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After doing research to find out who the geologist is referenced in the Hoagland interview, I believe I found the man’s identity and background information and a confirmation of his involvement in the Deep Water Horizon well.

FROM WIKI:

Safety Boss is an oil well fire fighting company based in Calgary, Alberta, Canada.

The company and its CEO, Mike Miller, became most famous by becoming the number one fire-fighting company in Kuwait after the 1991 Gulf War. The company doused 180 out of the 600 fires, more than any other company there. Safety Boss set the rapid pace that had to be matched by other companies in Kuwait, and as a result, the fires were out within nine months, instead of the many years that was initially given as the earliest possible date to put out the fires.

The last fire to be put out was set up by Safety Boss to be doused by the push of a button by the Emir of Kuwait.

The technology that allowed Safety Boss to take the lead was the Smokey fire truck, developed in 1983 after an especially stubborn and damaging oil fire in Alberta.

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FROM THIS LINK: http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/58817/title/Science_%2B_the_Public__BP_oil_rig%E2%80%99s_sinking_and_gushing_crude_raise_questions

“Among them: Mike Miller, chief executive officer and senior well-control supervisor at Safety Boss. Headquartered in Calgary, Alberta, his half-century old Canadian company specializes in fighting oil-well fires, blowouts, pipeline ruptures and processing-facility fires. He’s curious why BP rushed to put out the rig’s fires.

“At least while the rig was burning, all of the effluent from the well was coming to the surface and burning at the surface,” Miller notes. Indeed, burning oil — even on the sea surface — is an accepted spill-mitigation technique. So he’s puzzled why water boats were deployed to dowse the burning platform.

A mile down and out of sight
“What they did was fill the rig up with water. At which point it sunk,” Miller says — a full 5,000 feet to the seabed. And that, he maintains, violated “the first rule in offshore fire-fighting, which is not to sink the ship.” The reason: As soon as the rig submerged, it took down the riser pipe, which in this case was a 5,000-foot-long tethered straw through which the oil was gushing up from a reservoir 13,000 feet below the seafloor.

This riser didn’t just break loose and fall down when the platform sank: It crumpled. And where it suffered acute bends, it weakened, opening up at least two secondary gushers. So instead of having the oil coming out as a single fountain at the Gulf’s surface — one that people could reach — it’s now spewing from multiple holes in a damaged pipe nearly a mile beneath the surface.”

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As far as confirming that Mike Miller is one of the legitimate sources for the gas bubble story, at least I have the correct person and company name. If and when I find a connection between him and the Hoagland statements, I’ll post it here.