Shareholder Activism at BP AGM

Environmental campaigning can take you to interesting places, or it can take you to the grey, soulless barn that is Manchester Central. This is where I was last Monday, the occasion being the annual general meeting of the oil and gas multinational BP, formerly British Petroleum, briefly ‘Beyond Petroleum’, but mostly ‘beyond parody’: the people who had claimed to be saving the planet, but who actually destroyed the Gulf of Mexico.

Greenpeace has run a number of campaigns against BP in the past, and after one of them I found myself the holder of a single share in the company. This allows me to attend their AGM and, if I so desire, ask questions of the board. Greenpeace UK haven’t got in BP in their sights right now, so I was temporarily an activist for ShareAction, a group of people who do this sort of thing all the time.

Usually these gigs are in London, and even a free lunch doesn’t tempt me to go, but this year, for the first time in a century, they were in the north of England. Why was a good question. Possibly they were getting a few too many awkward questions down there. Scheduling the event for the day before Shell’s AGM in Holland was probably also a cunning ploy. The only way climate change activists could go to both would be to fly. Fortunately, they wouldn’t need to, as Manchester has activists of its own, and there was a decent group of us waiting to ask some questions of the board.

I’d been at the Conference Centre, a former mainline station in the middle of Manchester, earlier in the year for the Greater Manchester Mayor’s Green Summit. That had been a slickly organised affair too, but I didn’t remember seeing quite so many well-built, bald men with wires coming out of their ears when I attended that. 

Outside a group of scruffy people were holding up placards, whilst better dressed people shuffled past and made their way into the venue. I was dressed somewhere in between, having found a tie and a reasonably clean shirt at the back of the wardrobe, I followed them in. Beyond the first line of large men were airport-style security barriers. My credentials were accepted and I was allowed in, but my water bottle and re-usable coffee cup weren’t. This led to a dilemma as to whether I should accept the complimentary drink in a disposable cup.

Dilemma over, it was time for the main event. The AGM itself was part university lecture hall, part film studio. A bank of movie cameras occupied the middle of the auditorium, all pointed at the stage where the bank of rostrums looked like the bridge of the USS Enterprise. Two wary ‘redshirts’ flanking the stage were the most obvious security features, but closer examination revealed that most of the front two rows, except for a pair of little old ladies in the middle, were equally bald and equally well built. They were clearly not taking any chances.

But we weren’t here to cause trouble, at least not that kind. They had a special area to put people like us, with its own security, and a woman with a headset who took down the outline of the question we were going to ask and radioed it to her controller, wherever they were.

When all was ready the big screen, which had been showing film of BP’s latest engineering marvels, faded out and the board made their appearance. A phalanx of older white men, led by CEO Bob Dudley, took up their positions in the front row, with a couple of token women sat behind them.

The curtain opener was Carl-Henric Svanberg, Chairman of the Board, who made his speech about how BP was back, $65 billion dollars the poorer thanks to the Deepwater Horizon disaster, but now wiser and, yes, greener than ever before. I dare say, had the value of my shares been more than the cost of train ticket, I may even have been convinced.

He was just the warm up act though, the stars of the show were the activists, with our questions. A few genuine shareholders had sneaked in amongst us, who issued such gushing praise for the board my toes curled, but mostly it was a barrage of what politicians call tough questions: why were they fracking in Argentina, will they cooperate with the investigation into human rights abuses in Columbia, do they accept that Climate Change is a human rights issue, will they act on fugitive methane emissions, and so on.

Their response was slick, polished, professional and craven. They had an answer prepared for each question, but only one. If the same question was asked in two different ways, it was ignored the second time. Some questions weren’t answered at all, sometimes with no explanation. The pattern though was clear. The answers were not being given for the benefit of the activists, but of the shareholders. ‘No, there is no problem here’, ‘I’m sorry, I don’t recognise those figures’, ‘we have never been found liable’, but mostly ‘that is nothing to do with us’. BP just take the oil out of the ground, what happens to it next is everybody’s responsibility except theirs.

Asking a question at a big AGM like this is both easy and difficult. You have a podium, you have a microphone, and everyone is silent, waiting to hear what you have to say. But on the other hand, when you stand up there, this is clearly their territory. The board sit like gods on their thrones, guarded by their hired muscle. It’s hard to remember that they are the ones with the explaining to do.

