Offshore Drilling | featured news

BP and its chief subcontractors, Halliburton and Transocean, made decisions that increased the chances of a catastrophic blowout, a team of experts said.

The BP oil rig explosion and spill wasn't about anyone purposely trading money for safety, investigators on a special presidential commission said Monday.

Halliburton and BP knew weeks before the blast on a rig in the Gulf of Mexico that the cement mixture they planned to use to seal the well was unstable, a commission found.

BP's blown-out oil well in the Gulf of Mexico has finally been killed once and for all, five months after an explosion sank a drilling rig and led to the worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history.

Energy companies in the Gulf of Mexico will have to permanently plug nearly 3,500 nonproducing wells and dismantle about 650 unused platforms, the Obama administration says.

BP Plc's ruptured Gulf of Mexico well that caused the biggest U.S. offshore oil spill ever could be killed for good within four days, the U.S. official overseeing the spill response said on Wednesday.

Oil giant BP PLC said in an internal report posted on its website Wednesday morning that multiple companies and work teams contributed to the massive Gulf of Mexico spill that fouled waters and shorelines for months.

With the replacement of the failed blowout preventer and a cement plug in place, the well's seal is almost permanent, the federal spill response chief says. The final step will be to plug the well from the bottom.

There is no sign of an oil spill after a rig caught fire in the Gulf of Mexico, a spokesman for rig operator Mariner Energy said.

An offshore oil rig has exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, west of the site of the April blast that caused a massive oil spill.