BP’s CEO Robert Dudley on Tuesday told an industry gathering in Houston, Texas that the oil and gas industry will come out safer and smarter following last year’s Gulf of Mexico oil spill, Houston based news website Chron.com reported.
Dudley told the IHS Cambridge Energy Research Associates conference, CERAWeek, that the industry is developing new technology to effectively contain runaway wells and pushing better oil spill prevention equipment design standards.
This was the new BP CEO’s first public address since taking over the position following the Deepwater Horizon accident that killed 11 rig workers and spilled millions of barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, which caused an environmental disaster, the likes of which the US had never seen.
“It would be a mistake to dismiss our experience of the last year simply as a black swan, a one-in-a-million occurrence that carries no wider application for our industry as a whole,” Dudley told 2,000 energy analysts and executives at the conference. “As we have learned in the past 11 months, one company’s calamity quickly becomes every company’s concern,” Chron.com quoted him as saying.
Following the disaster, President Obama’s government enforced a five-month moratorium on some deepwater drilling projects and put in place stringent safety policies.
For its part, BP set up a US$20 billion clean-up fund to compensate and aid the local fishing, tourism and other industries on lost business.
In late February the Marine Well Containment Company, a non-profit independent organisation focused on improving containment capabilities for potential underwater well control incidents in the deepwater US Gulf of Mexico, announced an initial well containment response system.
The organisation currently consists of a partnership between oil majors ExxonMobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Shell and new signatory BP.
“Last autumn we made an ongoing commitment to share what we’ve learned and the experience we gained during the Deepwater Horizon incident response with the world,” said James Dupree, regional president for BP’s US Gulf of Mexico business at the time of the announcement. “We have shared our insights with regulators, participated in public forums, worked directly with industry bodies and published our lessons learned. Joining the MWCC and bringing our capabilities and equipment to an interim response system is another important part of that commitment.”
