BP: Tony Hayward seems to have learned a few hard lessons. BP’s chief executive is, at long last, starting to think about the Gulf of Mexico disaster like an outsider.
The UK oil major was not prepared for the consequences of the spill, Hayward has told the Financial Times. Moreover, the company may in future conduct its own deep-water drilling operations in places like the Gulf — instead of outsourcing to specialist companies like Transcocean, which ran the rig whose failure in April caused BP's well to burst open.
Such thoughts are hardly extraordinary these days, but are quite different from BP's message of only a month ago. Then BP was arguing that the flotilla of 80 boats swinging into action showed excellent preparation for disaster. Its emergency plan was robust.
BP also defended the practice of oil producers contracting out deep water drilling to specialist firms — even though this made well owners liable for potentially horrendous consequences of accidents on rigs they did not operate. BP accepted legal responsibility for the situation, but described the Horizon tragedy as “not our accident”.
Neither BP nor Hayward personally was dishonest.
Inside BP, there was little doubt the well would be capped long before the cost of the operation reached anything like $20 billion, the amount wiped off BP’s market capitalisation in the first week of the disaster — and now the consensus estimate for the cost of the calamity. There were no real worries about oil getting anywhere near Florida, which it now has.
The underestimation of risk and overestimation of competence should not be surprising. BP is, or was, a proud and confident company. No wonder its leader believed that the corporate response to the crisis was superlative and that the world should acknowledge that.
Why was BP confident to point of arrogance? The question has many answers — in BP’s history, its organisational structure, and possibly in the legacy of the cult surrounding John Browne, the former chief executive. Hopefully, Hayward’s new tone marks the beginning of a deeper self-examination.