First to Kendall- Royal Dutch Shell is the one you are thinking of.

Joe, you are wrong about the hiring policies of the major oil companies. Their workers are highly paid. They get good pensions upon retirement- I am one of the pensioners. The man in charge of the BP well receives six figures, and the chief technician gets close to that or the same.
The professionals are the best that universities can produce with at least four years engineering or earth sciences degrees.
The procedures and exploration programs are usually led by Ph.D. level specialists.
I was with an Exxon company, but I worked on cooperative projects with employees of other major companies; their training was equivalent.
As a geological exploration specialist, I worked with other Ph. D graduates- in my own group one from London Univ. and one from Utrecht; my own from a Big Ten University. Our technicians were 2-4 year program graduates of approved technical schools.

I hesitate to sort out blame- but the decision-makers, often econonics-finance-business graduates as well as the Board- sometimes take short-cuts to reduce expenses or to maximize profits (which could be for me, my next-door neighbor, employees, my daughter's teacher's pension fund, etc.- and we all want more).

I also blame the regulatory agency of the government, MMS, which allowed short-cuts on this and several other BP wells which were breaking new ground, and hence should have been required to have the best and latest (but even that may have been not enough in this case).