and owned a third of all the oil discovered there. In the oil business, strong personalities made the difference, and Browne, like an evangelist, was wooing his audience. ‘We’re going to spend $15 billion here over the next decade,’ he promised, ‘drilling between four and seven wells every year.’ His enthusiasm was understandable. Oil which had been inaccessible in 1998 was now, he knew from Rainey, within their grasp. If the Houston team was successful, BP would outdistance its competitors. Only a handful of doubters suspected that Browne loved being treated like a rock star more than he loved rocks and their contents. Older members of his audience knew that oil had always attracted the ambitious and the larger than life. The same man who controlled 90,000 employees and pledged to serve mankind could also behave unaccountably. That was the nature of multinationals.
Exploration for new oil had barely increased over recent years. Since the mid-1970s, over 1,800 new wells in the Gulf of Mexico and in the Atlantic Ocean off Brazil, Angola and Nigeria had promised to deliver 47 billion barrels of oil. But, like a herd, the major oil companies assumed that prices would not rise, and feared risking their profits and their share prices. Their investment in the search for more oil was cut, and many wells had been abandoned. Yet, on reflection, Thunder Horse was recognised as marking a small revolution, and formerly abandoned areas were reconsidered. ‘Elephants’ meant big, fast profits. Thunder Horse meant there was at least another 100 billion barrels of oil to be found under the sea in the Gulf and the Atlantic. Those who believed oil supplies would ‘peak’ between 2011 and 2013 were challenged to reconsider their doom-mongering predictions. The only disadvantage was the cost. Convinced that oil would not rise above $30 a barrel, Browne congratulated himself that his sharp reduction of BP’s costs would ensure Thunder Horse’s profitability.
Positioning the Korean-built steel rig 6,050 feet above a small hole in the sea bed caused jubilation among BP’s beleaguered staff. ‘The serial number of each piece of equipment is 001,’ exclaimed Rainey with pride. No one on the platform expected to actually see oil. Gushers of crude soaring into the air were relics of history. Oil produced in the Gulf was diverted as it emerged from wells into the Mardi Gras system, a network of about 25,000 miles of pipelines criss-crossing the sea bed from Texas to Florida. BP’s task was to link Thunder Horse to the system. The obstacles were the depth and distance to the terminals: divers could not survive a mile beneath the surface. But finding elegant solutions to apparently intractable problems caused oil men’s hearts to beat faster. BP’s answer was to use robotic underwater vehicles, powered by batteries and guided by sonar from the Houston control room, to find a route for the pipes to cross the furrowed, steep Sigsbee escarpment of mountains and valleys, and then to lay and weld the pipes and valves. On 18 July 2005, Thunder Horse was nearly ready. But then Hurricane Dennis hit the Gulf of Mexico, and under American regulations every engineer was compelled to abandon the rig.
The team closed the operation down, but those who gave the order from Houston forgot that the complicated procedures had never previously been executed. After the hurricane passed, the returning teams discovered the rig tilting at a dangerous angle. Defective valves in the hydraulic control system had allowed water to drain out of the ballast tanks. Oil was also leaking from equipment on the sea bed that linked the well to the pipeline. BP’s engineers had not noticed the poor quality of the manufacturers’ work. None of BP’s designing engineers had taken into account the fact that only valves manufactured from nickel could sustain the extraordinary pressures and temperatures on the sea bed; and the welding had been faulty. The flaws were superficially simple, and exposed BP to ridicule from its rivals. Sending divers to carry out repairs a mile down was impossible, and the damage was too great to repair with robots. The equipment would have to be brought to the surface. It was not clear where the blame lay, but the sums involved were too large to reclaim from the designers and the Korean shipyard. Publicly, BP reported that the rig would be unusable until 2007, and that the repairs would cost £250 million. Such optimism caused wry smiles across Houston.
In normal times, the employees of the major oil companies cooperated to serve their common interests, but in the competitive atmosphere of the time mischievous gossip raged across Houston, and the spirit of BP’s humiliated team faltered. Thunder Horse was more than just a tilting platform – it was symbolic of the company. ‘Poor design and supervision,’ smiled Shell’s head of design about the calamity. ‘BP always shoot from the hip,’ said a Shell technician, characteristically dismissing the abilities of a rival. ‘Their technology and engineering is second rate. They’re always coming to us for help.’ He dismissed BP as a late arrival, hanging onto Shell’s coat-tails, copying its rivals or outsourcing. A colleague agreed that BP was a fast follower, depending on ‘off-the-shelf go-buys’.
David Rainey was indignant at such criticism. History, he believed, undermined Shell’s claims of superiority. He felt the company had rested on its laurels, and that following the success at Mars it had been closed to new ideas in the Gulf. ‘Deep Mensa’, an $80 million well bored by Shell in 2001, had been a disaster. Technicians monitoring the data witnessed the ‘crash out’ – the uncontrolled vibrations which smashed the drill as it struggled through fractured rock. Even the best explorers risked embarrassment on the frontiers of the industry. Mortified, Shell’s engineers had taken a year to rectify their mistakes.
Shell’s expensive errors had been concealed from the public. But Thunder Horse appeared to be a warning to Russia and other national oil companies not to rely on BP. The company’s explanations were gleefully rebutted by a Chevron vice president: ‘It’s defeatist to say “Stuff happens.”’ That criticism was also rebutted by Rainey. During the 1980s, he recalled, Chevron had suffered multiple drilling failures which had crippled the company. Cooperation in the Gulf with Chevron, Rainey said, had caused arguments. In 2001, BP’s explorers had collaborated with Chevron to test drill the ‘Poseidon’ block. ‘They’re off the structure,’ Rainey had complained, urging Chevron to reconsider the test location. Chevron insisted on its expertise, but missed the oil reservoir. Expressing condolences for the failure, BP negotiated to inherit the ‘barren’ field. Rainey’s team had precisely calculated the top of the reserve’s ‘hill’, hit a billion barrels of oil, and renamed the well Kodiak.
BP’s engineers were however not protected from the reproaches of a leader of Exxon’s exploration team. As the junior partner in Thunder Horse, Exxon was suffering losses caused by BP. Lee Raymond’s jocular description of John Browne as a ‘bandit’ found many echoes among Exxon’s executives, especially from the technical director who recalled a fault at the BP’s Schiehallion oilfield off the Shetland Islands which had compelled BP to lift equipment off the sea bed not once, but twice. On two occasions the company’s engineers had failed to spot valves installed upside down by the contractors. While Exxon’s engineers would at worst have spotted the fault and learned the lesson, BP’s management system was not equipped to evaluate the technology, neutralise risks and absorb the lessons.
Exxon, as the industry leader, proudly avoided technical disasters. Since the days of John D. Rockefeller, the nineteenth-century founder of Exxon’s forerunner Standard Oil, the corporation had standardised the rigorous management of costs and processes to prevent financial or technical errors. Like God, the system and the company were infallible. Relying on a culture developed since Standard Oil’s creation in 1870, Exxon was built on tested foundations. By comparison, BP in 2004 was a conglomerate including former Standard Oil companies – Sohio, Arco and Amoco – still struggling to replicate Exxon’s excellence and standardisation. While Raymond concealed uncomfortable truths by cultivating a mystique and keeping outsiders at a distance, Browne was constantly selling himself and his improvised company. Nevertheless, both men could justifiably claim considerable technical achievements to ameliorate oil shortages; yet their skills were spurned by oil-producing countries.
One manifestation of the mistrust of BP, Exxon and the other major oil companies lay across the Gulf, in Mexico. The country, the world’s sixth largest oil producer, owned vast quantities of unexplored oil beneath its coastal waters. To Browne’s
