BP Oil Spill: How Do You Screw Up Making Concrete?

The BP Oil Spill has yet another culprit: concrete.

First there was the marine riser. Then the unstoppable surge of methane gas, followed by the blowout preventer that could not prevent blowouts. Now it’s the concrete’s fault. At what point are the companies going to start blaming the water in the Gulf?

In the dizzying list of hard-to-define terms BP has floated to the public since the Deepwater Horizon explosion six months ago, it seems the company has finally found another culprit in the slow clean-up effort: faulty concrete. And the faulty concrete happens to be Halliburton’s.

This explanation has received major media coverage over the past two days. The Times and the Journal both published articles about the faulty concrete, the former publishing Obama’s chief investigator’s letter to the rest of his commission:

We have known for some time that the cement used to secure the production casing and isolate the hydrocarbon zone at the bottom of the Macondo well must have failed in some manner. That cement should have prevented hydrocarbons from entering the well. For a variety of technical reasons that we will explain at the upcoming hearing, BP cemented the well with a nitrogen foam cement recommended and supplied by Halliburton. Halliburton generated the nitrogen foam cement by injecting high pressure nitrogen into a base cement slurry as it pumped that slurry into the well.

Huh? I understand it all happened 10,000 leagues under the sea, but does anyone have a simple explanation for how you can screw up making concrete? Because the eHow page makes it seem pretty easy.