Thanks for that question.
I'll start off with the containment effort. The exercise commenced in July. They were joined by BP just about a month ago, so it's still early stages. Most of what they're doing at this point, we think--even though we're not actively involved, and it is being done within the companies--is reviewing what was done, basically the lessons that were learned, if you like, from the Macondo, because that was the first well for which that kind of major subsea containment effort was mounted.
We will engage in that in a couple of ways. My two colleagues have mentioned the International Regulators Forum, of which we are a very active member. The regulator in the U.S. is the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management. Actually we met with the director of that bureau when we were out in Vancouver several weeks ago at our conference, and we meet with his operational staff and discuss a variety of issues. So we'll stay involved and stay up to speed with it through their efforts, because this is basically being done, as we speak, inside the Gulf of Mexico.
The second way we'll get involved in that is that when companies prepare for us an emergency response plan for a new deepwater exploration well, we will require them to address the containment effort they will be able to exert, including where they would get the resources to do that, as part of their emergency response plan. That is something that hasn't been done up until now. That was very much a lesson learned for us. I suspect the lesson will be applied in the same way by our colleagues in Nova Scotia and in the National Energy Board.
The other question you asked, I believe, was what we are doing about lessons learned. One of the things we have learned is that in the Macondo incident, it wasn't so much a matter of regulations not being in place. It was that there wasn't an appropriate safety culture, and we don't think there was an appropriate amount of oversight of what was going on, so a number of things that were done were well outside normal practices.
There were a number of opportunities for intercession that would have been successful if they had been taken earlier to prevent the incident, but for some reason.... We really don't know the reasons yet.
Some of you may be aware that BP came through the Department of Natural Resources to Ottawa and met with all of us to make a presentation on the Macondo incident about three or four weeks ago. They did a three-part presentation for us. There was a gentleman who was part of the engineering investigation team. He talked very frankly about the things that had gone wrong and where they could have been stopped. Another gentleman talked about the containment effort, and the third gentleman talked about the spill response effort. The lessons learned have been that we have good regulatory regimes in place, and our operators have appropriate safety cultures and appropriate practices and procedures, but one lesson is most important in all these incidents. And I've been involved. My company had crew members on the Ocean Ranger. We lost five of our workers there. None of these incidents have happened as a result of one thing going wrong and causing the disaster. They've always been a result of a number of things that of and by themselves would not have led to such tragic consequences, but when they line up, when they occur one after the other after the other, then you get into that kind of situation.
The best way to prevent that is by adopting and imposing an appropriate safety culture. I'll use just one small example: the stop-work authority I referred to. Everybody on a drilling installation that Chevron runs has the ability at any time to stop any work they see ongoing if they believe it is unsafe or if they believe it could lead to an unsafe condition.
A week and a half before the Macondo blowout there was continuous remotely operated vehicle monitoring of the blowout preventer stack and the marine riser. It was noticed that there were bubbles coming from one of the control pods in the BOP stack. That's a no-no. That shouldn't happen. That means something has gone wrong. But it was ignored. Nobody did anything about it. If somebody had said “We have to find out what's wrong there”.... It would have been an expensive effort. In that deep water it would have taken a number of days to pull the marine riser and to pull the BOP stack and inspect it to see what had gone wrong with it. It might have cost $10 million or $15 million. What a marvellous investment that would have been to avoid the catastrophe that happened. A safety culture can stop that.
That's where we're really exerting our maximum efforts, and our operators are making sure we have an appropriate safety culture on every installation in our area.
I could talk about this for a long time. I won't. I'll let it go at that.
