BP should not be the sole target for oil-spill blame

As an unparalleled environmental disaster unfolds in the US Gulf of Mexico, the world's citizen journalists and large parts of the mainstream media have been falling other each other to excoriate one particular oil company,

.

From the standpoint of responsible journalism, the spectacle of the blogosphere acting as chief prosecutor, jury and judge in the court of public opinion is unedifying, unsettling and scary.

To say so is not the same thing as belittling the impact of the

foundered off the coast of Alaska, or papering over BP's role in the affair. It is simply to note that the reams of news coverage and commentary the story has generated since the

well blew out on April 20 has been distinctly one-sided.

What follows should not therefore be taken as an effort to excuse the British oil major from any sin of commission or omission that contributed to what is certainly shaping up to be a huge environmental catastrophe, but rather as one journalist's attempt to redress the balance.

is a Dubai-based international services company that has won industry accolades for safety has worked closely with BP to develop the huge

oilfield in the harsh environment of the north Caspian Sea. Its CEO, Fazel Fazelbhoy, has this to say about BP's safety culture:

"BP has always been a leader in safety and quality. We've found the partnership to be very symbiotic. We have grown and learnt from exposure to each other's safety culture."

The recent disaster in the Gulf of Mexico "could not have been an incident that was driven by a lack of safety capacity or commitment".

More generally, there are several points worth noting in connection with BP's role in the disaster:

In the first place, although BP was the operator of the stricken Macondo well, it was

with the project. It was, however, the only non-American company involved. and as such was a logical scapegoat for angry US politicians including the president, Barack Obama.

The implicated US companies, seldom mentioned in the blame game following the blow-out, include

, which holds a 25 per cent stake in Macondo,

, the company that owned the rig that drilled the well,

, which was cementing the well when it blew to convert it from exploration to production, and

l, which sold BP the "blowout preventer" that failed to function.

Secondly, it is the world's thirst for transportation fuels, and the reluctance of certain governments to grant international companies access to oil-bearing terrain that is easier to work, that has forced BP and other major oil firms into ever deeper waters that test the limits of their technology. Given the risks involved, a major incident involving failed technology was more or less inevitable.

Moreover, It is not profit-driven greed that leads companies like BP to search for oil in deep water, as high-risk projects with enormous up-front costs are seldom reliable sources of profit.

Countries that restrict access to onshore and shallow water oil prospects include the US. Washington could reduce the risk of accidents by opening up federal lands and shallow offshore areas to oil exploration and production using proved technology. Ironically, the political backlash from the BP deep-water incident is likely to

.

Thirdly, much has been made of BP's insistence in a regulatory filing that a blow-out and major environmental incident was unlikely to result from drilling at Macondo. But it was BP's job to persuade the regulatory authorities and others who could be affected by the project that it had taken sufficient precautions. Were US and state regulators asleep at the switch when they signed off on the project?

Alternatively, since BP had not one but three mutually redundant emergency mechanisms in place to prevent a blowout, everyone may have agreed that sufficient safety precautions had been taken.

In a related vein, many of BP's previous safety infractions have been dredged up and gleefully aired in the international press and in numerous blogs.

Many are related to the deadly 2005 explosion at the company's Texas City refinery. Those have little bearing on BP's recent safety performance, since the company's current CEO Tony Hayward, who pledged to improve the firm's safety culture, was only appointed in 2007.

Others are more recent and involve BP's offshore oil exploration and production operations in the Gulf of Mexico and the British North Sea. These are relevant, but given the wide scope of the company's operations, it would be surprising and even suspicious if no such safety violations had been uncovered.

An important part of oil industry safety culture involves oil company co-operation with regulators over safety inspections. No safety culture is perfect; there will always be some slip-ups, back-sliding and corner-cutting; but the more these are uncovered and corrected, the more robust the safety environment should become.

It is only if a company is consistently cited for violations more often than its peers, or if it routinely drags its feet over acting to correct deficiencies, that alarm bells should ring.

The question that has not yet been answered, or apparently even asked of the relevant regulators, is whether either of those conditions apply to BP. In the absence of such an analysis, is it valid to conclude that the company's safety culture was weak? Or is it the regulatory environment that was lacking, as at least

has bothered to ask?

As a coda, early reports on the cause of the Macondo well blow out implicate a

, probably released from a layer of "gas hydrate" - essentially a special type of ice that forms at low temperatures and high pressures, and which traps high concentrations of gas molecules in a solid crystalline lattice. The gas can be released unpredictably and explosively if the hydrate is disturbed.

The behaviour of gas hydrates is poorly understood by the few scientists and engineers who study them. Previously encountered mainly in the Arctic, they have only recently been recognised as a hazard associated with deep-water drilling, with implications that have not been fully assessed.

Should BP be blamed for failing to make allowances for what it may not have suspected was lurking at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico? After all, there is a reason why drilling at such depths is called "frontier exploration".

An anonymous industry observer describes the Deepwater Horizon, the sophisticated Transocean rig that drilled the Macondo well, and the technically challenging job it performed thus: