Well control insurance

Well control insurance covers the costs incurred to regain control of an oil or gas well that has become uncontrollable, a situation called a blowout, as well as the associated expenses of firefighting, pollution clean-up and redrilling. This peril, specific to the exploration-production industry, can generate extreme losses combining property damage, environmental harm and lost production. The Deepwater Horizon platform disaster in 2010 illustrated the potential scale of this type of event, mixing loss of life, a large-scale oil spill and colossal liabilities. Underwriting well control requires sharp technical expertise on drilling operations, the quality of the operator and the safety barriers, in an often extreme and hard-to-access environment. For the specialist market, this risk concentrates high severity and an accumulation exposure when several wells or operators are hit by a single regional event.