All told I was glad I was up second to last. I was there to ask a question on the Amazon Reef, the unique and amazing coral system found in deep water at the mouth of that great river just two years earlier, a place where all the text books said you should never find a reef. Someone from the Climate Change 100+ group, another organisation that has shareholder activism as its main modus operandi, had mentioned the reef earlier, allowing Carl-Henric to give his prepared answer: no, the reef was not a new discovery, and anyway, the question of whether you should drill there was not for them, but the Brazilian government.

Knowing their answer in advance meant I could tailor my question to it. I said that until the 2016 paper on the reef was published nobody, apart from the researchers involved, had known the reef was there. I said that until a 2017 expedition went out (on the Greenpeace ship Esperanza, but I didn’t mention that) there had been no pictures of the reef. And I said that the paper scientific paper produced by the expedition, published only last month, showed it was six times bigger than previously believed, and extended into one of the blocks BP jointly owns.

Would they answer? The board had done their usual trick of hearing several questions at once, so they could choose which to answer, so I couldn’t be sure. Svanberg had a quick word with Dudley. He answered another question, then he spoke about the reef. In Brazil, he said, ‘everyone knew it was there’. But this wasn’t anything the shareholder should worry about, because it was ‘35km away from where they were’.

The answer was infuriating, because it was so obviously wrong, contradicted by the paper I had in my briefcase. It seems we were dealing with Schrodinger’s Reef: something that everyone knows is there, even though it isn’t.

And that was that. The board’s obscene pay award was waived through without a single objection, and when the votes on the resolutions came through they had all been approved with majorities that would have embarrassed the vainest of tinpot dictators.

After the meeting there was the free lunch, but also a chance to meet the board informally. Svanberg sought me out and seemed very pleased with himself. The retired US Admiral they’d recruited to try to get the organisation a safety culture told me some stories of his time in nuclear submarines, and then I got a chance to collar Bob Dudley himself. Here I got a dose of what must pass for polite conversation in Davos and other such circles. No, he did not deny climate change, on that he was clear, but we mustn’t forget the ‘natural cycles’ that also play a part, and which presumably can be used to explain away any evidence that does fit his fossil fuelled view of the world. The Deepwater Horizon was, obviously, a source of regret, but is was the only accident they’d had.  

I tried to correct his oil-tinted view of the world, gave him a little lesson in climate science and reminded him of BP's other mishaps, Texas City, Grangemouth, several Alaskan oil pipeline spills, a near miss in Azerbaijan and a minor prang with a rig called the Thunder Horse, but he wasn’t bothered by what I thought. This man earns more in a month than I have done in my life. I don’t scare him.

But something did. The board had refused to answer several questions, including one from a representative of the Union of Concerned Scientists, claiming they were traps. Class Actions, Bob Dudley told his shareholders, were a ‘business plan’ for some US lawyers. What he didn’t say was that Friendsof the Earth threatened Shell with just such a suit just a few weeks ago. Clearly, they were worried. Indeed, when a gushing shareholder came up to Dudley, told him he was wonderful and asked for his autograph on his AGM papers, I couldn’t help saying “Are you sure that’s not his Class Action suit?”, and Dudley really did stop and check.

So, what did I think of my days of being a shareholder activist? "An instructive exercise in corporate evasion and lying" was what I told DeSmogBlog. It was something that needed to be done, but not something that is going to change the world. There are other ways of doing that.

Review: [When Girl Meets Oil] Evolution of a Corporate Idealist

Evolution of a Corporate Idealist

A hundred years ago the mills of Glossop were booming. Most have gone now, but we still have the Partington theatre, a legacy of a benevolent mill owner and which puts on plays, film shows and occasionally opera. We also have Woods Hospital, where L S Lowry died, a gift to the town from another mill owner, Samuel Hill-Wood, who's largesse also briefly propelled our local football team to the top division in English football.

The charitable work of these liberal Capitalists used to be called Paternalism, and sometime during the twentieth century it disappeared along with other such British institutions as the Dinner Hour and the Tea Trolley.

However today it is back, and going by the name of Corporate Social Responsibility.

We Dominate Because We Care

I knew a bit about CSR before I picked up this book. I knew CSR people spoke a different language to the rest of us, one of Supply Chain Initiatives and Stakeholder Engagement. I also knew a few companies that had been hot on CSR, such as Shell, British American Tobacco and the late and unlamented Enron. I had also knew it sucked in people who I was sure were headed for glittering careers in the world of Human Rights law and such like. So what happens to them when they take the corporate shilling?

To those of us on the outside, giant corporations are just impenetrable black boxes, the inner workings of which we know almost nothing about. We see the human and natural resources going in, and the pollution and executive remuneration coming out, and assume everyone inside is of the same mindset. As a result the dialogue between company insiders and activist outsiders is often one of the mutually deaf, with the gulf between us as large as the one CSR pioneer BP filled with oil four years ago.

That was bad news for the environment, but a decade earlier it was globalised Capitalism that appeared to be on the ropes. The Multilateral Agreement on Investments had bitten the dust and the 1999 World Trade Association meeting had ended in bloody confrontation between protestors and police. The barbarians were at the gate and something needed to be done to safeguard the corporation. Was CSR that something?

Girl meets oil

Whilst they were fighting on the streets of Seattle, down at Yale Christine Bader was completing her MBA. She had already decided she was neither going to sell her soul for money, nor don a balaclava herself. She had been seduced by the Sun King, aka England's own John Browne, dapper CEO of oil giant BP and so, although it wasn't called that then, she ended up in CSR.

Given my views on, as he is now, Lord Browne you would probably expect me to regard this as a bad start. However I do remember how he came across at the time, so I'll give her the benefit of the doubt here. Plenty of other perfectly sensible people really did think a fancy new logo meant that butterflies really would start coming out of BPs oil wells.

Soon Ms. Bader was in Indonesia doing pioneering work to endure BP's Tangguh plant was built with minimum disruption to the local population. Then she was in Shanghai proving that you can do business in China without compromising human rights, before being seconded to the UN to help to write the international gold standards on the subject. And none of that was as easy I've just made it sound.

Meanwhile it all was all going horribly wrong for BP first in Scotland, then in Texas City, then Alaska and finally in the Gulf of Mexico. The company she done such good work for suddenly turned out not to be an ethical business, but a corporate villain. They had put short term profits over long term safety, had promoted those who cut corners and punished those who raised concerns, had ignored near misses and taken risks which with hindsight looked incredibly foolish.

Ms Bader had nothing to do with any of that, but how a person who is clearly clever than I am could spend the best part of a decade in such a dysfunctional organisation without smelling a rat is the question that runs through this book. Was she fooled? Did she just see what she wanted to see? Or was her part of BP different to the rest of the company?

The answer appears to be a bit of all three.

Certainly Ms Bader admits to not looking too carefully behind the curtain. Had she realised that Browne only talked about Climate Change so that it could sell gas to power companies, or that whilst Browne was talking human rights to the world he was getting secrets from his spy in Greenpeace, she might have been a bit more cynical.

On the other hand BP's work in Indonesia and China, as well as the parallel progress on human rights in Columbia, was genuinely innovative.

Why?

Inside the beast

Certainly it wasn't too onerous for them; a few hundred thousand dollars spent as part of a multi-billion dollar project. But whilst Ms Bader is clear to repeat that isn't all about money, when outraged locals can cost a big company millions of dollars when they get spikey CSR does start to look like good value for money. All of which suggests to me, with my activist head on, that what the world really needs is not more CSR professionals, but more rioting mobs.

I suspect Ms. Bader knows this too. She's also aware of the contradictions of being a Corporate Idealist. She is cynical about a colleague working for an investment bank who was seemingly oblivious to where most of its money went, but at the same time she realises she was blind to most of what BP were doing as well. She also knows CSR people can end up just being wheeled out to help bury bad news.

But she also tells of the often cathartic experience of confronting the C-suite with the material evidence of how the decisions they make impact on the people at the bottom of the corporate food chain. It can take a big stick to get progress, but that change can be profound and genuine.

Decline of a Corporate Cynic

So what did I learn from this book?

Firstly, although Ms. Bader and her colleagues will say this is not what CSR should be, for the moment it is just an add-on. That's partly because, whilst you can drill for oil whilst supporting oppressive regimes or you can drill for oil respecting human rights, and either way it's still oil, if you take an issue like Climate Change seriously you just wouldn't drill for oil in the first place.

