Horizon (1964–…): Season 47, Episode 7 - Deepwater Disaster: The Untold Story - full transcript

A mile beneath the waves...

millions of gallons of oil
poured into the Gulf of Mexico.

It was the world's deepest blowout.

The water depth,

5,000 feet, there's
never been an occurrence in any kind
of water depth like that before.

The whole world wanted
the damn well to stop flowing.

Over 87 days, a team of engineers
and scientists worked to create five

very different plans
to contain BP's well.

It certainly created the biggest
challenge we've ever faced.

It was a desperate battle.

When the ideas came to use
atomic bombs at the sea floor,
those were kind of discarded.



But no-one doubted the scale
of this engineering undertaking.

There's a lot
of events that happen in history -
man walking on the moon.

She's done now. She's done.

Knowing at that moment
that I was going to be a part
of such an event,

you can't describe the feeling.

It was a task that
BP said "scared everybody".

It did become personal. This well was
fighting back. I hated this well.

We have a really big problem here,
really significant problem.

What were you
thinking at that point?

"Ooh, this is going to be bad."

This is the story of why it took 87
days to cap the deepest blowout
in history.

America's Gulf Coast...

a land shaped by the pursuit of oil.

For more than 100 years its fate has
rested in the hands of oil men.



Doug Suttles
is one of the men who run BP.

He's a third-generation oil man

and an experienced engineer.

For 87 days
he was at the eye of a storm that

tested his ability to grapple
with the seemingly impossible.

There always has been something
in this industry which seeks out

challenge, and it does attract people

who like that, it likes people who
like challenge, who like adventure.

Doug Suttles is on his
way back to the scene
of the Deepwater Horizon explosion.

The 87 days that followed
pushed engineering to its extremes.

The industry is always
pushing on the frontier.

And the frontier sometimes is
around technology,

you know, going to greater depths,
or going to deeper water.

The Deepwater Horizon was drilling
an oil well in water a mile deep.

It's kind of like
deciding to go to the moon,

you're not supposed to be able to do
that, but you find a way.

And I don't think we've yet found
the challenge we can't overcome.

But on April the 20th,

Doug Suttles was faced
with a challenge that he
and BP would struggle to overcome.

I'd been in bed about an hour
and my phone rings.

One of the things when your phone
rings in the middle of the night,

no-one ever calls you with good news.

I get up and pick up my phone

and it was the individual who
runs our Gulf of Mexico business.

And he said, "Look, Doug," he said,
"I don't have all the details yet,

"but it looks like we've got a very
bad accident on the
Deepwater Horizon."

I saw the images starting to come in
from the rig, you realise this was
an extraordinarily serious event.

RADIO: 'We're preparing to
take the load.

'OK, we're taking the load.

'Survivor's clear of the vessel.'

On board was a crew of 126.

Most were saved. 11 people died.

The cause of the fire
lay deep under the ocean
below the Deepwater Horizon.

The giant rig was connected to the
sea bed by a pipe called a riser.

It was 21 inches wide
and a mile long.

The riser led to the
blowout preventer - the BOP -

a four-storey high set of valves
designed to close off the
well in an emergency.

With no anchor,
the rig was using GPS to stay
in position a mile above.

Below the BOP the well bore
sank two and half miles further.

The explosion happened when gas
began seeping into the well.

It shot up three and a half miles
to the rig...where it ignited.

The crew tried to activate the BOP,

but it didn't work.

The well was blowing
out uncontrollably.

400 miles away is
America's oil capital - Houston.

When disaster struck,
word spread across the city.

BP needed help.

The call came from a fellow

that we knew very well within BP

and he just said that it
was a very significant event

and was going to require our
very best and most talented people

and probably for
an extended duration.

Pat Campbell is a
veteran well-killer.

Over 40 years in the oil business,
he's become a legend.

He's defeated blown-out wells
all over the world.

Facing the deepest blowout in
history, Pat Campbell had no doubt
what was at stake.

If there was not a solution that
could be invoked very quickly it
would be an extremely serious event.

Daybreak
brought no end to the inferno.

For BP, stopping the blowout
was now a race against time.

The search for a solution focused
a mile below the burning rig...

on the device on the sea bed that
should have prevented the accident.

The BOP contains four devices
to close the well if there is an
uncontrolled surge of oil and gas.

The last resort
is the blind shear ram -

two blades powered by hydraulics
that can sever the drill pipe
and permanently seal the well.

The blowout preventer is like
a giant valve on the sea floor

and if we could simply
close the valve,

all of the flow would've
been stemmed at that point.

There would have been no
more pollution to the sea.

Even now nobody knows why the
Deepwater Horizon's BOP failed
on the night of the accident.

