Run to Failure: BP and the Making of the Deepwater Horizon Disaster

It was Big Oil's nightmare moment, and the dominoes began falling years before the well was drilled.

Two decades ago, British Petroleum, a venerable and storied corporation, was running out of oil reserves. Along came a new CEO of vision and vast ambition, John Browne, who pulled off one of the greatest corporate turnarounds in history.

BP bought one company after another and then relentlessly fired employees and cut costs. It skipped safety procedures, pumped toxic chemicals back into the ground, and let equipment languish, even while Browne claimed a new era of environmentally sustainable business as his own. For a while the strategy worked, making BP one of the most profitable corporations in the world. Then it all began to unravel, in felony convictions for environmental crimes and in one deadly accident after another. Employees and regulators warned that BP’s problems, unfixed, were spinning out of control, that another disaster―bigger and deadlier―was inevitable. Nobody was listening.

Having reported on business and the energy industry for nearly a decade, Abrahm Lustgarten uses interviews with key executives, former government investigators, and whistle-blowers along with his exclusive access to BP’s internal documents and emails to weave a spellbinding investigative narrative of hubris and greed well before the gulf oil spill.

Abrahm Lustgraten is an award-winning reporter for ProPublica and a former writer for Fortune. He covers energy and environmental topics, including natural gas, renewable energy, water resources, and energy policy. He is a winner of numerous prizes, including the George Polk Award for environmental reporting, the Stokes Award for best energy writing, a Sigma Delti Chi Award from the Society of Professional Journalists and several awards from the Society of Environmental Journalists.  Lustgarten has appeared frequently on national media to discuss energy issues, including NPR's Fresh Air, Rachel Maddow, and Hardball with Chris Mathews. In 2004 Lustgarten recieved a grant from the MacArthur Foundation to support his international reporting in China and Tibet, a project that led to his first book, China's Great Train. And his work on BP, which led to his second book Run To Failure, was nominated for an Emmy after it aired in a PBS Frontline documentary. Lustgarten lives in San Francisco, CA.