Australia studies inquiry into oil spill

A report into a huge oil spill off Australia strikingly similar to the Gulf Coast one was handed to the government today.

Its results are unlikely to be made public for weeks, but conservationists and experts said it was already clear such drilling projects need far greater scrutiny.

Resources Minister Martin Ferguson, who commissioned the inquiry, said he would seek legal advice to ensure that making it public would not jeopardise any future court cases.

The West Atlas rig and Montara wellhead platform in the Timor Sea off north-west Australia began leaking last August at a relatively shallow 650 feet beneath the sea. More than 400 barrels of oil a day stained the coasts of Indonesia and East Timor before mud pumped through a relief well shut off the deepwater spigot 11 weeks later.

The bigger leak off the southern US coast is pumping between 1.47 million and 2.52 million gallons a day into the Gulf of Mexico. The leak that started in April occurred much deeper at 5,000 feet.

Halliburton, a Texas-based global oil field services provider, was the contractor that provided cement seals for both BP’s Deepwater Horizon rig in the Gulf of Mexico and for the West Atlas rig in Timor Sea operated by PTTEP Australasia, a unit of Thailand’s PTT Exploration & Production.

Greg Bourne, a former senior BP executive who is now the chief executive of the conservation group WWF-Australia, said the Australian investigative report should be released by early next week so that the industry could learn from the mistakes.

“Absent that knowledge and those learnings being made available, should an accident occur, that would be a travesty of justice,” he said.

He expected investigations of both disasters would reveal design faults and cementing mistakes as well as procedural and regulatory failures.

“There are standards of good oil field practice and what we can begin to surmise is that they weren’t adhered to either in Australia or the Gulf of Mexico,” he said.

But he said there were no lessons to be learned on how to plug the Gulf of Mexico flow, because the circumstances and technologies were too different.

Elmer Danenberger, a retired US regulator of the offshore oil and gas industry in the Gulf of Mexico who recently gave evidence at congressional hearings into the ongoing Deepwater Horizon disaster, told the Australian inquiry that the West Atlas blowout “appears to have been entirely preventable if internationally accepted practices were followed”.

Tina Hunter, an expert on energy law at Australia’s Bond University who followed the Australian hearing, said Halliburton should be held responsible for incorrectly signing off on the West Atlas well shoe as being cemented properly.

“Both cases have similarities in that we have these oil spills that occur and then there doesn’t seem to be any contingency planning to stop the spill at its source,” she said.