Back then BP's hopes of a quick fix

rested on bringing the 325-tonne
device back to life.

Any other solution would
require much more time, much more.

The BOP,

one would think,
HAD to be the solution.

Events began moving quicker
than anyone could control.

The Deepwater Horizon
had been burning for two days.

We hadn't been able to start to
provide live feed from one of
the vessels into the command posts

that we were working out of
and someone pointed out that the
vessel was starting to sink.

And at that point,
everyone turned to watch the TV

that was showing the image and there
was pretty much silence in the room.

Charlie Henry is a
government scientist.

He was on a conference call
with the coastguard and BP.

I think all of us knew that
we could only hope for the best
and fear for the worst.

But watching that vessel sink,
I think, did take a lot of the,
you know, hope out of us.

In the first days of the crisis,
one of the men running BP's response

had little inkling
what battles lay ahead.

In your mind you're thinking,
"This may be a few days,
maybe even a few weeks."

We didn't actually believe
it would take that long.

Until the accident,
it seemed the oil men had

tamed the harsh environment in which
the Deepwater Horizon was drilling.

The deep water creates some
really unique challenges.

Not the least of which is you can't
physically go down
and touch anything.

Everything you do in deep water
is remote.

And it's done with sensing of one
kind or another. It's a very,
very technically intense industry.

But there had never been a
blowout a mile below the waves.

It would prove to be a technological
challenge beyond any faced before.

The rig Doug is visiting today
was brought here after the accident.

The wreckage of the Deepwater
Horizon lies a mile below his feet.

The day after the rig sank
BP sent down a remote
operated vehicle

fitted with cameras
to investigate the well.

When the 68,000-tonne rig hit the
sea bed it caused a storm of silt.

When we got to the bottom we
couldn't see anything. But what
these ROV's do have is sonar.

So we were actually
using the sonar for our eyes.

The ROV began its mission
at the wellhead.

We don't see anything
above the blowout preventer.

We don't see the riser, and nor
do we see oil or gas coming out.

BP believed they had
made a momentous discovery.

Of course, at that point we thought
the flow had stopped.

We thought this horrible
accident maybe is coming to an end.

BP believed the blowout
preventer had fired as the rig sank.

But the real discovery
was yet to be made.

We started then circling the
blowout preventer with the ROV,
and that's when we discovered

the riser was still attached,
but bent over at 90 degrees.

So then we weren't certain any more.

Maybe it could be flowing.

The ROV then flew along
the riser pipe, 5,000 feet.

When it fell onto the sea bed
the riser had created a trench.

The sonar picked up
something away to the right.

We go up there, there's a piece of
drill pipe sticking out of the mud

with oil coming out, not a large
amount, but oil coming out.

And that was our very first
indication we still have, we may
still have a blowout occurring.

The riser was bent over
like a roller coaster.

It travelled 1,500 feet up
in the water,

and then turned back on itself
pointing towards the well.

Sonar led engineers to another
site on the left of the riser.

Here we see what looks to be a broken
end of the riser, but now it looks
like much more oil is coming out.

That's when we found

our two leaks. Now we realised the
well is still flowing.

And the enormity of the technical
challenge exploded at that point.

To make matters worse, the company's
hopes of a quick fix were dying.

In the crisis centre in Houston,

engineers had been trying to
remotely activate the
blowout preventer.

Nothing was working.

Out of options, an explosive
charge was detonated inside the BOP.

The BOP rocked a little bit,
that tells me that it did fire,

and when that didn't seal it off,

I said, "Well, we have a, we have
a really big problem here,
really significant problem."

What were you
thinking at that point?

"Ooh, this is going to be bad."

Fear began stalking the Gulf Coast.

The region is one of
America's richest fisheries.

As oil began to threaten
livelihoods and the coast line,

despair loomed large.

And the American Government
began turning the screw on BP.

Our job is to keep the boot
on the neck of British Petroleum

to carry out the responsibilities
that they have both under the law

and contractually, to move forward
and to stop this spill.

Now the stakes
could not be higher for BP.

There were times when it felt like
the world didn't trust us.

There were times when it felt like
people doubted our motive.

One of the biggest questions now
was how much oil was flowing
from the blown-out well?

We're joined now by Doug Suttles,

the Chief Operating Officer for
Exploration and Production for BP...

On day eight of the crisis,
Doug Suttles appeared on television.

He put a figure on the size
of the oil leak.

What we can say based on what
we're picking up on the surface,

it looks like something between
one and 5,000 barrels a day

is a reasonable estimate.

But President Obama's point man
on the spill knew it was far worse.

What was going through my mind
at the time had nothing to do
with one or 5,000.

