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The explosion

Leaking oil.

• Cleanup efforts
• Aftermath and impact
• Charges, settlements, and penalties
• Charges against individuals
• The civil trial
• Environmental costs
• The Deepwater Horizon oil spill in pictures

What caused the Deepwater Horizon oil spill?

How did the deepwater horizon oil spill affect birds.

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Deepwater Horizon oil spill

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• National Ocean Service - Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill
• Center for Biological Diversity - A Deadly Toll
• National Center for Biotechnology Information - PubMed Central - Improving the Integration of Restoration and Conservation in Marine and Coastal Ecosystems: Lessons from the Deepwater Horizon Disaster
• Texas Parks and Wildlife - Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill
• Marine Mammal Commission - Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill in the Gulf of Mexico
• Smithsonian Ocean - Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill Milestones
• Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2010 - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up)
• Table Of Contents

When did the Deepwater Horizon oil spill happen?

The Deepwater Horizon oil spill began on April 20, 2010, when an explosion damaged the Deepwater Horizon oil rig. The rig's sinking on April 22 began the discharge of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

Who owned the rig responsible for the Deepwater Horizon oil spill?

The oil rig involved in the Deepwater Horizon oil spill was owned and operated by offshore oil-drilling company Transocean and leased by the oil company BP .

The Deepwater Horizon oil spill occurred after a surge of natural gas blasted through a concrete core recently installed to seal an oil well for later use. Once released, the natural gas traveled up a riser to the platform of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig that was over the well, where it ignited, killing 11 workers and injuring 17.

Birds were particularly vulnerable to the effects of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Many died from ingesting oil or because it interfered with their ability to regulate their body temperatures. Brown pelicans and laughing gulls were among the species most affected. A study showed that up to 800,000 birds were thought to have died.

Deepwater Horizon oil spill , largest marine oil spill in history, caused by an April 20, 2010, explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig—located in the Gulf of Mexico , approximately 41 miles (66 km) off the coast of Louisiana —and its subsequent sinking on April 22.

The Deepwater Horizon rig, owned and operated by offshore-oil-drilling company Transocean and leased by oil company BP , was situated in the Macondo oil prospect in the Mississippi Canyon, a valley in the continental shelf . The oil well over which it was positioned was located on the seabed 4,993 feet (1,522 metres) below the surface and extended approximately 18,000 feet (5,486 metres) into the rock . On the night of April 20 a surge of natural gas blasted through a concrete core recently installed by contractor Halliburton in order to seal the well for later use. It later emerged through documents released by Wikileaks that a similar incident had occurred on a BP-owned rig in the Caspian Sea in September 2008. Both cores were likely too weak to withstand the pressure because they were composed of a concrete mixture that used nitrogen gas to accelerate curing.

Once released by the fracture of the core, the natural gas traveled up the Deepwater rig’s riser to the platform, where it ignited, killing 11 workers and injuring 17. The rig capsized and sank on the morning of April 22, rupturing the riser, through which drilling mud had been injected in order to counteract the upward pressure of oil and natural gas. Without any opposing force , oil began to discharge into the gulf. The volume of oil escaping the damaged well—originally estimated by BP to be about 1,000 barrels per day—was thought by U.S. government officials to have peaked at more than 60,000 barrels per day.

Although BP attempted to activate the rig’s blowout preventer (BOP), a fail-safe mechanism designed to close the channel through which oil was drawn, the device malfunctioned. Forensic analysis of the BOP completed the following year determined that a set of massive blades known as blind shear rams—designed to slice through the pipe carrying oil—had malfunctioned because the pipe had bent under the pressure of the rising gas and oil. (A 2014 report by the U.S. Chemical Safety Board claimed that the blind shear rams had activated sooner than previously thought and may have actually punctured the pipe.)

Efforts in May to place a containment dome over the largest leak in the broken riser were thwarted by the buoyant action of gas hydrates —gas molecules in an ice matrix—formed by the reaction of natural gas and cold water. When an attempt to employ a “ top kill,” whereby drilling mud was pumped into the well to stanch the flow of oil, also failed, BP in early June turned to an apparatus called the Lower Marine Riser Package (LMRP) cap. With the damaged riser shorn from the LMRP—the top segment of the BOP—the cap was lowered into place. Though fitted loosely over the BOP and allowing some oil to escape, the cap enabled BP to siphon approximately 15,000 barrels of oil per day to a tanker . The addition of an ancillary collection system comprising several devices, also tapped into the BOP, increased the collection rate to approximately 25,000 barrels of oil a day.

