuck on the golf balls. Who's the
person who decides, you know what we need? Golf
balls. Yeah. It's about density and shape and
creating what they call a bridging effect. The
idea is you pump this solid material into the
BOP to clog up all the nooks and crannies, creating
enough friction and blockage for the mud from
the top kill to finally take hold and plug the
thing up. It just feels so incredibly low tech
for such a high tech industry. Hey, throw some
tires in there. It really speaks to the absolute
lack of contingency planning for a deep water
blowout. They had all this incredible technology
to drill the hole, but almost no proven technology
to fix it if it broke this badly. And as you
can probably guess, the junk shot also failed.
The pressure from the well just blew it all right
back out. So we're months into this now. The
oil is still flowing. What finally worked? What
was the thing that stopped it? Well, they had
some partial wins along the way. They managed
to get a smaller cap, a top hat cap on there
that was able to siphon some of the oil to the
surface. But the final kill, the actual end of
the disaster, required two things. The static
kill from the top and the relief wells from the
side. Explain the relief wells. This always seemed
like the sniper shot of drilling to me. It really
is. While all this chaos was happening with the
domes and the jump shots, two other drilling
rigs, the Development Driller III and the GSF
Development Driller II, were quietly, methodically
drilling brand new holes nearby. Okay. Their
goal was to drill down 18 ,000 feet through solid
rock and then steer the drill bit to intersect
the original wellbore at the very bottom, a pipe
that's only about seven inches wide. That's like
trying to hit a dinner plate from three and a
half miles away through rock. It is an incredible
feat of precision drilling. And they did it.
Once they intercepted the well from the side,
they could pump heavy mud and then cement in
from the bottom, which is a much more effective
way to seal it. On September 19, 2010, a full
five months after the explosion, the well was
officially declared effectively dead. Five months.
That is just an eternity when you are dumping
that amount of toxic sludge into an ecosystem
every single day. And that brings us to the surface.
While the engineers are playing robot wars underwater,
there is this massive mobilization happening
on the waves. The cleanup. This was the other
half of the battle. And it really followed a
three -pronged strategy. Containment removal
and dispersal. Let's talk about containment first.
The booms. We all saw miles and miles of these
orange and yellow sausages floating in the water.
4 .2 million feet of boom was deployed. It looks
incredibly impressive on camera. It sends a message
to the public, look, we're doing something. We
are fencing it in. But scientifically, in the
open ocean, it was largely theater. Why do you
say that? Why didn't it work? Because the ocean
moves. Booms are pretty effective in a calm harbor
or a quiet lake. But out in the open gulf...
With three foot waves, with wind, with strong
currents, the oil just sloshes right over the
top or it gets pushed down and goes right underneath
it. I vividly remember seeing news footage of
oil washing up on the beach with the boom tangled
up right there in it. Exactly. It became part
of the debris field. It was a visual barrier,
not a truly effective physical one in most conditions.
And the desperation to contain it led to some
pretty weird moments. You remember the hair?
The Matter of Trust campaign? Yes. People were
sending in their hair clippings. Yeah, and dog
fur. Yes. Salons all across the country were
sweeping up hair from their floors and mailing
it to the Gulf. The idea, which actually dates
back to the Exxon Valdez bill, is that hair absorbs
oil very well. The oils stick to the cuticles.
So people were stuffing pantyhose with dog fur
and human hair to make these little homemade
absorbent booms. Did it work at all? I mean,
on a micro scale, sure, a ball of hair will soak
up motor oil in your driveway. But on the scale
of 4 .9... million barrels. It was. It was a
symbolic gesture, but it really showed how desperate
and helpless the public felt and how much they
wanted to do something. But while the public
was knitting these hair booms, BP was deploying
the big guns. The chemical dispersants. Corrects
it. And this is, without a doubt, the most controversial
and potentially damaging legacy of the entire
cleanup effort. BP used 1 .84 million gallons
of a dispersant called Corexit. That volume alone
is staggering. 1 .84 million gallons of an industrial
chemical. It is. And crucially, they used it
in a way that had never been done before on this
scale. Typically, you spray dispersant on the
surface slick. You have these big C -130 planes
that fly over and basically crop dots the oil.