I was so far beyond that,

about what the potential
implications of the spill were.

Admiral Thad Allen
was a key figure in this crisis.

He'd been brought in by
the President to make sure BP
lived up to their responsibilities.

He dismissed the figure of 5,000
barrels of oil leaking per day.

I knew it was far more than that.

We were trying to bring as many
resources to the scene as we could

and while all of that
was interesting to me, it wasn't
consequential to my decision-making.

The inaccurate figures
had come from a government agency.

These were coming from
well-intentioned people

that thought they understood
what was going on, or were trying to
answer questions from the press.

If you don't have a number,
that's a problem, if you have
a number, that's a problem.

Charlie Henry had a problem
of his own.

Part of his job was to predict
where the oil might go.

A job made far harder because
the oil was flowing from a well

a mile below
the surface of the ocean.

Part of the consequence
from the way the oil was released

was that the oil
was not at the surface

as a very small point source of
pollution - it was widely scattered.

How do you then respond to an oil
slick that is initially very large.

And it was very large because
as those droplets drift to the
surface, they continue to spread.

There was no single spill to target
with skimming vessels and boom.

Instead, the weather and ocean
currents were driving patches of oil

across a front line of hundreds
of miles of marshes and beaches.

It equated more
to trying to hold the line.

You didn't know where the skirmishes
were going to be and you had to
defend the entire line.

That put a tremendous resource
requirement on us in terms of boom,

skimming equipment and people,
and that made it more like a war.

BP was said to be spending
six million dollars a day
on efforts to clean up the spill.

In the year before the explosion,
the company's profits
were nearly 14 billion dollars.

As BP's nightmare deepened,
the company's leaders hoped
its vast wealth could now save it.

Very early on in the event,

a conversation I had
with our CEO, Tony Hayward,

he told me I had every resource
of the group available to me -

money, people, anything I needed.

There were literally
no limits to the response.

No limits to the amount of money?
No.

But all the world's riches
might not be enough.

This was fast becoming
the well from hell.

Pat Campbell was now BP's
key well control adviser.

In 40 years battling blowouts, he
had never faced anything like this.

20 years ago, he was in Kuwait,

fighting 800 oil wells
deliberately set on fire
as the first Gulf War ended.

The work that had to be done
to take care of 'em

was about 1,000% easier

than the BP well.

One well.

They put out
just as much oil and gas.

Difference was,
they were on the surface.

Difference with this one
is it's 5,000 feet down.

Nobody had imagined disaster could
strike a mile below the waves.

Now it had,

there was no plan to fix it.

This was no ordinary oil spill.

This was closer to Apollo 13
than it was to the Exxon Valdez,

When I say that, it has to do with
given an enormous technological
challenge that was not anticipated,

without all the proper engineering,

the parts to the system
all being available immediately,

and it's kind of throwing everything
you've got on the table
and seeing what you can do with it.

On the very edge of Louisiana
is Port Fourchon.

It would be the site
of the first improvised effort
to fight the blowout.

BP needed a method to tame the well
that could be put in to action
urgently.

There was one idea
that had worked before.

We were thinking about
what was done

on the next largest blowout that
ever occurred in the Gulf of Mexico,

and that was a well
called the Ixtoc I.

The Ixtoc well, 43 miles offshore
in the Gulf of Mexico,
blew out on 3rd of June.

All attempts to cap it have failed.

In 1979, well belonging to
the Mexican Government blew out,

unleashing one of the worst spills
in history.

Legendary well-killer
Red Adair was called in
to try to contain the oil.

Pat Campbell used to work with him.

What Red did was built a dome
and put it over the well

and then was able to collect
most all of the oil and gas.

The Ixtoc blowout
was in 160 feet of water.

Nobody knew if placing a dome over
a blowout at 5,000 feet could work.

Our case may be
not quite that simplistic,

but we could apply
that similar logic and
we could do that pretty quickly.

In Port Fourchon,
Pat Campbell has a yard.

The hunt was on for something
that could be pressed
in to service as a dome.

This is a cofferdam.

It was built to shelter divers
working below the seabed on damaged
oil wells in shallow water.

There was another one 15 feet
taller and ten feet wider.

The plan was to place the larger
cofferdam over the leak
at the end of the riser pipe.

Most of the oil would be captured
inside the cofferdam

and funnelled up through a hole
in the roof
to a vessel on the surface.

Jason Holvey worked
to turn the cofferdams into vessels
that could collect oil.

They were probably 50% complete.

We would have had a significant
amount of time savings

converting these
into a containment chamber

rather than starting from scratch.

The cofferdams had to be modified
to cope with conditions
at the sea floor.

We had to completely re-work
the internal structures
of these cofferdams that we built.