In early July the LMRP cap was removed for several days so that a more permanent seal could be installed; this capping stack was in place by July 12. Though the leak had slowed, it was estimated by a government-commissioned panel of scientists that 4,900,000 barrels of oil had already leaked into the gulf. Only about 800,000 barrels had been captured. On August 3 BP conducted a “ static kill,” a procedure in which drilling mud was pumped into the well through the BOP . Though similar to the failed top kill, mud could be injected at much lower pressures during the static kill because of the stabilizing influence of the capping stack. The defective BOP and the capping stack were removed in early September and replaced by a functioning BOP.

The success of these procedures cleared the way for a “ bottom kill,” considered to be the most likely means of permanently sealing the leak. This entailed pumping cement through a channel—known as a relief well—that paralleled and eventually intersected the original well. Construction of two such wells had begun in May. On September 17 the bottom kill maneuver was successfully executed through the first relief well. The second had been intended to serve as a backup and was not completed. Two days later, following a series of pressure tests, it was announced that the well was completely sealed.

Claims by several research groups that subsurface plumes of dispersed hydrocarbons had been detected in May were initially dismissed by BP and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). However, it was verified in June that the plumes were in fact from the Deepwater spill. The effect of the microscopic oil droplets on the ecosystem was unknown, though their presence, along with that of a layer of oil several inches thick discovered on portions of the seafloor in September, cast doubt on earlier predictions about the speed with which the discharged oil would dissipate. Bacteria that had adapted to consuming naturally occurring gas and oil seeping from the seabed were thought to have consumed a portion of it.

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The BP Oil Disaster, 10 Years Later

Debbie Elliott

It's been 10 years since the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history: the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Here's how the Gulf Coast is recovering.

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Teaching Resources Library

BP and the Deepwater Horizon Disaster of 2010

Christina Ingersoll

Richard M. Locke

Cate Reavis

Apr 3, 2012

The explosion and sinking of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig on April 20, 2010, resulted from a series of events and decisions involving employees of BP and its contractors. While there does not appear to be one clear culprit or reason that led to the disaster, the case explores issues of organization, information, and decision-making, as well as the ability or inability of individuals to voice their values as contributing factors.

Learning Objectives

To engage students in what it means to act ethically in today’s business world; understand that decisions are strongly influenced by broader factors such as culture, organizational design, and decision-makers’ values; and think critically about ethical dilemmas and how to voice their values in response to those dilemmas.

Appropriate for the Following Course(s) 

leadership, ethics, corporate responsibility, operations management

BP and the Deepwater Horizon Disaster of 2010 

TEACHING NOTE*

*TEACHING NOTES AND SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIALS ARE ONLY AVAILABLE TO EDUCATORS WHO HOLD TEACHING POSITIONS AT ACADEMIC INSTITUTIONS.

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Deepwater Horizon – BP Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill

On April 20, 2010, the oil drilling rig Deepwater Horizon , operating in the Macondo Prospect in the Gulf of Mexico, exploded and sank resulting in the death of 11 workers on the Deepwater Horizon and the largest spill of oil in the history of marine oil drilling operations.  4 million barrels of oil flowed from the damaged Macondo well over an 87-day period, before it was finally capped on July 15, 2010.  On December 15, 2010, the United States filed a complaint in District Court against BP Exploration & Production and several other defendants alleged to be responsible for the spill.  

This webpage provides information and materials on EPA’s enforcement response to the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill, settlements with several of the defendants, including the record-setting settlement with BP Exploration & Production for an unprecedented $5.5 billion Clean Water Act penalty and up to $8.8 billion in natural resource damages.  

This webpage is limited to EPA’s enforcement-related activities only, and does not cover all legal or other actions against BP Exploration & Production and other parties for the spill, such as private party/class action settlements for medical claims and economic damages, or other actions against those responsible for the spill.  The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana has established the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill website for this purpose.  In addition, links for additional information on the spill, cleanup activities and other responses are provided below.

