No, as stated before, BP commissioned the well and as principal operator it and, to a lesser extent, its risk-sharing partners on the project (Anadarko and a company known as MOEX) share joint responsibility for the outcome. It is up to the operator to carry out due diligence on the design of the well, and for offshore operations of this type, the operator has to file quite a lot of paperwork with the MMS describing the engineering design of the well and certifying that the safety systems and procedures meet industry and regulatory standards. This appears to have been done.
Now, a very big potential problem here is that the MMS has to some extent gone along with industry-proposed standards for deepwater operations, mainly because these are on the edge of viable technology and there is not necessarily a large amount of data on the types of failures that may occur. The situation is somewhat analogous to that of the crashes of De Havilland Comet airliners of the 1950s, where the issue of metal fatigue in aircraft structures was not well understood. Here (so far as I can tell from limited info), the well was engineered, and the BOP stack was rigged up in such a way that the systems should have worked properly, based on available data.
Regarding Transocean and Halliburton, both were contracted by BP to assist in constructing a hole to BP’s specifications and absent contrary information I have no reason to believe they did not do so. IANAL, of course, but in my experience potential liability for service contractors rests on being able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that they either carried out their jobs negligently, or outright falsified safety-critical information. There is no current indication that either of these things occurred, although the results of investigation may change this.
Some liability to Transocean could ensue if, for example, it could be shown the drilling crew failed to notice the warning signs of a kick (there are several possible indicators), or defects in the rig abandonment procedure could be shown to have resulted in the deaths that occurred. Without knowing the details of the cement job that may have contributed to the disaster, I don’t care to comment on what role Halliburton may eventually play in all this.
Something people need to realize is that the risk of a kick, as I described earlier, is present on nearly all wells drilled for oil and gas, and that some small percentage of kicks develop into blowouts regardless of how many safety systems are in place. What makes this one such a massive clusterfuck is the technical difficulty of shutting off flow on a wellhead that is one mile down, that has several hundred thousand pounds of damaged equipment sitting atop it, and is apparently leaking from several points along thousands of feet of pipe that dropped to the seabed when the rig sank.
I’m sorry to have to say this, but right now the best hope is that the well ‘bridges off’ (plugs itself from sand and rock caried up in the flow) on its own. If flow cannot be brought under control until the completion of a relief well (which will take at least several weeks or months to drill) this really will be an unprecedented catastrophe.
