Oil covered pelicans found off the Louisiana coast and affected by the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico wait in a holding pen for cleaning at the Fort Jackson Wildlife Rehabilitation Center in Buras, Louisiana June 11, 2010. Photo © Jose-Luis Magana/Greenpeace

Can the risks taken by BP be put in the wider context of US dependence on oil?

An oil worker who survived the BP Deepwater Horizon explosion has claimed that the oil rig’s safety equipment was leaking several weeks before the disaster. Tyrone Benton told the BBC’s Panorama programme that he spotted a leak on the rig’s Blowout Preventor – which failed to shut down the well after the explosion – and that BP and the rig’s owner, Transocean, switched off the faulty part, rather than repairing it. “Benton’s revelations will pile even more pressure on BP,” predicted Graeme Weardon in The Guardian.

The company has also now been accused of either “lying” or being “grossly incompetent” by Rep. Ed Markey, a senior Democrat and chairman of one of the committees investigating the Gulf spill. Markey made the comments after releasing an internal BP document that had come to his attention, which revealed a BP estimate that 100,000 barrels of oil a day could, in theory, flow from the ruptured oil well. BP spokesman Robert Wine countered that this was a non-relevant worst-case scenario and accused Markey of “misrepresenting” the truth. BP initially thought that 1,000 barrels per day were leaking into the Gulf of Mexico, though current estimate is more like 60,000.

And an analysis of federal data by the Wall Street Journal has added further grist to the BP accusation mill. The paper found that the company frequently used a cheaper oil well design that has been called “risky” by Congressional investigators. The design, used in one out of three of BP’s deepwater wells (and on the one that exploded on April 20) was used by BP “significantly more often than most peers,” said the paper.

While berating BP for the disaster’s causes, an investigation by The New York Times also placed it in its wider context, revealing an alarming “chasm between the oil industry’s assertions about the reliability of its blowout preventers and a more complex reality”. The paper showed that “the federal agency charged with regulating offshore drilling, the Minerals Management Service, repeatedly declined to act on advice from its own experts on how it could minimize the risk of a blind shear ram failure.” The “blind shear ram” is a device designed to slice and seal a well if it blows.

And focusing even more intently on the macro, William Rees-Mogg in The Times linked the disaster to America’s dependence on oil and the Obama administration’s pursuit of “inherently risky” offshore drilling. “Putting the blame on BP is not unjustified, but when the President blames BP, he is blaming it for following his own policy. Large as it is, BP is only one link in the chain of US oil exploration; the whole chain is vulnerable.” Rees-Mogg also predicted that the “moratorium on offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico is “unlikely to be maintained in the long term, because of the pressure for more oil.”