Follow up to previous postings on the Gulf Coast oil spill, two new working papers via the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling:

• Stopping the Spill: The Five-Month Effort to Kill the Macondo Well – Staff Working Paper No. 6: “The containment story thus contains two parallel threads. First, on April 20, the oil and gas industry was unprepared to respond to a deepwater blowout, and the federal government was similarly unprepared to provide meaningful supervision. Second, in a compressed timeframe, BP was able to design, build, and use new containment technologies, while the federal government was able to develop effective oversight capacity. Those impressive efforts, however, were made necessary by the failure to anticipate a subsea blowout in the first place. Both industry and government must build on knowledge acquired during the Deepwater Horizon spill to ensure that such a failure of planning does not recur.”
• Response/Clean-Up Technology Research & Development and the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill – Staff Working Paper No. 7: “Of the many themes to arise in discussion of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, one of the most pervasive has been that the spill response floundered because advances in clean-up technology had not kept pace with advances in exploration technology. As this narrative goes, over the last two decades, industry pushed the frontier of deepwater drilling so far that commentators have “compared the drive into ever-deeper waters to deep space exploration.” Clean-up technology, on the other hand, “has progressed so little that the biggest advancement in the Gulf of Mexico disaster — at least in the public’s mind — is an oil-water separator based on a 17-year-old patent and promoted by the movie star Kevin Costner.” Although, by many accounts, technology “advanced a decade in the four months” of the response to the spill,4 existing response equipment was not up to the challenge of such a large spill. “I don’t think any of us looks at this and says this is an acceptable response,” Shell Oil President Marvin Odum said during the summer of 2010. This draft staff working paper discusses why a chasm between exploration technology and response technology has developed.”