We had to re-establish
eight-inch structural T-beams

all the way round
the perimeter of the inside

to withstand the pressures
that we would see at that depth.

We didn't know exactly
where it was going to go,
or what conditions there were,

so we strengthened the walls
all the way around
and strengthened the corners

so that we could put a door in any
of the four faces at a later date

when it was deemed we had
a location to install
this pollution containment chamber.

As his team finished work
on the cofferdam

there were hopes it would collect
as much as 80% of the oil
flowing from the well.

But there was foreboding too.

A mile down, the well was releasing
very hot oil and methane gas,

up to 300 degrees Fahrenheit.

Under great pressure,
gas hitting the cold seawater
can turn to hydrates,

a substance similar to ice.

This could disable the cofferdam.

We knew that there was a possibility
of the formation of hydrates,

so we planned for injection ports
to be installed in the dome.

At the top of the dome,
there's a green piece of pipe
sticking in the side of the dome.

That is an injection port for
the methanol, which is an inhibitor
to the formation of hydrates.

It had taken 18 days
to get this far.

The battle to contain the oil
now depended
on outsmarting the hydrates.

We knew where we were
on the hydrate formation curve.

It was kind of a 50/50 deal.

It was worth a shot.

Engineers watched as the cofferdam
sank into the depths.

It weighed 87 tonnes in the water.

It took more than six hours
to reach the bottom.

As we got within a couple of feet
of being on the riser,

it would not go down
of its own volition any further

and we knew that that could not be
a result of the force of the flow,

because the force of the flow
wasn't great enough.

Oil was seen spewing
from the bottom of the cofferdam.

We realised that it didn't appear
that there was any more
hydrocarbons coming through

or out the top of the cofferdam
at that point.

So what's causing this?

It was something
nobody had anticipated.

As the cofferdam was lowered
through the ocean,

the current had carried the plume
of oil and gas
directly in to its path.

The cofferdam
was collecting hydrocarbons
from almost near the surface,

all the way down
to the 5,000 foot of water depth
where it would eventually land.

And because of that, that whole
trip, once it hit about 2,300 foot,

the cofferdam was filling with
ice and hydrate from that point.

So from 2,300 feet down
to 5,000 feet,

we essentially plugged the cofferdam
before it ever got on the bottom.

These images of the cofferdam
have never been seen before.

They show the hydrates that formed
around the outside of the structure,

and built up inside,

blocking up the hole in the roof
that would have allowed
the oil to stream through it.

This natural phenomenon had defeated
the best efforts of the engineers.

The excessive rapidly forming
hydrates didn't allow us time

to get our methanol lines hooked up,
to prevent those hydrates
from forming.

A deepwater chemical reaction
had scuppered BP's plan
to contain 80% of the oil.

Back at the command centre,
we're all like...

..wow,
who would have thought that?

At the end of it, everybody was
feeling probably a bit demoralised,

or a bit depressed
over the outcome.

I think it's fair to say that were
all taken by surprise on that issue.

Yet on the other piece of it,

it was kind of like,
we're not giving up now.

We didn't predict it.
So there you are.

Should you have done? Yeah.

For BP, all bets were now off.

Spray on. Sprays on.

Since the early days of the crisis,

BP had been spraying dispersants
onto oil on the surface
of the ocean.

It is standard procedure
for fighting spills.

But as they struggled
to get a grip of the blowout,

BP began considering
using dispersants very differently.

We done?

We're done. 1,700 gallons, almost.

I received an e-mail
from a colleague in the industry

who works for another
oil and gas company,

and he told me that he had been
talking to some of their scientists

and one of them had said that if we
applied dispersants at the source,

down at the well
on the seabed, that they would be
tremendously more effective

than applying them as traditionally
done with aircraft onto the surface.

Doug Suttles' idea was audacious

and controversial.

Using dispersants underwater
had never been done before.

It required
the government's approval.

Doug Suttles stopped me
in the hall and said,

"Charlie, we got this idea that
came in from a retired scientist
from Exxon, actually."

Charlie looked at me and it clearly
had made an impact on him.

And he said, "You know, we looked
at that eight years ago

"and I think it has a lot of merit,
I think this might work."

BP's hope was that applying
dispersants a mile under the ocean

would help keep the oil
from the shore.

We started to pull a few people
together and went to a whiteboard

and started outlining things that
might be beneficial and some of
the things that may be of concern.

Doug Suttles got things moving.

I got on the phone and called
our guys in our operations group

and I said, "Get me 30,000 gallons
of dispersant on a boat right now
and head it out to the well site."

And they did that.
Dispersants CAN be toxic.

No tests had ever been done on how
they would affect the deep ocean.

