WASHINGTON — Five oil giants. Five plans for coping with an oil spill, all written by the same tiny Texas subcontractor.
The government-mandated plans all came under attack at a congressional hearing Tuesday: Three of them listed the phone number for the same University of Miami marine- science expert, Peter Lutz — who died in 2005. Four talked about the need to protect walruses, which, as Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., dryly noted, “have not called the Gulf of Mexico home for 3 million years.” The plans also mentioned protecting sea lions and seals, which aren’t found in the gulf either.
The five oil companies submitted these plans — each more than 500 pages long and each relying on the same reassuring language — as part of their applications for permits to drill deep-water wells in the Gulf.
The firms assured the government that they could handle oil spills much larger than the one now threatening the region’s environment and economy. And each time, the Minerals Management Service approved the plan and gave the go-ahead for drilling.
Yet House Energy and Commerce Chairman Henry Waxman, D-Calif., said the “cookie-cutter” plans show that “none of the five oil companies has an adequate response plan” for a spill like the one that began April 20 with a blowout on a BP well.
The firms’ top executives offered a mixture of regret and defense.
Exxon Mobil chief executive Rex Tillerson said provisions for walrus protection in gulf plans are “an embarrassment.”
Grilled by Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Mich., about how the companies could say they could handle spills many times the size of the current one, Tillerson also conceded, “We are not well-equipped to handle them.”
But he asserted that whenever large spills happen, “there will be impacts, as we are seeing.” And he added, “We’ve never represented anything different than that.”
He said the company’s plans contain a worst-case scenario “that the MMS and the Coast Guard require us to calculate using their methodologies, and that’s why it’s in there.”
Tillerson said prevention was the best strategy, and he and the executives from Conoco Phillips, Chevron and Shell Oil criticized BP’s handling of the well blowout, which killed 11 workers and sank the Deepwater Horizon rig.
“We would not have drilled the well the way they did,” the Exxon chief said.
Lawmakers stressed the need to have plans in place in case all else failed. And whereas the companies have hired top-tier contractors to carry out their search for oil and gas, they relied on smaller, less well-known companies to handle spill planning.
The spill-response plans for all five companies were written by the same firm, the Response Group. Although it has operations in at least seven cities nationwide, the Houston- based firm’s website says the company has about 35 employees.
Waxman also noted that the five companies rely on Marine Spill Response to provide equipment.
“When you look at the details, it becomes evident these plans are just paper exercises,” he said.
The response plans, which the committee posted on its website, show that the companies also used common assumptions for different exploration wells. BP used the same model for all its wells in the gulf.
