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NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Shares of Halliburton(NYSE:HAL) dropped by as much as 10% on Thursday afternoon after a presidential commission revealed that tests conducted before the BP Macondo oil spill showed that cement used by Halliburton were liable to create unstable conditions.

Energy Policy: The administration lifts the Gulf drilling moratorium in time for the election, but it's not as good as it sounds. Meanwhile, China buys up Texas oil land to develop the energy reserves we won't. The lifting of the Gulf drilling ban imposed after the explosion of British Petroleum's Macondo well came as welcome news. But like anything this administration does, one must read the fine print. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced that the ban was being lifted before its Nov. 30 target because of the "the higher standards we have set" for drillers applying for new permits.

Since folks still want to discuss the oil spill related issues, this is another open thread. Note that there are a few oil spill related articles in Drumbeat.

NEW YORK - Now that BP's Deepwater Horizon oil well has been sealed, the long, hard work of assessing the damage begins even as the oil is dispersing throughout the Gulf. A research team from Columbia University in New York returned this past weekend (Sept. 17 to 19) from a tour of duty in the Gulf of Mexico with new data to attempt to measure the location and magnitude of subsurface oil plumes, and their effects on the marine ecosystem, which have recently been the focus of much debate.

"Man who does not include luck in his plan, often finds it." That is the Chinese proverb followed by John Wright, the man who has just successfully killed the leaking Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico. John Wright, the driller responsible for drilling the relief well to seal the Macondo well, the source of the Deepwater Horizon rig explosion and oil spill.It is a saying that Wright kept his faith in over the past few days, as his relief well got ever close to intersecting with BP's leaking well. Speaking to The Daily Telegraph, the American admits that drilling...

If you thought President Obama’s address to the nation this week would have focused on the Deepwater Horizon oil spill that is destroying the Gulf Coast economy, you would have been only partially correct. The president did mention what he called the “menacing cloud of black crude,” but the heart of his remarks was a political speech that attacked the president’s political enemies while pushing for a stock “green” agenda, including cap-and-trade legislation, that had no obvious connection to the menace in the Gulf Coast. What was supposed to be a leveling with the American people about the oil crisis...

The operations to seal the Deepwater Horizon well in the Gulf have now succeeded in putting cement plugs into the well that have effectively ensured that it will remain dead. The well itself was effectively killed when the cement was injected some weeks ago, and the work since has been to ensure that some of the potential problems from subsequent failure of that cement could not occur. And so the relief well had shown that there were no effective quantities of hydrocarbon products in the annulus, meaning that the well failure had purely been through the shoe and up the...

Washington - The deepwater drilling moratorium in the Gulf of Mexico has not increased unemployment in the region, says a new report from the Obama administration that counters the dire predictions of oil industry officials and Gulf Coast residents. The report, being released at a Senate hearing Thursday, said the moratorium imposed after the BP oil spill might have temporarily cost 8,000 to 12,000 jobs on oil rigs and elsewhere. But it found no net job loss in the region, thanks in part to a big hiring push for cleanup crews and massive spending

Update: Sunday, 11:40am: The well is effectively dead, according to Admiral Allen. The official statement is as follows: After months of extensive operations planning and execution under the direction and authority of the U.S. government science and engineering teams, BP has successfully completed the relief well by intersecting and cementing the well nearly 18,000 feet below the surface. With this development, which has been confirmed by the Department of the Interior's Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, we can finally announce that the Macondo 252 well is effectively dead. Additional regulatory steps will be undertaken but we can now state, definitively,...

Crews working to seal BP's blown-out well in the Gulf of Mexico once and for all need to finish one more pressure test on a cement plug before declaring the well permanently dead, officials said Saturday. The crew plans to celebrate once the well is officially killed. "We're going to have a good meal together - prime rib," Robson said.

Progress on the Deepwater Horizon well is going well enough that the Admiral considers it likely that the remaining work (other than plug and abandon) may be completed within the next four days. According to the transcript: . . .just to summarize again, in the last 24-hour period we proceeded to go ahead and drill to the intercept. At the time we started drilling we estimated that we were 3.5 horizontal feet away and 50 feet away from the intercept. We drilled down (inaudible), we went through the drill string, we put in a ranging tool just to make sure...

