Thursday, January 6, 2011

BP (NYSE:BP), Transocean (NYSE:RIG), Halliburton (NYSE:HAL) Get Blamed for Gulf Spill; Halliburton, Transocean Blame BP, Commission

The cat and mouse game over who is to blame for the Gulf of Mexico oil spill surprisingly lingers on, with the presidential oil spill commission concluding BP (NYSE:BP), Transocean (NYSE:RIG) and Halliburton (NYSE:HAL) were at fault in the spill; not exactly a big discovery.

One company still missing from the mix is Cameron International (NYSE:CAM), which built the blowout preventer, which failed to do its job, although why is still being determined.

That's important because we're having a lot of studies conducted over the cause of the spill, and we still haven't received the data on the cause of the failure of the vital blowout preventer, making the studies pretty much useless.

As far as the blame game goes, once Halliburton and Transocean were identified as part of the blame, they swooped into action, immediately deflecting blame back to BP.

Transocean blamed BP and regulators saying in a statement, "Consistent with industry standards, the procedures being conducted in the final hours were crafted and directed by BP engineers and approved in advance by federal regulators. Based on the limited information made available to them, the Transocean crew took appropriate actions to gain control of the well. They were well trained and considered to be among the best in the business."

Halliburton also attacked BP and the commission, saying concerning the commission they have "selectively omitted information we provided to them." They also pointed to the testing of cement mixtures which were identified as failures, when they claim their engineer on the Deepwater Horizon was given the okay that the test results were good to go.

Halliburton also blames BP for said was "the only means to test the integrity of the cement bond." They added "had BP properly interpreted the negative tests, the tests would have revealed any problems with the cement job."

All of this is about fines and liability, which for the most part, BP has so far shouldered alone. There are legitimate concerns though, and the commission's conclusions aren't as air tight as they seem to think, although the full report won't be released until next week.

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