On this page:

Case and Settlement Information

• Additional Information
• December 15, 2010: Civil complaint of the United States
• February 17, 2012: $90 million civil settlement with MOEX Offshore 2007 LLC 
• June 4, 2014: 5 th Circuit decision affirming ruling on summary judgment - 5th Circuit Decision June 4, 2014  
• November 5, 2014:  5 th Circuit decision denying panel reconsideration and affirming summary judgment ruling - Nondispositive Panel Opinion  
• January 9, 2015: 5 th Circuit order denying petition for rehearing en banc - Deepwater Horizon order denying petition for rehearing en banc  
• November 15, 2012: $4 billion criminal plea agreement with BP Exploration & Production  
• January 3, 2013: $1 billion civil settlement with Transocean Offshore Deepwater Drilling Inc., Transocean Deepwater Inc., Transocean Holdings LLC, and Triton Asset Leasing GmbH (“Transocean”)
• January 3, 2013: $400 million criminal plea agreement with Transocean  
• September 4, 2014:   Phase One Trial:  Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law on Gross Negligence and Willful Misconduct
• January 15, 2015: Phase Two Trial: Findings of Fact on Source Control and the Amount of Oil Spilled
• February 19, 2015:  Ruling on Maximum Dollars-Per-Barrel Penalty Amount, as Adjusted by the Penalty Inflation Act
• October 5, 2015:  $14.9 billion civil settlement with BP Exploration & Production
• November 30, 2015: $159.5 million Civil Penalty Ruling Against Anadarko Petroleum Co.

Additional Information on the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill

• Restoring the Gulf of Mexico After the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill
• 2010 National Coastal Condition Assessment Results and Report
• RestoreTheGulf: official federal government site for spill response and recovery  
• Final Report of the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill 
• Deepwater Horizon Joint Investigation Team 
• Enforcement Home
• Enforcement Basics
• Enforcement and Compliance Annual Results for FY 2023
• Air Enforcement
• Water Enforcement
• Waste, Chemical and Cleanup Enforcement
• Criminal Enforcement
• Enforcement at Federal Facilities
• Data and Results
• Policy, Guidance and Publications

We still don’t know the full impacts of the BP oil spill, 10 years later

The spill drove a push in science and some changes in regulations, but the dangers of offshore drilling remain.

Smoke rises from surface oil being burned by cleanup crews in the Gulf of Mexico after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in April 2010.

The BP oil spill of 2010 started suddenly, explosively, and with deadly force. But the response has stretched out for years and scientists say there’s still much more we need to learn.

As a crew on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig worked to close up an exploratory oil well deep under the Gulf of Mexico, a pulse of gas shot up, buckling the drill pipe. The emergency valve designed to cap the well in case of an accident, the “blowout protector,” failed, and the gas reached the drill rig, triggering an explosion that killed 11 crewmembers.

Over the next three months, the uncapped well leaked more than 300 Olympic-sized swimming pools of oil into the Gulf’s waters, making it the biggest oil spill in United States history. The leak pumped out 12 times more oil than the Exxon Valdez spill of 1989.

U.S. Coast Guard fire boats crews battle the blazing remnants of the offshore oil rig Deepwater Horizon on April 21, 2010 near New Orleans. An estimated 1,000 barrels of oil a day were still leaking into the Gulf at the time.

The spill opened many people’s eyes to the risks of drilling for oil in one of the most ecologically rich, culturally important, and economically valuable parts of the world. But 10 years and billions of dollars in cleanup efforts later, many of the same risks that allowed the disaster to occur remain.

“It took the better part of six to seven years [after the disaster] to get in place the inspection of blowout preventers and rules about making drilling plans safer and putting commonsense regulations in place, but those have been rescinded,” says Ian MacDonald , a scientist at Florida State University. “So basically we’re back to where we were in 2010, in terms of regulatory environment.”

And in some ways, more is known now than ever before about the Gulf and how the spill affected its ecosystems.

“We’re just to the point now where we have enough data to recognize things we missed earlier, and there’s still a lot we don’t know,” says Samantha Joye , a marine scientist at the University of Georgia. “This is a marathon, not a sprint.”

Can this kind of spill happen again?

About 17 percent of the U.S.’s total crude oil production comes from offshore projects in the Gulf . Pipelines—26,000 miles of them—connect wells to the processing infrastructure that lines the coast. Before plummeting demand from the coronavirus pandemic drove already-low oil prices lower, the Gulf of Mexico was producing as much crude oil as it had in years.

“Even in times of low prices like today, offshore just keeps going on,” says Gregory Upton, Jr ., an energy economist at Louisiana State University.

A severely oiled brown pelican is rescued in Queen Bess Island, Louisiana, after the oil spill.

And drilling for oil in deep offshore waters is inherently dangerous for the people working the platforms, as well as potentially for the environments they’re drilling in.

