Well, how do you think the OP meant it? I assumed he/she had read something in the news recently about BP and the DoD. That’s not a government contract? 
The OP asks for an “explanation for how BP can be allowed to drill in the Gulf again, or at least right away.” He didn’t mention the DoD - it was you that raised the DoD in post #4. I’d be interested to know what made **Try2B Comprehensive **think BP were about to be allowed to start drilling again but I can’t see anything that links it to contracts between BP and the DoD. As **Francis Vaughan **has pointed out any drilling BP does in the Gulf will have no affect on their supplying the US military with oil. It’s not as though BP has no other sources of oil.
In other words you are making shit up, and I shouldn’t be holding my breath for any cites.
The government reviewed, modified, and approved BP’s drill plans. BP followed through according to plan without deviation.
But, mankind has only drilled so many seabed oil pumps and despite our best efforts, there was still some places where our understanding of what was a secure method of drilling and what isn’t, was off. And even then, most likely the accident occurred due to sheer bad luck. If only one in every ten million seabed drilling projects ends in disaster, that doesn’t mean that you’re safe if you only approve ten such projects. You could only drill once and still end up hitting the bad luck jackpot.
Also remember there are not an unlimited number of applicants. Eventually you have to settle.
Oil is there in the Gulf of Mexico and it’s either pump it out or purchase oil from some place more expensive.
So BP applies for permit. They have a record with errors. Other applicants may be worse off or have no record. Causing the worst environmental disaster isn’t a feather in your cap, but a lot of it depends on circumstance.
If BP can show others that have permits did the same errors, but they were caught early enough, they can base their appeal of denial (if it is) on the fact they are no worse than the standards
I didn’t have the DoD in mind when I started the thread. Sometime in say the last two weeks I think I picked up a Wall Street Journal and read about a return to drilling in the Gulf, which involved the issuing of ‘permits’ to various companies, one of which is BP. ‘What balls!’ I thought. ‘How can they expect to just waltz back in there?’ Later I thought it was a pretty good question, if a little vague. A cite would be nice, I agree. I may not be back until Saturday though, please bear with me.
I see now the difference between ‘leases’ and ‘permits’. The leases assign this or that parcel of land to a company. They check it out, decide what looks like a nice place to drill, then they draw up a plan and request a permit for that specific project- am I getting this much correct?
I assume BP would still retain their leases, even if they are just sitting there. Everyone’s leases have been just sitting there- drilling was suspended altogether. But companies want to drill again, and as I understand it the government is getting ready to issue permits to do so, including to BP.
But how in the world could BP get a fresh permit to drill? Yes, it causes some frission with my sense of justice. We wouldn’t allow Al Qaeda to drill in the Gulf, would we? They wouldn’t be allowed to transfer their leases either- I assume there is some process by which those can be forfeited or seized. The Deepwater Horizon Disaster ought to qualify for that process, especially considering the appalling context preceding it. BP is perhaps not the peer of Al Qaeda, sure, but they certainly are a menace AFAIAC and have no business touching any of our land.
The people who make these decisions don’t seem to view it that way, so I am trying to at least figure out what the other perspectives are, without getting, you know, hysterical 
That doesn’t seem to jibe with the facts. They knew about the leaking blowout preventer and went ahead anyway. They got unusual readings that should have signaled trouble which they ignored. They did not follow the specs- using 6 drilling rods when ‘standard’ is 22? I’d have to look it up if you demand the exhaustive specifics.
While the other companies might have also been reckless, the spill was not a case of merely bad luck. At least you’d need to do some convincing before I accept that. And, drilling competence really should not be measured relative to all these other clowns- there ought to be a fixed standard, and I can’t see how BP can be viewed as meeting any reasonable standard.
I’ll throw this comment in here: I don’t feel defended by the DoD if they are involved in BP’s (alleged) return to the Gulf.
An important question to ask is “Who is ‘They’?” It’s not like Tony Heyward was sitting on this one rig and told all the relevant personnel to continue with operations. Or even that the head of Gulf of Mexico E&P made the decision, either. Yes, ultimately the entire company is response, even for the actions of their contractors, but it’s hardly a case of moustache twirling villains consumed with greed.
It’s much easier to armchair quarterback than to be on the rig making these decisions yourself.
I’m not saying BP was faultless. Far from it. But you make it seem like they went ahead with reckless abandon. Sorry to say it, but the actions that took place on the Deepwater Horizon were not uncommon on these rigs, even for other companies.
