Documents Show Cementing Often Implicated in US Offshore Blowouts

摘要

Offshore blowouts - the uncontrolled release of gas, oil or other fluids from a well - have occurred at a rate of about three a year in US waters in recent years, but none with such devastating consequences as the explosion at BP’s Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico on Apr. 20. A July 2007 study by the US Minerals Management Service (MMS) - recently renamed the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management - recorded 39 blowouts in the US Outer Continental Shelf between 1992 and 2006. All but one of them happened in the Gulf of Mexico and the other in the Pacific.