BP may now take seriously the problem of its rigs exploding, but in its latest Sustainability Report it say that Arctic oil "offers significant opportunities to help meet the world’s growing energy needs", mentions Climate Change only in terms of their own emissions, doesn't mention tar sands at all, but boasts about how they recycle their cooking oil in Tangguh. This seems to me to be a failure of the very first stage of CSR; that is acknowledging that there is a problem in the first place. Still, at least they're not fracking (yet).

“Louie, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship."

So it's not surprising Corporate Idealists and Green activists don't always get along. Add in that whilst CSR people earn a fraction of the wages of the C-suite whose reputations they safeguard, they don't do too badly all told and they very rarely find themselves in Russian gaols or on the business end of police truncheons and you have two groups of people who are going to struggle to bond.

But despite that this book makes clear that the dance between insiders and outsiders is a complicated and important one. BP did well on human rights in Indonesia and China in no small part because Ms. Bader had a gang of NGOs breathing down her neck. Meanwhile in the Gulf they were left alone to do their own thing. So maybe it was actually my team that took its eye off the ball. Oops.

So the Corporate Idealist needs the NGO activist and vice versa. It takes two to tango. Ms Bader knows this, I think many Human Rights NGOs know it too, but how many of us Greens get the message? Not enough I think.

All of which makes Evolution of a Corporate Idealist essential reading, especially for corporate cynics like me.

Indeed, afterwards I thought the clash of idealism and practicality was such a great story someone really should write a novel about it.

Now there's an idea.

Bad Capitalism: BP

"What the hell did we do to deserve this?"

This is what BP CEO Tony Haywood said when informed that the Deepwater Horizon had just exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, killing eleven people and unleashing the biggest oil spill in US history.

You can imagine the shock and indignation in his voice. How could this have happened to BP, the darlings of the business world, whose streamlined management structure was the stuff of Business Seminars the world over?

What's more, they were the nice ones, the ones with big green flower as a logo, the ones who cared about the environment.

How could it happen to them?

Here's how.

Greenwash

In 1997 John Browne, the dapper CEO of British Petroleum, as it then was, made a speech at Stanford University in which he acknowledged that Climate Change "cannot be discounted".

Today you'd expect him to go on to suggest that the Pope may very well be Catholic and that bears use the trees for their ablutions, but in 1997 this was big news coming from an oil man.

In the rush to crown Browne as the new Sun King most people ignored the fact he went on to say that "dramatic, sudden" action that "sought, at a stroke, drastically to restrict carbon emissions" would be "wrong".

For many, it was enough that he had even mentioned Global Warming.

Browne knew what he was doing making that speech, or at least he thought he did. If governments wanted to do something about Climate Change the easiest and simplest thing was to phase out coal fired power stations and replace them with gas. And where would they get their gas from? BP of course.

Three years later Browne spent millions of pounds rebranding BP as "Beyond Petroleum". He spent rather less money on a factory making solar panels. It was located in California, so the panels it made were too expensive to be commercially viable, but it was conveniently located for photo calls with 'Governator' Arnold Schwarzenegger.

However, even whilst Browne was making this speech, BP was employing British spy agency Hakluyt, and their German agent Manfred Schlickenrieder, to infiltrate Greenpeace in order to disrupt their campaign against BP's deep water drilling in the Atlantic. I was part of that campaign and wondered why BP were always one step ahead of us. We thought MI5 were hacking our emails. They probably were, but it was Schlickenrieder that was tipping off BP.

That Greenpeace saw through the greenwash didn't bother Browne. Some cynics suggested that calling yourself  Beyond Petroleum when your main business was oil was a bit confusing.  Others thought that Browne was just storing up trouble for the future, and that the clean and green image would rear up an bite BP on the bum if anything went wrong. But Browne just ignored them and lapped up the accolades.

Rogue Traders

 

The rebranding though was just window dressing for what Browne was really up to.

BP was an oil company with very little oil, so he went to look for some. More to the point he would regularly announce he had found it when he hadn't. The imaginary oil ended up costing them money, but in the short term BP's share price went up. That was not wise in the long term, but at least it was legal. However a lot of what BP's oil trading unit got up to under Browne was neither wise nor legal.

As both a producer and trader in oil BP had always had the chance to manipulate the market via what's known in the business as a 'squeeze', where a company would hold oil back in order to raise the price before selling.

However the world of derivatives opened up the opportunity for a reverse squeeze. Rather than using real oil to manipulate the virtual market, the oil traders would buy up oil derivatives in order to raise the price of the real crude.

This was sharp practice, and led to the company being repeatedly fined by US authorities. But that didn't bother BP, for as long as it's oil trading division brought in cash, the City was happy.

Spills

But what made the City money men even happier was Browne's cost cutting program.

Whole tiers of management were replaced, and complex indices of performance were replace by just one tally of a manager's success; cost. The manager who cut his budget got promoted. The manager who spent more went down. Managers moved rapidly around the company, so there was no point making savings tomorrow, costs had to be cut today. This short term thinking had a disastrous effect on BP's infrastructure, especially in it's controversial operations in Alaska.

Maintaining the safety of an oil pipeline isn't rocket science. You just need to clean the rust off and keep an eye on the joints. However such routine maintenance costs money and is easily postponed.

That's what happened in Prudhoe Bay. Costs were driven down, maintenance budgets slashed and pipelines and valves rusted in the Arctic winter. People knew what needed to be done, but BPs structure and pursuit of short term profits at all costs meant managers could only fix problems like Prudhoe Bay at the expenses of their careers.

In March 2006 chickens finally came home to roost for BP as corrosion caused a five day oil leak that spilled over 200,000 gallons of oil onto the ice. The spill ended up costing BP over $100 million in fines and lawsuits and they also had to fix their leaking pipes, which cost them far more than if they'd just maintained them in the first place.

But if BP wasn't too bothered about oil spills, there was another type of leak they really didn't like. As the cuts started to bite disgruntled employees had been contacting former oil trader Chuck Hamel, who passed their information on to the media or environmental groups.

BP hated this. They hired private investigators to tap Hamel's phones, intercept his post, steal his rubbish and sift through his credit card records. Slightly more bizarrely women were recruited to try to lure him into a honey trap. When the story eventually broke it caused a storm, and a judge accused the consortium running the pipeline for BP of behaving like "Nazi Germany".

Meanwhile Greenpeace's campaign against BP was again being thwarted, this time by the FBI. This being the window between the end of the Cold War and the beginning of the War on Terror, the Feds were evidently short on suspects and decided Greenpeace were a "domestic terrorist group".

Political Influence

Blair, Schwarzenegger and Browne

Seeing which way the political wind was blowing, Browne started courting Tony Blair before he became Prime Minister. Once in office New Labour's relationship with Britain's biggest company was so close it was said BP stood for "Blair Petroleum".

Browne's chief adviser, Nick Butler, was a former Labour insider and parliamentary candidate, and his head of communications was was Anji Hunter, Blair's former chief of staff. Meanwhile former BP CEO David Simon became Blair's Minister for European Trade and Competitiveness.

When Libya offered to give up its nuclear program in exchange for being allowed back into the human race, MI6 spook Mark Allen led the negotiations. Shortly afterwards he was working for BP, negotiating an oil deal with Gaddafi. When Libya said that the continued detention of Lockerbie bomber Basset al-Megrahi, and plans to prosecute the murderer of PC Yvonne Fletcher, were problems the message was passed on. Al-Megrahi was released, and leads to who killed the police woman were not followed up.

When there were calls for Britain to follow the USA in suing Libya for the deaths and injuries caused by the explosives they'd given to terrorists, including the Provisional IRA, the government initially refused, before being forced into a U turn by an outraged public.

Unsafe Practices

Political influence clearly helped BP enourously, but it couldn't keep away the grim reality that if you neglected basic maintenance in a dangerous industry like oil it would have a disastrous effect.

BP claimed it took safety seriously, and produced graphs to prove it. However the measure they used was personal safety, counting how many workers had had slips, trips and other minor accidents. All this could measure was how dozzy the staff were. However it probably didn't even do that, as the worker who scolded himself on his coffee, or sprained an ankle by not using the hand rail on the stairs, could easily be persuaded to keep quiet if to speak out might affect their job.

But such spin could not hide the reality of dangerously neglected facilities and demoralized and overworked staff. 

Grangemouth refinery

In 2000, three fires broke out at the Grangemouth refinery. No-one was seriously hurt, but an investigation by the Health and Safety Executive concluded that they had "endangered lives of workers and civilians".

In 2002 the authorities in California became suspicious that the Carson plant reporting a decrease in safety violations despite no repairs actually being carried out. Inspectors were refused entry on a variety of grounds, but when they eventually returned with the Sheriff they found that 80% of the tanks breached regulations and that BP had been lying.

BP' reaction to these events was telling. Paul Maslin in Grangemouth, who had repeatedly asked for money to repair his facility, was demoted whilst Colin Reid in California was promoted despite his false reporting.

Texas City refinery

What happened next in Texas then was no surprise.

In 2002 John Mazoni, Head of Refining and Marketing warned in a report that there were 'serious concerns about potential for a major site incident ' at the Texas City refinery. He was ignored.

Instead a program of vigorous cost cutting continued at the plant. A former executive Vice President later said 'the guys who ran the refinery. they were afraid for their jobs, there was a culture of fear'.

It could only end one way.

On 23 March 2005 workers repairing a raffinate splitter gasoline unit overfilled the unit. The level indicator and alarm were not working properly, and hydrocarbons overflowed into the blowback stack. This was an old model, no longer used by other companies, and there was a known risk of hydrocarbons leaking if this happened. In the control room staff, working 12 hour shifts due to shortages, failed to notice and the alarm was broken.

130 feet away from the unit staff were relaxing in wooden trailers. Regulations said that the trailers should have been 350 feet away unless blast proofed. A pick up truck was parked nearby with its engine running. It should not have been there either. The hydrocarbon fumes caused the engine to race making it to overheat. This then triggered an explosion which shattered glass 3/4 mile away.

Fifteen people died and 170 were hospitalised, with injuries including 90% burns and lost limbs.

Dodging Responsibility

Ewa Rowe c. Jeff Wilson

The day after the blast Browne arrived on the scene and said BP accepted full responsibility for the "incident", which was stating the bleeding obvious as it was their plant that had just exploded.

However behind the scenes they were doing exactly the opposite to what they said. Helped by a US press that seemed more interested in trying to blame Al Qaeda, BP nearly got away with it. The six hard hats that overfilled the unit were held solely responsible for the accident and sacked. The publicity budget was doubled and publications which carried lucrative BP advertising were warned not to write negative stories. One PR expert said "They handled the catastrophe like a class act".

Unfortunately for them Eva Rowe, the daughter of Linda and James Rowe, who both blown to pieces by the blast, had a surprise for them. In the small print of her settlement with the company was the clause that they had to release internal documents. These showed how that not only did BP know of the risk of an imminent disaster at the Texas City plant, but that they actually calculated that it would be more cost effective to pay off the victims than to make the repairs that would have saved lives.

Riding Their Luck

 

This wasn't the end of the bad news in 2005. In July the giant oil platform the Thunder Horse was evacuated as Hurricane Dennis hit the Gulf of Mexico. When the storm was over the $1 billion platform was found listing at 30 degrees. It turned out the rush to get it finished had led to a six inch pipe being incorrectly plumbed, letting in sea water.

This though was an extremely lucky break for BP as during the repairs it was found a critical underwater pipe had been badly welded and had cracked. Had this not been spotted “It could have been catastrophic,” said Gordon A. Aaker Jr., a senior engineering consultant on the project. “You would have lost a lot of oil a mile down before you would have even known. It could have been a helluva spill".

Smart people, and smart organisations, learn from near misses like this, but BP didn't. Instead they continued to chase quick profits and ride their luck.

Clearly though this wasn't going to last forever.

Meet The New Boss

Shortly afterwards Browne departed the company after lying in court over the relationship with his
ex-boyfriend. It's hard not to have a touch of sympathy for him here. He lived with his mother, a survivor of Auschwitz with old fashioned values, and worked in the ultra macho world of oil and big money. Coming out as gay would not have been easy for a man who struggled to relate to real people at the best of times.

His replacement was Tony Haywood. He was a former 'turtle', as they called Browne's globe trotting personal assistants. This was virtually the only way to get to the top of BP under Browne, and the result was a C Team who worshipped the boss and rarely dissented, which is never good management.

Hayward was effectively gifted the job when the Ewa Rowe settlement revealed that his main rival,  Mazoni, had sent an email complaining that dealing with the Texas City blast had caused him to lose "a precious day of my leave".

Not surprisingly the accidents continued under Haywood.

In 2008 poor cementing of an oil well in Caspian Sea caused a gas leak that could have killed all 200 people on BP's rig. They managed to keep the accident a commercial secret, but were betrayed when in 2010 Wikileaks published the account they'd given to the US Consulate.

Between June 2007 and February 2010 the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration Administration hit BP with 862 citations, not counting the 709 for Texas City. The next worst offender was Sunoco with 127.

And for good measure there were three leaks within a month in Prudhoe Bay.

Deepwater Horizon

So that was the situation when the drilling rig Deepwater Horizon, leased by BP from Transocean, started operations in the Macondo field of the Gulf of Mexico.

When it exploded on 20 April 2010, killing eleven crew, plunging another 115 into the sea and causing the worst oil spill in US history, it was merely chickens coming home to roost for BP.

According to the greenwash in their 2009 Sustainability Review BP was working towards its goal of 'no accidents, no harm to people and no damage to the environment', a refrain that was gleefully taken up by American politicians, with even Obama saying in early April 2010 "Oil rigs today generally don't cause spills." The result was one of the laxest regulatory regimes in the world.

Meanwhile BP was cutting corners on every aspect of the Macondo operation.They used the cheaper "long string" piping to line the bore, an unusual choice given that they knew that this would be a risky "high temperature, high pressure" well.

Halliburton recommended that BP use 21 centralisers to keep the drill pipe in place. The Deepwater Horizon only had six on board. They could have ordered more but the rig was costing them $1 million a day to hire and Haywood had made a goal of reducing unproductive time.

Next the cementing of the bore was rushed. Doing it properly would have meant paying the Halliburton contractors to stay on. Instead they were sent home without the usual checks being carried out.

Then just like with the Thunder Horse, there was another near miss. On 8 March 2010 a 'kick' occurred when gas entered the well and surged up the pipe. It took the crew a remarkably slow 33 minutes to react. Fortunately the Blowout Preventer worked and saved the rig, but it was a close run thing.


Again though, no lessons were learnt.

Then at 9PM 20 April 2010 the Deepwater Horizon pressure tested the well. It seems the BP
engineers lacked the skills to read the results. BP's monitoring station on land had shut at 5PM, as a cost saving measure, and nobody on board noticed the deadly pressure build up.

The first indication of trouble was when the supply ship Damon B. Bankson  noticed drilling mud coming out of the top of the rig. By the time they had radioed the Deepwater Horizon it was too late.

In the aftermath BP set up a website to give information on the disaster, which they gave the title of "Gulf of Mexico - Transocean Drilling Incident."


The rig could have been saved at the last minute if the Transocean staff on board had noticed the pressure build up. However this was the only link in the chain that led to the disaster for which BP was not wholly responsible for. 

Once the US government became involved the website's name was changed to BP Drilling Incident.

"Life's Not Fair"

BP tried other tricks too.

They claimed the leak was "only" 5000 barrels a day, and managed to get a compliant media to use this figure even when independent scientists were saying it was clearly much more. 62,000 barrels a day is now the best estimate.

Then they tried to blame, and sue, the manufacturer of the Blow Out Preventer. The BOP may have
been damaged in 8 March kick, or it may have failed due to the lack of centralisers, but in either case they were never expected to be 100% reliable. This was like than the operator of an unsafe aeroplane blaming a fatal crash on the company that made the escape chutes.

Finally they tried to rally thier friends in the UK, claiming they were the victims of an anti-British witch hunt by the US. The Daily Express wrote that Obama was "anti-British as ever" for no better reason than that his Dad had been tortured by the colonial authorities during the Mau Mau rebellion.

When all that failed they pulled the ever reliable "too big to fail" argument. Haywood and the Chairman of the Board met with President Obama and said that if the US didn't lay off BP there would be no company left and they'd be left sweeping up the oil themselves. This worked.

However it really was all over for Haywood.

He left with a years salary, that was £1 million, a pension pot worth £11 million and a seat on the board of a subsidiary worth £150,000 a year.

He considered himself the victim and was reported to have said "Life isn't fair."

I think I actually agree with him there.

References

Spills and Spin: The Inside Story of BP by Tom Bergin
MI6 'Firm' Spied on Green Groups Sunday Times 17 June 2001
A Review of the FBIs Investigations Into Certain Advocacy Groups US Department of Justice
In BP's Record, A History of Boldness and  Costly Blunders The New York Times 12 July 2010
BP Sustainability Review 2009