Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill: A Review
Keywords:
offshore oil rig, explosion, oil spill, environmental damages, accidentsAbstract
The Deepwater Horizon was a semi-submersible offshore oil rig, built to operate in deep waters as deep as
8000 feet and to drill down 30,000 feet, owned by Transocean. During the time of the accident, it was licensed to BP
by Transocean Ltd. While drilling an exploratory well about 41 miles off the coast of Louisiana, on April 20, 2011, an
explosion and fire on the Horizon killed 11 workers and released approximately 4.9 million barrels of crude oil into
the Gulf of Mexico. The oil spill was ultimately capped and contained on July 15, 2011. Damages to BP, the
environment, and the US gulf coast economy are estimated to be $36.9 billion. Various studies were conducted to
ascertain the extent of damages, causes, impact on environment from different field of expertise in order to
understand, avoid and handle similar accidents in the future which is almost next to irreversible. This paper presents
a state-of-the-art review of this incident and presents the lessons learnt in order to avoid occurrence of similar
accidents in the future.