It’s not surprising it was BP (and not Shell or Chevron or ExxonMobil) that got stung, but that’s also because BP is one of the biggest (if not the biggest) player in deepwater Gulf operations. And also they tend to be the ones pushing the technology the most.
Also, it’s not surprising TransOcean was involved. Considering their size, they have a disproportionate number of safety incidents on their rigs. Ultimately, the ones hiring TransOcean might be legally responsible, but TransOcean itself could have done better. I will guarantee that their head rig guy on the Deepwater Horizon was pushing his employees to keep going, even without input from his BP client reps. That’s likely true for any other rigs they work one, regardless of the contracting company.
You seem to believe there are fixed standards for every deepwater well. That’s far from true. Perhaps it’s not something the general public knows (though they should), but wells at these depths are new. Really new. As in last 10-20 years new. There aren’t that many of them.
And they weren’t drilling ‘rods’ but centralizers for the well bore. There is no ‘standard’ number of centralizers. They’re used to stabilize the cement pours. There were bad safety decisions involved in the decision to use only 6, but there’s no ‘standard’ procedure on the number.
Also, initially, it was believed that these rods were the wrong type for the well. That turned out to be false, but the ‘correct’ decision should have been to stop drilling and figure out another solution using the 6 rods they had. The solution they settled on was (obviously) not the best.
Define that ‘standard’. Deepwater operations in these conditions are novel (last 10-15 years). These guys were the ones defining the ‘standard’.
As I noted above, BP is perhaps the company that pushes deepwater technology the most in this respect. It’s easy to say one company is ‘competent’ when all it does is wait for some other poor schlub to perfect the technology before moving in. That’s basically what’s happened here.
Yes, there are basic operations issues involved. No, BP itself is not staffed entirely with clowns. There are some fundamental corporate culture things that need to be changed, particularly those involving safety. But painting the entire company as a bunch of incompetent goofs is beyond the pale.
I think a lot of heated discussion could be avoided if some review of the facts were done, and this includes the results of the investigations that have occurred since the well was killed. The final reports are not due for a while yet, but the Coastguard report and the report into the blow out preventer are out. They both make interesting reading.
From a simple technical point of view the blow out preventer is now well understood, and despite a lot of surrounding issues that clouded the core point, there is a simple, and to many people, unsatisfactory answer. The blowout preventer failed to seal due to a design issue, and would have failed even it was brand new and fully checked out. This wasn’t so much a design flaw, as simply that no-one had forseen that a loss of control of the well would lead to a set of forces that would lead to the drill pipe being subject to large vertical compressive forces inside the casing. This led to the drill pipe bending to one side, enough that the blind shear ram jaws did not cut the entire pipe. This flaw was not even on the radar until they pulled the blow out preventer apart and looked at what had happened. The worrying side issues of problems in the blowout preventer, including it being years past its recommended service date, and failures in some of the electronics and hydraulics, whilst important to address, didn’t actually contribute to the accident.
Again to point out the wide nature of the issues. BP didn’t own or run the drill rig (which includes the blow out preventer). Transocean owned it, and the drillers were Transocean employees. BP did however have a manager in charge on the rig, and BP was responsible for design of the well. In addition to the Transocean employees many tasks in the drilling were subcontracted. These same subcontracters work on every rig in the Gulf. Not just Transocean or BP rigs. There has been massive consolidation on the industry and there are often only a few players in any given speciality.
There is clear evidence that both Transocean and BP have suffered from significant issues in their safety cultures. Both seem to have suffered from a common failing - a safety culture driven by managers that like to tick boxes on paperwork. So the safety culture was directed at easy to measure and report things, but missed the big picture. Many people would recognise this problem. The industry also suffered from a “well we dodged that bullet, so we can probably keep on doing things that way.” This was the same culture that lost NASA two shuttles.
There are a lot of questions that are yet unanswered. There were a number of lapses in the last few hours that are not explained. Critical things - like why was the mud return not logged properly? That alone would have saved the rig. Some of the people that could answer these questions died on the rig. It isn’t as if they were unaware that these were critical measures and that their lives were on the line if things went bad.
IMHO - the entire industry has problems. The US government did nothing to help, having become beholden to the companies and significant political influence from very high had further degraded the government oversight. BP and Transocean had significant safety culture problems, but didn’t even realise they had them. To management it appeared as if they had a good safety culture, with all sorts of paper driven safety processes working well. The actual accident was a whole set of things going wrong all lining up at the wrong moment. It is maddening to realise just how many times just one thing going right would have prevented it. BP and Transocean deserve censure, but they are not wilful criminals. They didn’t set out to do this. Between them they are 20 billion out of pocket, and their lawyers will fight out who pays until sometime just before the sun goes cold. But they are not much worse than many other players in the industry who are being ignored.