The chemical breaks the surface tension. shatters
into tiny droplets and then it sinks below the
surface. Out of sight, out of mind. Pretty much,
that's the idea. But for Deepwater Horizon, they
got special permission from the EPA to inject
the dispersant subsea. At the source. Directly
at the source. They pumped 771 ,000 gallons of
core exit directly into the gushing wellhead
at the bottom of the ocean. Okay, what was the
logic there? Why do it down there? The logic
was to emulsify the oil before it ever had a
chance to reach the surface. They wanted to prevent
those massive miles -wide slicks from ever forming
in the first place. The hope was that by breaking
it into microscopic droplets at the source, naturally
occurring bacteria would be able to eat it much
faster. You're adding a known toxic... chemical
directly to a known toxic substance. And that
is the heart of the controversy, because Corexit
acts as a delivery system for the oil's most
toxic components. It makes it bioavailable. It
makes it easier for the oil to enter the cells
of living organisms. A 2012 study from Georgia
Tech found that the mixture of oil and Corexit
was up to 52 times more toxic to the Gulf's ecosystems
than the oil by itself. 52 times more toxic.
Yes. And a specific formulation they used, Corexit
9527A, contains a chemical called 2 -betoxyethanol.
This is a solvent that's been linked to hemolysis,
the rupturing of red blood cells in both animals
and humans. The EPA was so concerned about this,
they actually ordered BP to stop using it and
find a less toxic alternative. And what did BP
say to that? They essentially said no. They came
back and claimed that no other product was as
effective or available in the massive quantities
they needed. They argued that the known environmental
damage of thick oil hitting the fragile coastal
marshes was a greater evil than the unknown chemical
damage of the dispersant in the deep ocean. It
was. It was a choice between two poisons. And
this subsea injection, it created a phenomenon
we really hadn't seen before, right? These invisible
plumes. This is fascinating and absolutely terrifying
because so much of the oil was dispersed at depth.
A huge percentage of it never floated to the
surface. It just hung there, suspended in the
water column. Scientists in submersibles found
these massive underwater prunes of dissolved
oil. One of them was measured at 22 miles long.
A ghost river of oil just moving silently through
the deep ocean. That's exactly what it was. And
because it wasn't on the surface, you couldn't
skim it. You couldn't burn it. You couldn't even
really track it effectively. It was just soaking
the entire deep sea ecosystem in a toxic chemical
bath. We mentioned burning. They did manage to
burn some of it, the stuff on the surface. They
did. They conducted 411 controlled in situ burns.
They would corral the thickest parts of the slick
with special fireproof booms and then light it
on fire. It's dramatic, but it was actually one
of the more effective methods. It removed an
estimated 265 ,000 barrels. Okay. And what about
skimming? The boats that, you know, suck the
oil off the surface? Skimming is incredibly inefficient
in the open ocean. It makes for great news footage.
You see the boats working. But they only recovered
about 3 % of the total spilled oil through skimming
operations. Only 3%. So the vast majority of
that 4 .9 million barrels either evaporated,
was dispersed into the water column, burned,
or it's still down there. Correct. And that leads
us directly into the environmental fallout because
you simply cannot dump that volume of toxic material
into a semi -enclosed body of water like the
Gulf of Mexico without profound and lasting consequences.
Let's dig into the biology of that because I
think there's a tendency for people to assume,
OK, a few birds died, some dolphins, but nature
is resilient. It heals. The data from the years
since suggests something much more systemic happened.
Oh, absolutely. The scope is just massive. There
are over 8 ,300 distinct species living in the
spill area. But some of the most alarming research
to come out has to do with the heart. Cardiotoxicity.
So the oil can actually cause heart attacks in
fish. Essentially, yes. A landmark 2014 study
by NOAA and Stanford focused on bluefin tuna
and amberjack. They found that the polycyclic
aromatic hydrocarbons, the PAHs in crude oil,
directly disrupt the electrical signaling pathway
in heart cells. It literally short circuits the
heart, causing irregular heartbeats and in high
enough concentrations, cardiac arrest. And this
isn't just about fishes. I mean, a vertebrate
heart is a vertebrate heart. No, the mechanism
is highly conserved across vertebrates. If it
stops a tuna heart, it's very bad for a dolphin
heart or a sea turtle heart. And speaking of
dolphins, the data there is just heartbreaking.
I read about the unusual mortality event. That's
the official term from NOAA, and it's ongoing.
In the years immediately following the spill,
infant dolphins in the spill zone were dying
at six times the normal rate. Six times, that's...
That's a population collapse. It's a generational
wipeout in some pods. And when they perform necropsies
on the dead calves, they found 88 % of them had
abnormal or severely underdeveloped lungs. They
were likely breathing in the aerosolized oil
fumes at the surface, swimming through the dispersant.
It just decimated a generation of cetaceans in
the northern Gulf. And it wasn't just the large
mammals. The reports from fishermen about their
catches were gruesome. Yeah. Eyeless shrimp,
crabs without claws, fish covered in lesions
and open sores. In some heavily oiled areas,
they were finding up to 50 % of the red snapper
catch had these lesions. These are all signs
of chronic, long -term exposure to toxins. It's
proof that the oil didn't just wash away, it
got into the food web. There's a phrase in our
notes that really stuck with me. It sounds like
something from a sci -fi horror movie, The Dirty
Blizzard. It's a very descriptive term for a
very real phenomenon. We talked about how the
dispersant broke the oil into tiny droplets.
Well, out in the water column, those sticky oil
droplets collided with other suspended particles,
sand, mud, dead plankton. And they all just stick
together. They clump up into what scientists
call marine snow aggregates. And as these clumps
get heavier and heavier, they fall. For weeks
and months after the spill, it literally snowed
a mixture of oil and mud onto the ocean floor.
So the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico is just carpeted
in this toxic sludge. In an area of over 1 ,200
square miles around the wellhead, yes, up to
30 % of the total spilled oil is estimated to
now be mixed into the deep ocean sediments. And
that's a huge problem because the deep ocean
is slow, it's cold, it's dark. Things don't degrade
quickly down there. That oil could be biologically
active in the food chain for generations. We
know for a fact it killed entire deep sea coral
communities that were hundreds of years old.
They were just smothered by this blizzard. It
effectively suffocated the sea. floor. Now we've
talked about the fish and the coral, but humans
are a part of this ecosystem too, especially
the cleanup workers. The human health crisis
is the chapter of the story that I think gets
overlooked the most. You had... Tens of thousands
of people out there, many of them fishermen who
had just lost their livelihoods, now hired by
BP to clean up the mess that took their jobs.
They were out on the boat skimming, laying, boom.
Breathing in the fumes 2040. Breathing the volatile
organic compounds, the benzene, the toluene,
and remember the dispersant. That was being sprayed
from planes overhead. It was literally misting
down on them all day. And the situation with
protective gear. was controversial. Controversial
is putting it very, very mildly. There were widespread
reports later confirmed by whistleblowers and
OSHA investigations that BP and its contractors
actively discouraged or in some cases outright
prohibited workers from wearing respirators.
Why? I mean, why on earth would you stop someone
from protecting their own lungs? Two words. bad
optics. They did not want the nightly news to
show an army of thousands of workers in hazmat
suits and gas masks. It makes the situation look
toxic. It makes it look dangerous to the public
and to the tourism industry they were trying
to save. If everyone is just wearing T -shirts
and hard hats, it looks like a standard safe
cleanup operation. So they prioritize public
relations over the respiratory health of their
own workers. That is the core of the allegation.
Yes. And the result. The NIH established the
Gulf study to track the long term health of these
workers. People reported severe respiratory problems,
skin lesions, memory loss, seizures, blood in
their urine. And follow up studies found levels
of volatile organic compounds in their blood
that were five to 10 times higher than the general
population. That's just infuriating. And it wasn't
just the health impacts. The entire economy of
the Gulf Coast was practically erased overnight.
It was a total shutdown. At its peak, 36 percent
of all federal waters in the Gulf were closed
to fishing. The seafood industry alone. suffered
immediate losses of nearly a quarter of a billion
dollars. And tourism. I mean, who wants to book
a family vacation to a beach where you had to
scrub tar off your kids' feet? Exactly. The projected
tourism losses were over $22 billion. Real estate
values along the coast plummeted. It just destroyed
the economic engine of the entire region for
years. So we have the disaster, the failed engineering,
the toxic cleanup, the dead wildlife, the sick
workers. It all leads to the big question. How
did this happen? And who, at the end of the day,
is to blame? The investigations were incredibly
thorough. You had the Coast Guard, the Bureau
of Ocean Energy Management, a special presidential
commission. They all dug deep. And while there
were dozens of small failures, the ultimate root
cause often comes back to one single boring material.
Cement. Cement. It's the most basic material
on Earth. But in this case, it was the absolute
linchpin. It is the final barrier. When you finish
drilling a well like this, you pump cement down
to the bottom to seal the gap between the final
steel pipe and the surrounding rock formation.
That cement has to be perfect. It has to hold
back all that gas pressure forever. And at the
Macondo well... The cement failed. Why? Was it
just a bad batch of cement? It was a specialized
unstable mixture. They used what's called nitrogen
foamed cement, which was a decision made by Halliburton
and BP. Nitrogen, you mean like with bubbles
in it? Exactly. They inject nitrogen gas into
the cement slurry to make it lighter. This reduces
the pressure on the fragile rock formation down
below, which can be good, but it can also be
very unstable. If the nitrogen bubbles link up,
the cement becomes weak and permeable. The gas
can migrate. right through it like a sponge.
