Just three months into the job, BP chief scientist Ellen Williams watched the tragic events unfold following the April 2010 explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. The accident killed 11 workers and triggered the largest-ever industrial oil spill; by September more than 500 million liters of crude oil had gushed from the damaged deep-water well owned by BP.
Williams says that in the months following the spill, she got increasingly frustrated as she tried to parse the news media’s “confusing and often contradictory” reports of the details of the accident and the attempts to plug the well. “It bothered me that if I couldn’t understand on a technical basis what was going on, then what about others?” So heeding her academic instincts, she rounded up experts in oil exploration and environmental sciences and asked them to put together a technical talk on deep-water drilling,...
