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!
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