Halliburton Energy Services has agreed to plead guilty to destroying evidence in connection with the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill, according to US officials.
Federal officials said that a criminal information charging Halliburton with one count of destruction of evidence was filed in federal court.
Halliburton has agreed to pay the maximum fine, be on probation for three years and continue to co-operate with the government’s criminal investigation, said the news release, which did not specify the fine amount.
The Texas-based company has also made a 55 million dollar (£35 million) contribution to the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation. It was not a condition of the court agreement, the news release said.
Halliburton was British oil giant BP’s cement contractor on the drilling rig that exploded after a well blowout, killing 11 workers and spilling millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf.
Around May 2010, the company directed a programme manager “to run two computer simulations of the Macondo well final cementing job using Halliburton’s Displace 3D simulation programme to compare the impact of using six versus 21 centralisers”, the news release said.
Halliburton recommended to BP the use of 21 centralisers in the well, but BP decided to use six instead, the news release said.
The simulations indicated there was little difference between using six and 21 centralisers, but the programme manager “was directed to, and did, destroy these results”, federal officials say.
Similar evidence was destroyed in a subsequent incident in June 2010, the Justice Department said.
“Efforts to forensically recover the original destroyed Displace 3D computer simulations during ensuing civil litigation and federal criminal investigation by the Deepwater Horizon Task Force were unsuccessful,” the news release said.
“In agreeing to plead guilty, Halliburton has accepted criminal responsibility for destroying the aforementioned evidence.”
The plea agreement and criminal charge both arise from a criminal investigation by the Deepwater Horizon Task Force.
Halliburton and BP have blamed each other for the failure of the cement job to seal the Macondo well. During a trial, BP asked a federal judge to sanction Halliburton for allegedly destroying evidence about the role that its cement slurry design could have played in the blowout.
The company announced in April it was trying to negotiate a settlement over its role in the disaster.