Book Talk: Tom Bergin exposes spin behind BP spill

A year after oil major British Petroleum capped its doomed Macondo well, Tom Bergin's account of the worst offshore oil spill in US history suggests that this was an accident which was more likely to happen to BP than any other oil company.

The Gulf of Mexico spill had its roots in a BP culture of cost cutting and short term incentives which also helped cause an earlier fatal accident at Texas City Refinery, Bergin argues in his recent book "Spills and Spin: The Inside Story of BP".
Bergin, head of Reuters oil industry coverage in Europe, the Middle East and Africa since 2004, talked to former senior executives to uncover the whys and hows of a spill that devastated Gulf coastlines.
Bergin spoke about his book, a story which fundamentally challenges the narratives BP offered to explain the disaster.

Q: Why did you think this book needed to be written?

A: "If a disaster happens, I think that the victims of that, and their families, are very much entitled to a proper explanation as to what happened. I think that they are not well-served by some legal settlement in which everything remains, all the documents remain, shut and they end up getting a cheque through the post. I also don't think that it's very useful in preventing such accidents happening again because if we don't really investigate the root causes of disasters then how are we going to stop them from happening again?"

Q: When did you start thinking that the way BP had operated over a long time might have been partly to blame for the spill?

A: "Because I knew that BP had been cutting costs very harshly I did suspect that that would be a factor, but the problem with that as an overarching explanation is that every company cuts costs. There has to be a reason why, if it's true that BP cut costs to an unsafe level, and it had a culture of doing that over a long period of time, there has to be an explanation for that. I guess what I was looking for was the why on all these things.
"I had certain ideas about things but to be honest it was really with going and doing the deep dive with it and spending a lot of time talking to former senior executives that I got a better understanding."

Q: Would another accident at BP surprise you?

A: "In terms of accidents if there's going to be an accident, a disaster which is a result of structural issues, it largely comes down to what those structures are. The problem is that we don't know what they are.
"For example, BP had incentives in place before the Gulf of Mexico spill which encouraged its drilling managers to drill quickly. We don't know if they've been done away with. There have been indications that those kind of incentives may have been abolished but we don't know that. Also, BP's procedures for designing wells were also criticised but the company has refused to say what, if any, improvements it has made in this area.
"One thing that has changed that should be positive is the way that Bob Dudley has abolished independent strategic business units in the upstream. One of the things that I outline in the book is how the fundamental restructuring of the company into autonomous different units in the early 1990s created really dangerous incentives for managers to run their business for the short term. He has made that change. That should be positive but we're back to the same old problem that we really don't know what goes on inside big companies."