“Working on the ultra-deep stuff is pretty much like working in outer space,” say Mark Davis, a water law expert at Tulane University.

But conditions on the Deepwater Horizon rig were particularly concerning. After the spill, the commission created by the Obama administration to investigate the spill reached stark, damning conclusions. Many lapses in safety had contributed to the disaster , many of which traced back to a culture both within BP and the industry more broadly that did not value safety enough.

Boats used absorbent booms to corral the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

A new agency, the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE), was created to track and enforce offshore drilling safety issues, something that had been handled by the same agency that approved leases to oil companies.

“Before Deepwater, there was this mentality that had set in in the 1990s and 2000s, that the oil and gas industry, as it was going farther offshore, was capable of self-regulating,” says Matt Lee Ashley , a researcher at the Center for American Progress. “Then Deepwater happened and burst that set of assumptions.”

BSEE announced a new set of safety rules for offshore operations in 2016. Among those rules was one that required blowout protectors—the piece that had failed at Deepwater Horizon—to be inspected by a third party, rather than self-certified by the drilling companies. But many of those rules, as well as other safety practices put in place after the disaster, have been weakened in recent years. Most notably, in 2019 the Trump administration finalized rollbacks of several components of the 2016 rules, including the independent safety certification for blowout protectors and bi-weekly testing.

Inspections and safety checks by BSEE have also declined some 13 percent between 2017 and 2019 and there have been nearly 40 percent less enforcement activities in that time compared to previous years, according to Lee Ashley’s analysis.

Today, more than 50 percent of Gulf oil production comes from ultra-deep wells drilled in 4,500 feet or more of water, compared with about 4,000 feet for Deepwater Horizon. The deeper the well, the more the risk: A 2013 study showed that for every hundred feet deeper a well is drilled, the likelihood of a company self-reported incident like a spill or an injury increased by more than 8 percent.

Terry Garcia, former deputy administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and a member of a major safety commission convened after the Deepwater Horizon disaster, worries that the safety changes in the years after the disaster didn’t extend broadly enough, either.

“We have this tendency to fight the last war, to prepare for the last incident that occurred,” he says. After the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill, for example, new laws and regulations were enacted to deal with future tanker spills. But that focus on the future didn’t happen for oil rigs, and the next disaster is unlikely to look exactly like Deepwater.

A dead black drum fish floats through oiled waters in Grand Isle, Louisiana.

Another concern, says Scott Eustis, the science director at the Louisiana-based Healthy Gulf, a group that focuses on marine protection, comes from the ever-increasing pressures of climate change. Louisiana, which has the most comprehensive climate adaptation plan in the region, is expecting the number and intensity of major hurricanes to increase within the next 50 years. Each storm that blows through the Gulf threatens offshore drilling infrastructure.

“Since Deepwater Horizon, we’ve taken two steps forward and one step back, and that one step back is worrying because we could very much end up in a similar situation,” says Lee Ashley.

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What we know about the spill’s effect s.

After the spill, BP agreed to pay out more than $20 billion in penalties and damages, with around $13 billion directed toward restoration and a vast research effort in the region.

But scientists realized they lacked much of the basic background science necessary to predict where, when, and how the oil would spread or what its impacts on the region would be.

At first, it was difficult even to assess how much oil spilled from the well. Early initial assessments were low—but satellite imagery revealed that there was much more oil than had been reported. The final tally showed that the spill dumped more than 200 million gallons of oil.

Oil continued to sink to the ocean floor for more than a year, a recent study shows . It changed the amounts of sediment collecting on the bottom of the sea for years afterward and choked them of oxygen . Immediately after the spill, the 1,300 miles of contaminated coasts saw oil concentrations 100 times higher than background levelsl even eight years later , concentrations were 10 times higher than before the spill. And In February of this year, a study showed that the footprint of the oil spread some 30 percent wider than previously estimated, potentially contaminating many more fish communities than previously thought.

Scientists are still figuring out exactly how the oil impacted the biology of the Gulf, but the immediate effect was to turn the seafloor near the well site into a “toxic waste dump,” one study said. Studies are also showing that reef fish changed drastically after the spill; that fish absorbed some of the oil-sourced contaminants ; and that ecological communities throughout the water column, from tiny bacteria to deep sea corals to arthropods , could take decades to recover .

( Read about how the effects of the spill are still reverberating in dolphins ).