And they didn't test this mixture properly. Oh,
they did test it. But the post -spill investigations
found that Halliburton's own test results showed
the mixture was unstable. Those results were
not properly communicated or were ignored. But
the much bigger failure was the final safety
check. called the negative pressure test. This
is the real smoking gun, isn't it? This is the
moment they could have and should have stopped
everything. Before they disconnected the rig
from the well, they had to prove the cement seal
was holding. So they deliberately reduced the
pressure inside the drill pipe to see if any
pressure from the reservoir would leak back in.
So if the pressure on the gauge stays steady,
the well is sealed. If the pressure starts to
rise, you've got a leak. It's that simple. And
when they ran the test on the deepwater horizon,
the pressure rose. Significantly. It was a clear,
unambiguous sign of a major leak. So why on earth
didn't they stop? They rationalized it away.
The managers on the rig came up with a completely
baseless theory they called the bladder effect,
arguing that the pressure reading was a glitch
in the system, not a real leak. It's a classic
case of what they call confirmation bias. They
so badly wanted to be done with this well. The
rush to completion. I saw that phrase over and
over. That was the culture. The rig was more
than a month behind schedule. Every extra day
on that well cost over a million dollars. The
managers on the rig, both from Transocean and
BP, were under immense pressure to finish up
and move on to the next job. And in that rush,
safety took a backseat to schedule and cost.
And that bladder effect theory, that rationalization,
cost 11 people their lives. So how did the court
see all of this? How was the blame officially
divided? The gavel came down and it came down
hard. In a 2014 ruling, a federal judge found
BP guilty of gross negligence. Explain the legal
difference there. What's the difference between
simple negligence and gross negligence? Simple
negligence is carelessness. It's, oops, I made
a mistake. Gross negligence is a conscious, voluntary
disregard for the need to use reasonable care.
It implies that you knew there was a significant
risk and you proceeded anyway. It's a much higher
bar to prove. And it carries a much, much bigger
fine. A much bigger fine under the Clean Water
Act. The judge actually took the rarest step
of apportioning the blame by percentage among
the companies involved. Okay, so who got what
slice of the blame pie? BP, as the well operator,
was found to be 67 % responsible. Trandoshan,
the owner and operator of the rig itself, was
found 30 % responsible. And Halliburton, the
contractor who provided that faulty foamed cement,
was found 3 % responsible. So BP, by far, took
the massive hit. They did. On the criminal side,
the company pleaded guilty to 11 counts of felony
manslaughter. They pleaded guilty to lying to
Congress specifically about those flow rates
we talked about. That goes right back to the
internal email cover -up. Exactly. And the final
price tag for all of this. In 2016, a final civil
settlement was reached for $20 .8 billion. That
is, to this day, the largest environmental settlement
in the history of the United States. Wow. And
when you add in the cleanup costs, the victim
compensation funds, the other fines and penalties.
The total cost to BP has been over $65 billion.
It's a number so big it almost loses meaning.
It bankrupts the imagination. It absolutely crippled
the company for years. They had to sell off major
assets all across the globe just to pay for the
damage they caused in the Gulf. So here we are.
It's been more than a decade since the well was
capped. The news cameras are gone. But I want
to leave our listeners with a thought that's
really been nagging me throughout this research.
We talked about the cleanup, the skimming, the
burning. The most generous estimates say they
only recovered or removed about 25 % of the oil.
That's the high -end estimate, yes. So where
is the other 75 %? Where did 3 .5 million barrels
of crude oil go? That's the mystery of the missing
oil. And the answer is it's not missing. It's
in that dirty blizzard on the seafloor. It's
still dissolved in those deepwater plumes. It's
been integrated into the food web from the plankton
all the way up to the dolphins. It didn't disappear.
It just changed form and location. And deepwater
drilling hasn't stopped. In fact, if you look
at the permits, they're drilling in even deeper
water now than they were in 2010. They are. The
so -called Golden Triangle in the Deepwater Gulf
is still booming. The technology has improved.
The safety regulations are stronger. But the
risk is still inherent. So I guess the final
question is, have we actually fixed the problem?
Or have we just gotten better at managing and
maybe hiding the risk? With that toxic snow still
sitting on the bottom of the ocean, is the Macondo
disaster actually over? Or are we just living
in the long, slow, invisible tale of a permanent
change to the Gulf ecosystem? It's a question
we might not have a full answer to for another
50 years. Biology moves at a very slow pace.
But the scar, both on the ecosystem and the people
there, that scar is definitely permanent. Something
to think about. That's it for this deep dive.
Thanks for listening.