We would never have been able
to receive a permit

to inject dispersant in oil
down at 5,000 feet to study,
to track how it moves -

it's just a risk we wouldn't take
for the sake of science.

Testing took place
in the real world.

Thousands of gallons of dispersants
were pumped into the oil
flowing from the well.

On day 26 of the crisis,
the government gave BP the go-ahead
to use dispersants at depth.

It was a big leap in the dark.

It was a big leap of faith
that there would be no impact.

Dr Samantha Joye is an oceanographer

who has studied the ecosystem of
the Gulf of Mexico for many years.

She has been investigating
the impact of the oil
spill on the ocean.

Dr Joye was flabbergasted

by the decision to use
dispersants a mile down.

There are a lot of
unknowns with dispersants.

And the tests that have been
done on dispersants with various
organisms are very limited.

This is a...
This is a large system, um,

it's a very complicated food web,
lots of different organisms.

It's impossible to predict
how these various components of the

natural system are going to respond
to dispersants.

By the end of the crisis, BP
would use nearly two million
gallons of dispersants...

Nearly half that
amount was underwater.

The company says it doesn't
know what the long-term
consequences will be.

34 days into to the crisis...

as BP struggled to
stop the flow of oil,

the company faced
growing political heat.

If we find that they are not doing
what they are supposed to be doing,

we will push them out of the way
appropriately.

How humiliating was that for you?

Well, I have to say, I didn't focus
on those comments to a great deal.

Because if the Government chose
to take an action like that,
I guess they could choose to do that.

Suggesting BP could be shunted
aside was the latest move in
a vicious political game.

We always have the legal authority

to say we're going to come in
and take this over.

Whether we have the
capability, competency

or the capacity to
do it is another point.

I said on many occasions when asked
whether or not we should replace BP,
my answer was, "With who?"

But there was a sense that BP was
being seen as the problem, not the
solution by those in government?

I am in government
and there was no solution without BP.

But Admiral Allen's
boss had a problem.

Nearly half the American
public thought the President
was handling the spill badly.

Keen to shift the focus,
BP were an obvious target.

Nobody is more upset than me
because ultimately,

like any President,
when this happens on your watch...

..then every day you are thinking,
"How does this get solved?"

These were desperate times for BP.

37 days into the crisis,
the company was about to stake their

reputation on a surreal new strategy
called Top Kill.

It had little to do
with heavy engineering...

and everything to do
with household junk.

The plan was to pump thousands of
these items in to the well to try
to restrict the fierce flow of oil.

Pat Campbell oversaw
testing these materials.

We have a number of the materials
here that were used in the
so called Junk Shot.

The bridging agent materials that
were pumped in to the well bore.

The tennis ball because it is a
resilient material - it will
pass through a constricted area

and perhaps expand in to the place
that it needs to be in order to
try to start forming a seal.

Also then, very, very hard
materials.

Although they are not made
of a metallic substance,

they have a hardness that
approaches that of steel.

It was hoped the combination
of hard and soft materials
would restrict the flow of oil.

The next phase of the kill would
rely on vast quantities of mud.

Not any old mud.

But drilling mud...

formed by mixing
water and a mineral -

barium sulphate.

The result is more dense than oil.

If enough drilling mud could
be pumped in to the well,

its weight should
permanently overcome the blowout.

As unlikely as it seems,
Top Kill is a proven weapon in
the well-killer's arsenal.

But could mud and junk
actually kill this well?

With multiple small flow paths,
there was a good chance that it

would, although when you look
at the flow from the ROV's video,

it suggested that that was not
a number of small high pressure
leaks, it was a significant

flow path area. What was
your sense of the likely outcome?

Very low probability.

BP's Chief Executive was giving the
world a very different impression.

We rate the probability of success
as somewhere between 60 and 70%.

I thought, wow,
that's very ambitious.

Having heard BP's announcement,
Pat Campbell was puzzled.

As the Top Kill neared,
he questioned the company...

Were they being too confident?

BP didn't think so.

Well, OK, they don't think so,
why did they say that, then?

This is not precise science,
you know, and for many reasons,

for one of which none of us knew the
exact condition inside that blowout
preventer and inside that riser.

So different people had opinions.

But he was involved in the testing,
I mean, he wasn't just one of your
experts, he was the key expert.

Right, but I also think here
it's important to think about,
whether that opinion

of probability is high or low. I
don't believe it changed and would

have changed,
the decision to attempt it.

A mile beneath the waves BP had
placed a vast container of junk.

From there the junk was pumped
along a pipe...

into to the Blowout Preventer
and down in to the well.

It was then followed by a surge of
mud pumped from a vessel on the
surface, straight in behind it.

