LAST HORIZON OIL RIG SERIES

The crew worked with large, heavy steel materials and flammable oil in a natural system that can be unpredictable. The errors were later described in detail in a January 2011 report to the president created by the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling - a team of engineers, politicians and scientists tasked by President Barack Obama with investigating what caused the explosion and oil spill.Ĭrew members on Deepwater Horizon stood 4,992 feet (1,521 meters) above the sea bed and had to rely on data from underwater instruments to make decisions.

LAST HORIZON OIL RIG SERIES

The ultimate cause of the Deepwater Horizon disaster was a series of preventable missteps by engineers and workers designing and carrying out a drill plan in the weeks and hours preceding the event. (Image credit: landbysea/Getty) What caused the Deepwater Horizon disaster? The platforms usually host drilling machinery but also desalination, generation and life support equipment for the crew. Oil rigs like this free-floating structure drill at wells in the Gulf of Mexico to extract fossil fuels from deep water.

BP hired Halliburton, an oil field services company, to help operate the rig and carry out the exploration. The company leased the Deepwater Horizon rig from the world's biggest oil rig contractor, TransOcean, beginning in 2001, to search for oil in an area of the Gulf that BP named the Macondo Prospect. Energy companies have drilled more than 2,000 oil wells in the Gulf of Mexico.īP (formerly known as The British Petroleum Company ltd.) is one of the world's largest oil companies, with headquarters in London. The oil and gas accumulates underground into cracks and pockets between layers of rock tens to hundreds of feet thick called 'pay zones' by the oil and gas industry. Over time, pressure and heat transformed the molecules of those organic materials into hydrocarbons - compounds made of hydrogen and carbon, which form the building blocks of oil and natural gas. The oil below the ocean floor formed from organic materials, such as the remains of plants and animals, trapped below ground millions of years ago.

Last horizon oil rig