Halliburton, BP aware cement flawed

WASHINGTON, Oct. 28 (UPI) -- A government panel Thursday said Halliburton was aware of cement flaws at the BP oil well that exploded in the Gulf of Mexico weeks before the incident.

A letter by chief investigator Fred Bartlit Jr. to the presidential commission appointed in May to investigate the fatal April 19 explosion and fire that led to the most massive oil spill in U.S. history said Halliburton conducted three laboratory tests that indicated the cement mixture was substandard. The explosion killed 11 oil rig workers.

The New York Times said Bartlit's letter does not argue the cement was responsible for the failure but makes clear that if the cement had done its job, no gas would have gotten into the well bore of the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig leased from Transocean.

The Chicago Tribune reported Halliburton and BP were aware of the test results as early as March.

In public testimony, Halliburton, a major oil field services company, said it had used the right cement formula and blamed BP's flawed design of the Macondo well for the blowout.

Investigators whipped up a batch of foam cement slurry from the same recipe used by Halliburton and sent it to an independent laboratory for testing. The mixture failed nine stability tests, the Times said.

"Although laboratory foam stability tests cannot replicate field conditions perfectly, these data strongly suggest that the foam cement used at Macondo was unstable. This may have contributed to the blowout," Bartlit's letter said, adding, "Halliburton and BP both had results in March showing that a very similar foam slurry design to the one actually pumped at the Macondo well would be unstable, but neither acted upon that data."