BP’s internal inquiry into the causes of the disastrous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico provoked an immediate backlash from its contractors on the rig and US politicians who dismissed it as “not BP’s mea culpa”.
The UK oil group’s report, presented in Washington DC on Wednesday, identified “a sequence of failures” that led to the accident on April 20 which killed 11 workers.
The company accepted its engineers should shoulder some of the blame but shifted much of the responsibility on to its contractors, Transocean, the owner of the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig leased by BP, and Halliburton, the company responsible for cementing the well.