Follow up to postings on the Gulf Coast oil spill, Hearing on “Inquiry into the Deepwater Horizon Gulf Coast Oil Spill”, Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations 12 May 2010, to “examine what caused the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig and the oil spill now spreading across the Gulf, in order to help prevent future incidents and inform the direction of our national energy policy.” Link to all the documents, with selected references as follows:

• From Chairman Waxman’s Opening Statement: “BP, one of the world’s largest oil companies, assured Congress and the public that it could operate safely in deep water and that a major oil spill was next to impossible. We now know those assurances were wrong.
  Halliburton, one of the world’s largest oil services companies, says that it had secured the well through a procedure called “cementing” and that the well had passed a key pressure test. But we now know this is an incomplete account. The well did pass positive pressure tests, but there is evidence that it may not have passed crucial negative pressure tests. According to a senior BP official, significant pressure discrepancies were observed in at least two of these tests, which were conducted just hours before the explosion.
  Transocean, one of the world’s largest operators of drilling rigs, says it has no reason to believe that the rig’s failsafe device, called a blowout preventer, was not fully operational. But we have learned from Cameron, the manufacturer of the blowout preventer, that the device had a leak in a crucial hydraulic system and a defectively configured ram.”

• BP – What Could Have Happened?
• BP – What We Know
• Halliburton – Last 2 hours before end of transmission
• BP – Blowout Preventer Testing Memo
• Transocean – Deepwater Horizon BOP Assurance Analysis, March 2001
• Transocean – Surface BOP Operations from Floating Vessels
• BP – Regional Oil Spill Response Plan
• Transocean – Nontank Vessel Response Plan
• Transocean – Major Accident Hazard Risk Analysis Deepwater Horizon, August, 2004