The hope was, together
they would seal the well.

The early indications from the job
were, this looks like it's working.

And so the...

Your hopes are building.

You're actually
thinking, "Maybe today.

"Maybe today is the day we're going
to get this well to stop flowing."

But in reality the pressure
was too great for the junk...

it would not stay in the well.

We could not get a bridge,
we could not build a bridge

that would sufficiently restrict
the...the well flow.

For two days BP pressed on...

running five more
cycles of junk and mud.

Every time they
stopped pumping mud in...

everything came straight
back out of the well...

including oil.

Our confidence was starting to slip.

Clearly it was, it was not
working as quickly
as we thought it would work.

And by the third attempt we realised
this actually wasn't going to work.

A barrel of mud can cost $500.

Around 28,000 barrels were pumped
before Top Kill was finally
declared a failure.

Would you have stopped
Top Kill earlier?

Personally, yes. Yes, but
just based on my experience.

BP had very publicly staked their
reputation on Top Kill working.

Wasn't your upbeat assessment of the
chances of Top Kill working more
a question of PR than science?

No, I don't believe that at all.
I don't believe that at all.

I mean, we were more worried

about people
having too much confidence.

In the dark days after
Top Kill's failure, Doug Suttles
made an astonishing admission.

This scares everybody,
the fact that we can't

make this well stop flowing, or we
haven't succeeded in that so far.

What did you mean?

Well, this fear that this well just
would never stop flowing, you know,

there was a lot of hope

on Top Kill, not just in BP but
I think in the public at large.

Was that your darkest hour?

Well, the darkest hour was clearly
the phone call and 11 people missing.

But after the accident, in the
response, I think that was,
that was the toughest moment.

That felt like a
real kick in the gut.

Now the crisis entered a
new and dangerous phase.

BP realised they were facing a
threat that could wreck their
hopes of ever fixing the blowout.

Some of the data gathered during
Top Kill suggested that we may
not have integrity of the well.

And both ourselves and the
Government came to that conclusion.

Now BP contemplated
a nightmare scenario.

If too much pressure built up
in the wellbore, there could
be a catastrophic rupture.

Oil would force its way up through
the seabed - impossible to stop.

Everywhere along the line,
one of the premises was that
we would do no harm, or any

irreversible harm, taking no action
that would increase the risk that
we would have a total well failure.

Now they took a
significant decision...

not to risk trying to cap the well.

We shifted at that point
to focusing on an open

containment system because it didn't
run the risk of creating a broach.

In the yard in Port Fourchon,
BP's team were busy building new

containment devices
known as Top Hats.

Put that one in between number three
and number seven.

They would collect oil without
building up pressure
inside the well.

But before any of them could be put
in place, the riser pipe connected

to the well would
have to be removed.

A complex operation never attempted
before, a mile below the waves.

The challenges of cutting the riser
itself are the physical,

how do you go in and
cut a 21-inch diameter,

one-and-a-half inch wall,
steel casing and make sure

it happens in 5,000 foot of water?

These are sections of riser pipe
from the Deepwater Horizon.

And this is what you need to cut
one. A pipe-cutting shear.

Nickname of it, that a
lot of us like to call it, is a Bass.

A lot of people think of a little
fish, swimming in the water,

but Bass actually stands
for Big Ass Shear.

The shear
is usually used to demolish derelict
oil rigs in shallow water.

Nobody knew whether it was capable
of making the cut to the riser
a mile down.

Before sending the shear out
to the well site, Joe Tyrell
and his team had to test it.

She's done now, she's done.

There's a lot of events that happen
in history that are well-documented,
huge events, man walking on the moon.

Knowing, at that moment, that I was
going to be a part of such an event,
you can't really describe the feeling

unless you actually get that
phone call and they say, "Hey, Joe,
you're going to be a part of it."

But it's one thing
to make the cut in the yard...

quite another to sever the
pipe a mile below the waves.

In Houston, BP's engineers were
preparing to remove the riser.

The plan was for the shear to
cut away the weight

of the riser around 45 feet,
along from the blowout preventer.

A second, smoother cut would be
made by a saw just above the BOP.

Joe Tyrell arrived at the hive,

the company's crisis centre,
at around three am.

When he saw the riser
he was surprised.

I just looked at everybody and said,
"Hey". You know, I thought they
were cutting these lines off.

Running along the riser pipe
are two smaller pipes.

Joe Tyrell had run his own tests
suggesting the shear could not
cut all three pipes together.

At that point I got a little
apprehensive but, you know,
give it a shot.

They brought the
shear into position, they kept
looking at me,

I was standing in the background,
and kept giving them the thumbs up,
"Good to go, good to go."

