But it ignores many important facts that are essential to understanding why the blowout occurred.Īs just one example, BP made an ad-hoc and, in hindsight, poorly informed decision to circulate a fluid waste mixture into the well instead of disposing of it as waste onshore. Like investigations of the event, the movie focuses primarily on the ill-fated and malfunctioning blowout preventer – the device designed to seal any fluids and gas beneath it and prevent them from coming to surface.

Other errors are much larger: The movie depicts gas breaking out around the wellhead even before the blowout event, but such a “broach” of gas to the seafloor never occurred. There are many inaccuracies in “Deepwater Horizon.” Some are small: For example, Mike Williams, chief electronics technician for Transocean (Mark Wahlberg), barrels down a flight of stairs on the rig carrying his luggage without holding any handrails, which would be a clear violation of Transocean safety policy. And I worried that the film would not convey the fact that virtually all of today’s deepwater wells are safely constructed.Ĭaleb Holloway (Dylan O'Brien) and Mike Williams (Mark Wahlberg) on the rig in ‘Deepwater Horizon.’ David Lee/Lionsgate Publicity Technical failures and bad decisions I did not think it would be possible to explain the complexities and nuances in a two-hour movie. In the dedicated class that I teach on this disaster, I stress not only that many technical mishaps contributed to it, but also that leadership failures – largely by BP, the company that owned the well – allowed the blowout to occur. The idea of Hollywood profiting from sensationalizing this tragedy seemed quite inappropriate to me. history, but forget that it also killed 11 offshore workers. Most people seem to remember that the Macondo/Deepwater Horizon blowout (more about this terminology below) caused the worst environmental oil spill in U.S. I had other reasons for low expectations. Conditions on Stamper’s rig, with explosions hurling people through the air, bear little resemblance to the safe, well-controlled environment that one finds on virtually all deepwater rigs around the world. When I tell non-oilfield people that I am a professor of petroleum engineering, someone usually brings up the dreadful movie “Armageddon,” in which Bruce Willis’ character, Harry Stamper (“the best deep-sea driller in the world”), is coerced into giving up his offshore drilling job to embed a nuclear bomb into an asteroid that threatens all life on Earth. Drilling for oil and gas is not typically viewed favorably or depicted correctly in Hollywood movies. When I went to see the movie “Deepwater Horizon” with some of my graduate students last week, I did not expect accuracy.

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