Chevron CEO: Practices We Wouldn't Use Employed By BP

15th Jun 2010 17:15

By Siobhan Hughes Of DOW JONES NEWSWIRES WASHINGTON (Dow Jones)--Oil-company executives put further distance between their companies and BP PLC (BP, BP.LN), telling Congress on Tuesday that they would have made different well-design decisions than those investigators say were made by BP. The comments from Chevron Corp. (CVX) and Exxon Mobil Corp. (XOM) chief executives came a day after House Energy and Commerce Committee investigators described how BP officials ignored safety warnings from their own personnel and contractors and used well-design techniques that saved money and time. "We would not have drilled the well the way they did," Exxon Chief Executive Rex Tillerson told the committee. He said that "a number of design standards that I would consider to be the industry norm were not followed." Chevron Chief Executive John Watson said that "it's not a well we would have drilled." Watson said the design of the casing and mechanical barriers that were put in place at the BP well "appear to be different than what we would use." According to congressional investigators, BP took the cheaper of two options in an important well-design decision by choosing a single string of steel casing from the seafloor all the way to the bottom of the well. The single-string approach provided two barriers against the flow of gas up the annular space, Halliburton Co.'s (HAL) vice president of cementing, Tommy Roth, told committee staff, according to the letter. That compares with four barriers of protection provided by hanging a steel tube called a liner from a hanger on the bottom of the casing already in the well and then inserting another liner tube called a tieback on top of the liner hanger. "We would have run a liner, a tieback liner," Tillerson said. -By Siobhan Hughes; Dow Jones Newswires; 202-862-6654; [email protected] (END) Dow Jones Newswires June 15, 2010 12:15 ET (16:15 GMT)