With very little change since yesterday in the situation in the Gulf, it may be time to start spreading these reviews out a little more, or if the well is intersected this week, to consider moving to more general topics. The DDIII drilled 30 of the remaining 50 ft between the relief well and the original Deepwater Horizon well on Monday. The drill was then retracted to make a ranging run, and once that is completed, one can assume that they might just go ahead and do the intersection on the next drilling pass.That will begin to generate the next...

Admiral Allen issued a statement today, in regard to the situation at the Deepwater Horizon well: After extensive consultation between BP engineers and the federal science team, as well as reviewing data collected from measurements I authorized Friday, the Development Driller III today began the final steps towards the completion of the relief well that will intercept the Macondo 252 well and perform the bottom kill procedure.This accelerated progress was possible after several discussions between BP and the federal scientists and engineers, leading to the installation of a lock-down device over the weekend, which resulted in the necessary conditions to...

A short time ago I wrote about the concerns with the casing hanger in the Deepwater Horizon well, and the risk that it might lift and allow whatever fluid is in the annulus between the production casing and the well lining to be released. In his remarks on Friday Admiral Allen discussed that situation. At some point there has to be a seal on the top of the well to prevent fluid escaping from the annulus. The solution that he, the science team, and BP have reached is that the casing hanger will be locked into place, so that it...

n response to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, four industry task forces were formed, to look into better ways of preventing oil spills in deepwater locations, intervening when an oil spill does occur, and responding to oil that has been spilled. This week, two of the task forces made their reports; the other two task forces had made their reports in May. The American Petroleum Institute issued a briefing paper on the reports. The Subsea Task Force made 29 recommendations, which can be found in this report. One of the major recommendations was the formation of a Marine Well Containment...

This thread is being closed. Please comment on http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6946. BP's new report giving their version of what happened at the time of the explosion comes to a rather surprising conclusion--that the blowout preventer worked, but too late. If the rig crew had taken different actions, the explosion and fire might have been prevented. According to a Wall Street Journal article titled Rig Workers Had Chance to Prevent Explosion: Contrary to what most oil industry experts thought based on testimony in government hearings, not only did the crew manage to activate the blowout preventer—the huge set of valves designed to shut...

Update, 1:00pm EDT Friday: Admiral Allen has issued a letter, authorizing BP to proceed with specific aspects of the relief well intercept procedure. In particular, BP is to proceed with an evaluation of the current status of the casing hanger. If it is found to be correctly positioned, BP is to install the locking ring to secure the hangar, and then commence completion of the relief well. There was, apparently, no briefing on Thursday on the Deepwater Oil Spill. However RockyPaloma has put up a number of videos on Youtube showing an internal video inspection of the blowout preventer (BOP)...

Scientists on a research vessel in the Gulf of Mexico are finding a substantial layer of oily sediment stretching for dozens of miles in all directions. Their discovery suggests that a lot of oil from the Deepwater Horizon didn't simply evaporate or dissipate into the water — it has settled to the seafloor.

BP deflected much of the blame for a rig blast that led to the United States' worst-ever oil spill, releasing an internal report on Wednesday which said that drilling contractor Transocean had missed danger signs.BP defended its much-criticized well design and said failures on the rig, operated by Transocean [RIG  53.05  ---  UNCH  (0)   ], led to gas swamping the platform and creating the conditions for the explosion."Over a 40-minute period, the Transocean rig crew failed to recognize and act on the influx of hydrocarbons into the well," BP said in a statement.BP also criticized the cementing of the...

NEW YORK (MarketWatch) -- BP PLC plans to release an internal report of the Deepwater Horizon disaster Wednesday morning, even as it continues to deal (with ) the consequences of the April 20 explosion and oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. BP said the report was prepared by its internal-investigation team on the causes of the Gulf of Mexico fiasco. The accident resulted in the death of 11 workers and nearly 5 million barrels of oil spewing out of the ruptured well about 50 miles south of the Louisiana coast. The findings also are coming as the criminal...