Transocean: No Apologies Over Gulf Oil Spill

Fourteen months after the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded 50 miles southeast of Venice, La., killing 11 men and setting off the largest offshore oil spill in U.S. history, Transocean, the company that owned and ran the ill-fated 32,600-ton vessel, finally issued its official account of what happened and why. It produced a report on June 22 of no fewer than 854 pages, divided into two volumes, and spared no detail. The bottom line, though, isn’t complicated:It was BP’s fault.

That Transocean would try to deflect blame isn’t surprising. The Swiss-incorporated, Houston-based drilling contractor is caught in a litigation frenzy involving British Petroleum; Halliburton, which did cement work; and several other companies, including Anadarko Petroleum, one of the minority stakeholders in the well, and Cameron International, manufacturer of a critical piece of safety equipment known as the blowout preventer. They are wrestling over who will get stuck with tens of billions of dollars in environmental and economic damage claims related to the blowout of BP’s Macondo well on Apr. 20, 2010.