Then at that point they checked the
rigging one last time
and said, "Cut."

But it was clear from the start
things weren't looking good.

Well,
we got to 15 minutes, still

no cut, 20 minutes, still no cut,
and at that point I just told them,
it's not going to make it.

We've done open and shut and tried
to chew at this long enough and
it wasn't going to make the cut.

The first attempt to
cut the riser had failed.

They came to me and they said what
do we need to do to make this cut.

And of course
knowing how we did the tests here

in the yard, I said we've got to get
those choke and kill lines which are
pieces of pipe on the outside, away.

So engineers started cutting away
the external pipes on the riser.

I went to the hotel that night
and I was kind of down.

Even though I told them I didn't
think it was going to make the cut
in that scenario.

I still felt like we failed.

You know and now the
whole world knows we failed.

The next day Joe Tyrell and the
team tried to make the cut again.

Five minutes go by and you can see
it's starting to slowly close and
slowly move, and you're getting

up to eight nine minutes, and
now you're thinking OK now is where
we need to start seeing something.

We didn't see anything.

We kind of opened and
shut the jaws a couple of times,

that kind of, kind of gives
it a different bite on the riser.
About the third time we did that,

now we're up to about 12 minutes,
and I'm thinking, "Here we go."

I said just go ahead
and give it full power right now.

And at that point, I
was kind of looking down and saying
"Oh, come on, come on, come on."

Then somebody yelled in
the background, everything was
just quiet inside this room.

And I could hear somebody in
the background say, "I see oil."

I looked up at the one screen
and you could see a little
bit of oil starting to flow.

At that point I knew, knowing
how the shear works, it started
to shear the riser, and within

a minute after that, it was just more
and more and more oil coming out and
then kind of a mushroom cloud of oil.

And you see the piece
of riser fall away.

And then it was just jubilation,
I mean everybody was clapping in the
room, saying good job, high five

and everything, and I pretty much
got goose bumps and just had a big
smile on my face at that point, so.

You could have told me somebody ran
over my dog, and I probably wouldn't
have lost my smile!

Now BP faced a new problem.

With the riser removed
and the top hat in place,

the question was how much oil
could the company actually collect.

Their plan relied on a
vessel on the surface,

the Enterprise.

The enterprise was only able
to collect 18,000 barrels of
hydrocarbons, oil, per day.

The well at that point was making
in excess of 18,000
barrels of oil per day.

So we knew we were at the
maximum capacity of the Enterprise.

To make things worse the top hat
could siphon off more oil than
the Enterprise could contain.

Some valves that we had on

the device had to remain open.

We had hoped that we would
be able to close them

and force all the oil and gas to go

back to the surface, to the vessels,
but it just simply wasn't to be,
the volume was too great.

The President chose not
to hide his frustration.

Make no mistake, we will fight

this spill with everything we've got
for as long as it takes.

We will make BP pay for the damage
their company has caused.

Most oil in the
Gulf is piped ashore.

But that wasn't an
option with this well.

BP were struggling to bring vessels
able to store oil to the scene.

Shouldn't you have had more capacity
on the surface to store the oil

that could've been collected by
the top hat than you did?

We found ourselves
with the situation we had,

and all we could
do was assemble the equipment

and the capabilities
that were available on the day.

We were trying to
assemble all the capacity we could.

So we had things coming in
from actually literally
all over the world.

Then the nightmare deepened.

The official calculation of
how much oil was flowing
from the well went up,

way beyond the
amount being collected.

As they were trying to produce
oil and bring it to the surface,
the flow rate changed.

When we established that the flow
rate was probably somewhere between
35 and 60,000 barrels a day,

we then went to BP and
said, "You have to give us a system

"that is capable of containing the
flow rate each day so we need
a system

"that can contain
60,000 barrels."

BP increased the amount of oil
they were collecting to around
25,000 barrels per day.

There
was one idea that could perhaps stop
the flow of oil from the well.

An idea that BP and the
Government had considered too risky.

Since the crisis began,
Pat Campbell had been championing

just such a device
to permanently close in the well.

It will not leak
because of its pressure capability.

It gives me several options and
I can conduct the flow from the
well back to vessels on the surface.

Or I can shut it in.

That's what I would
do on the ground.

And the question becomes,

"Well, why wouldn't I
do that underwater?"

The capping stack would
form a complete seal with
the blowout preventer.

Inside were three rams or valves.

They could be left open
to allow pressure,

along with oil, to be released.

Or the valves could be closed

and the well shut in.

What the risks about
installing that capping stack?

Whether or not the entire system
could withstand the pressure,

the condition of the well,
the BOP and everything else.

After Top Kill,
BP had been afraid the capping
stack might blow the well.

