Erika Bolstad, McClatchy Newspapers
Washington -- Top executives from four of the five largest oil companies operating in the United States tried Tuesday to show that their own engineering and management practices include safeguards that would prevent them from making the same mistakes that led to BP's runaway deepwater oil well.
The executives, however, struggled to explain to an irate and insistent House of Representatives subcommittee why, as McClatchy Newspapers reported June 2, their regional response plans for catastrophic Gulf of Mexico spills are nearly identical to the BP plan -- a document that's now widely considered inadequate for containing a gush of oil that's now estimated at 35,000 to 60,000 barrels each day.
Testifying together for the first time since they were questioned about high gasoline prices in 2008, the executives from Shell, Chevron, Exxon Mobil and ConocoPhillips repeatedly said they wouldn't have allowed the same drilling risks as their counterpart at BP, Lamar McKay, who was grilled about the company's progress in capping and cleaning up the spill.
"We would not have drilled the way they did," said Rex Tillerson, the chief executive of Exxon Mobil.
Tillerson, whose corporation is among the biggest in the United States and has been rated as the most profitable nonstate-owned oil company in the world, was often the most outspoken and opinionated of the executives. Tillerson told the committee that he had brief conversations with President Barack Obama and several top White House aides about the spill and the response.
He rattled off a list of what Exxon would have done differently from BP, beginning with the well design, the type of pipe the company would have run from the ocean floor deep into the Earth, what sort of cement it would have used, and the decisions it would have made about the unusual pressure and test results that its BP counterparts saw.
Shell's Marvin Odum, whose company saw its exploratory drilling plans in Alaska's Arctic waters put on hold by the government after the April 20 rig explosion, told the committee that his company has reviewed its safety practices following the Gulf accident.
Their reassurances rang hollow to the chairman of the energy and environment subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Rep. Ed Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, who focused on the similarities of the response plans.
Some of the "cookie cutter" response plans even mention walruses, Markey said, a marine mammal that he pointed out hasn't lived in the Gulf of Mexico for 3 million years.
"The only technology you seem to be relying on is a Xerox machine to put together your response plans," Markey said.
"Obviously, it is embarrassing," acknowledged Jim Mulva, the chairman and chief executive officer of ConocoPhillips.
McClatchy reported that plans for 31 deepwater exploratory wells that are now subject to a moratorium mimicked those of BP's. They were so similar to BP's that the Minerals Management Service recently asked the companies to resubmit them.