I can’t find anything to say BP have got permission to start drilling again. On 4 April the WSJ reported they were discussing it with the US Government but a later article suggests the talks were not going well. The WSJ does suggest that eventually they will be allowed back as they have the lots and the expertise to get the oil America needs.
Comparing BP to AQ is a bit rich - I am pretty certain BP do not want to bring on the downfall of the Great Satan and introduce the Caliphate. 
Nor do they deliberately seek to destroy US assests and kill Americans. They are a multi-national oil company that had a - disasterous - industrial accident. Note I am not trying to defend them or their safety record - it wasn’t good before the Gulf, just read the Baker Report on the Texas City incident - and they quite rightly have to pay compensation to those affected but treating them as untouchable pariahs who should never touch American soil again is just plain silly.
As others have pointed out officials have to judge whether the problems identified have been put right and whether the procedures now in place have reduced the risks to as low as level as possible - noting as **Sage Rat **does that deep water drilling is in its infancy and not all the risks are properly understood and managed yet - just as they have to with every other company who wants to drill for oil in American waters.
Again, as already been pointed out, BP were not soley responsible for the disaster. The Deepwater Horizon was owned and operated by Transocean and a lot of the things that went wrong were down to them. Should they be banned from operating in the Gulf as well? (Too late for that: BP have not got a permit to drill but Chevron have and it will be Transocean doing the drilling.)
As pointed out by Great Antibob this quite a confused misquoting of what happened. Not only is there no such standard, but it wasn’t even a design specification, nor was it unusual to deviate in the manner they did.
The centralisers are used to ensure that the casing that is being cemented in place doesn’t touch or get too close to the drilled sides of the well. If it does the cement won’t flow in the constriction well enough to yield a good seal. The well parameters were given to the Halliburton engineer who was overseeing the cement job. (Note how this bit is done by a subcontractor.) He ran the parameters through a program on his laptop, and it recommended 22 centralisers as optimal. A smaller number and the program suggested that the chance of the cement job not sealing first time increased. The thing people don’t understand is that if a cement job “fails” it just means that you do it again. And cement jobs fail all the time. The contractors never say the job will work, and if it doesn’t, you get no discount when you pay them to do it again. 22 centralisers was the recommended number to lower the risk of having to do the job again. The use of six was a calculated risk. If the cement job failed, they would lose another day at least redoing it, but if it worked, they saved the time needed to fly in the centralisers. As it turns out the bet was a good one, and there is no evidence the cement job didn’t work first time. It wasn’t what caused the well to kick, and was probably a perfectly reasonable engineering call. But it gets blown out of all proportion, and so badly misquoted and garbled that it sounds as if there is nefarious misconduct occurring.
Like I said, I wasn’t sure what exactly the OP was referencing. I was assuming, based on the news feeds, that the OP was talking about a contract BP received that was for work to be completed within a few months. Again, I said that…more than once. No?
I am not making shit up and please don’t call me a liar. I gave my opinion that the relationship between BP and the States (of which the DoD is the biggest buyer) will have an effect on new permits. BP operations haven’t been tabled. They’re in a technical time-out, like I said before. That’s my speculation based on how I see it. It’s something that’s completely improvable, but allowed in a GQ forum where I thought the OP was questioning new contracts (because again, they did not provide a damned cite so i had to go off of general public knowledge) in light of the ban. It’s just like me saying, “Well, President Q went into Country 5 because he’s a religious nutcase” has no bearing on the actual facts…but if President Q is known to be a religious nutcase and the OP was asking why President Q invaded Country 5, it’s a reasonable answer to something that has no solid answer.
Pretty sure that I’m allowed some musings once the facts of the case are established…or is that not allowed?
There have been three permit approvals so far, none that went** directly** to BP as far as I know. I don’t know if any of those approvals have turned into actual permits as of today.
However, BP is a major shareholder in Noble, so I can see some hooplah since it’s been determined that the blow-out was unavoidable. But I didn’t see anything in the WSJ that talked about the Gulf - just Shell & Alaska.
imho 
I don’t see how you could logically ban BP from ever benefiting from a contract, permit, or any such in the Gulf.
Oh god, Try2B Comprehensive on* yet another* anti-BP tirade (this time masked as a “question”).
We get it. You hate BP.
The difference between definitively stating something then admitting that you were merely speculating and making shit up is too small to concern me.
And you weren’t speculating as to what the OP was trying to say?
Back off.
Looks like the WSJ article was from April 4: