Before this year’s Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, a similar blowout involving another BP operation, in Azerbaijan, took place in 2008 that the company tried to keep secret.

 

Classified cables from State Department officials in Azerbaijan revealed that a BP well in the Azeri-Chirag-Guneshli (ACG) field suffered a gas leak that could have resulted in an explosion. The communiqués indicate that the cause of the problem may have involved faulty cement work—something that BP officials initially attributed to the Deepwater Horizon accident.

 

Although the company avoided a deadly explosion, the gas leak forced BP to shut down two fields, thus reducing oil production by 500,000 barrels of oil a day for months.

 

BP operates the ACG field in partnership with Chevron, ExxonMobil, Hess, Statoil (Norway) and Socar, Azerbaijan’s state owned oil company. Some of these partners indicated BP withheld information from them about the gas leak, according to the cables.

-Noel Brinkerhoff

 

WikiLeaks Cables: BP Suffered Blowout on Azerbaijan Gas Platform (by Tim Webb, The Guardian)

US Embassy Cables: BP Blames Gas Leak on 'Bad Cement Job' (The Guardian)

US Embassy Cables: BP under Fire over Handling of Gas Leak Incident (The Guardian)