“It’s astounding,” says Joye . “We underestimated so many of the impacts when we were first looking.” Only after a decade of sustained observation, she says, have the true impacts of the spill started to become clear.

( Read about how pelican habitat on the Louisiana coast is being restored after the spill).

What we learned about the Gulf

The paradoxical effect of the spill is that scientists know more about the Gulf of Mexico, as well as the physics, ecology, and chemistry of oil spills, than they ever would have otherwise.

The white sand beaches of Orange Beach, Alabama are covered with oil.

It was clear from the moment the spill began that there were many basic science questions that were unknown about this area of the world, like ocean currents and wind patterns, knowledge gaps that hindered the recovery process.

“The first fundamental issue we faced in 2010 was a chronic lack of baseline data,” says Joye.

For example, no high-resolution map of the seafloor existed, information that would have helped scientists understand where the bottom-dwelling creatures of the Gulf might be affected. Driven by the disaster, federal scientists produced a map in 2016.

“It was crucial to be able to detect and predict where the oil would go,” says Oscar Garcia Pineda, a satellite expert. In 2010, it took days to get satellite images downloaded and processed; today the response time is about 20 minutes, he says. In conjunction with studies that used drifters , boats, drones , and other techniques, scientists have deepened their understanding of the Gulf’s restless movements.

But there’s much more still to learn, say Joye and MacDonald; it’s crucial to set up long-term monitoring programs so scientists can be better prepared for the inevitable next disaster.

“We need much better oceanographic data,” says MacDonald, “so we’re not trying to model after the fact whether Florida is going to get hit by this oil spill, or if it’ll go the other way.”

And other knowledge gaps also engender risk. For example, a 2004 hurricane triggered underwater landslides at another drilling site in the Gulf. The mudslide broke the drilling rig away from the well, leaving it leaking hundreds of barrels a day . But the mudslide risk across the Gulf hasn’t yet been thoroughly mapped out.

“There was a dearth of knowledge. It’s that old adage, ‘you can’t manage what you don’t understand’—well, you can’t protect what you don’t understand , ” says Garcia.

Why is there drilling in the Gulf of Mexico?

The reason the Deepwater Horizon well existed in the first place? Hundreds of billions of barrels of fossil fuel energy are buried deep beneath the Gulf’s seafloor.

Oil seeps from the floor of the Gulf naturally, in small volumes. Th e phenomenon has been long known to people who lived and traveled along its marshy shores and coastlines. Hernan de Soto, a Spanish explorer who sailed through the Gulf in 1543, used the gummy oil his sailors collected from the beaches to patch up his wooden ships. Tribal communities gathered tar that caught in the tangled cordgrass of the sandy barrier islands and used it for art and to waterproof pots.

Offshore drilling began in the late 1930s. The first site, Louisiana’s Creole platform, squatted just a mile and a half off the coast, its wooden legs sprouting up through water 14 feet deep.

By the 1950s, engineers were gaining ambition and confidence, nudging the limits of their drilling activities deeper and deeper, following the long, broad slope of the seafloor that tilted away from the Gulf’s shores. By 2000, over 300 operating oil rigs and thousands of platforms dotted the wide, shallow slope. But they pushed further, out to where the ground drops away sharply. Geologists’ glimpses into that underground world, from seismic observations and experimental drill holes, hinted at millions of barrels of oil lurking below, if only the drillers could get to it.

The Deepwater Horizon well, drilled in 2009, pushed the limits of that deep drilling. At its creation, it was the deepest well ever drilled, punching over 35,000 feet down into the ground below the sea, in water over 4,000 feet deep.

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Five Lessons From the BP Oil Spill

• Andrew Winston

It’s very easy to pile onto BP right now. The “accident,” which may be due more to negligence, is bad enough. The company lost 11 employees — after losing 15 in a high-profile explosion at a refinery 5 years ago. The damage to the Gulf, its species, and the people who depend on it is […]

It’s very easy to pile onto BP right now. The “accident,” which may be due more to negligence, is bad enough. The company lost 11 employees — after losing 15 in a high-profile explosion at a refinery 5 years ago. The damage to the Gulf, its species, and the people who depend on it is almost incalculable. But surprisingly, it’s even easier to criticize BP’s behavior since the explosion — the company has tried hard to downplay the scale of the tragedy and it has moved slowly to stop the torrent of oil pouring into the Gulf.

• Andrew Winston is one of the world’s leading thinkers on sustainable business strategy. His books include Green to Gold , The Big Pivot , and Net Positive . AndrewWinston

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