Now the company had new
information and new confidence.

While we were assessing,
do we really have a problem
with the integrity of the well,

our own work and the Government's
work showed that actually we
probably had integrity of the well.

And that's what actually then
brought the capping stack
back into play.

Was it a big bet?

Was it one of these things
where you're taking maybe,

an additional risk for a bigger
reward in this particular scenario?

Absolutely.

Dawn in the Gulf of Mexico.

Day 84 of the crisis.

Four plans had been tried.

Millions of barrels of oil
had flowed in to the ocean.

Day 84 was D-day for BP.

A day of hope
tempered by trepidation.

Nobody knew for sure whether
the well would be able to
withstand the mighty stack.

It was sent down
through a mile of ocean

At 7pm it was moved in to position
on top of the blowout preventer.

We were watching on a minute by
minute, the pressure readings

and as long as it stayed in
tolerance, everybody was saying,
"Way to go."

After a day of deliberations,
the three valves on the stack were
closed one by one.

Every turn of the choke,

the flow decreased,
decreased, decreased, decreased.

The one job that went
better than any others.

Every single step went to plan.

2.25 pm on 15th July and I'll
never forget that date or time -
the flow was stopped.

This is the moment
when the deepwater disaster
was finally ended.

BP's battle with the well
had gripped the world.

It had involved
hundreds of engineers
and cost millions of dollars.

It had taken 87 days.

It was one of those
emotional moments that,
you know, it's hard to describe.

Because, er, there was a piece of
me that was, er, it was just total
relief, finally,

after, you know,
87 days, we finally have done
something here and were successful.

When I got the news
that we had closed the stack in

and no more oil was coming out,
that was a good day.

People were wanting to celebrate,
people were wanting to cry.

I mean, it was just that whole mix
in the room at that point in time.

That was a day that we'd been waiting
for, for a very long time.

Now the well has been defeated,

the world is seeking answers.

Why did an oil company proud of
its ability to operate in the
planet's most harsh environments,

have no plan when disaster struck?

Some people would say
you were unprepared?

I can appreciate that criticism.
I mean the fact that the
well flowed for 80 something days

before it stopped,
the fact that oil did get to shore.

The human impact here is horrific.

Would I have liked to have had
the capability we have now
with containment?

Absolutely, on 20th April.

But I didn't have that
at the time, I do now.

And it's critical we hang on to that
and we continue to learn from that.

Could BP have capped the
well faster than they did?

There is now a debate about
whether the blowout could
have been ended sooner.

The three ram capping stack
could've been fitted earlier.

Why wasn't it?

Really, all work on that
initiative was stopped.

BP instructed us to to stop.

Why did BP stop work
on the three ram capping stack?

Well, I don't think we ever did.

I don't think we ever stopped,
er the work on the capping stack.

The debate is about whether the
right balance was struck between
capturing oil as it escaped

and capping the well,
with the risk it might rupture.

It's sort of theoretical
about how much earlier
it could have been ready

but I would say three weeks
is a comfortable guess.

So there was three weeks where
oil was pouring into the ocean
that could've been avoided?

Well, theoretically or possibly
could've been avoided, yes.

Well, you have to think about this.

So what's our motivation here? Our
motivation is to bring this accident
to an end as quick as we can.

And secondly to minimise the impact.

And core to minimising the impact
is capturing every drop we can.

So we were going to pursue
every option, and we were going

to deploy every option that
would maximise the capture.

We had no incentive not to do
that, it doesn't make any sense.

For years to come,
exactly what happened

during these 87 days will be
studied by scientists and engineers,

as the oil industry looks for
lessons about how to deal with
any future deepwater disaster.

This rig is on station
above the vanquished well,

keeping a watchful eye.

The oil men were
confounded by this well.

Most wells when we are around them,
we're hopeful that they'll produce
oil or gas in large quantities.

This one,
you know, one of the best days of all
is when we buried it in cement.

This is not a well we like.

The business of extracting
oil from beneath the
planet's oceans will go on.

Below Doug Suttles is the oil
field in which the Deepwater
Horizon was drilling,

Mississippi Canyon 252.

What future
plans does BP have for MC252?

Well, right now we don't have plans
for MC252. Some way down the road

that will be discussed
and considered.

But it is possible that BP
would produce oil from MC252?

I think what's possible is the field
could be developed.

When BP's well blew out
there was no plan to fix it.

It took the engineers five
attempts and 87 days before the
flow of oil was finally stopped.

And the well encased in concrete.

I used to write on
wells with spray paint

or with chalk, you know,
and write a name on it.

If you were able to,
what would you write on this well?

O-B-A-W.

One Bad-Ass Well!