A sad little spoof of BP’s management of the spill
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AAa0gd7ClM
(part of below is from a letter I sent a reporter and columnist for the Arkansas Democrat)
…as a person who spent my first 20 years of working as an oil field geologist, I particularly notice articles about the BP spill. And I spent too much time listening to the talking heads on TV. The tragic result of the hubris of man has a ripple effect that was unforeseen by those who were party to it. The comparable situation was the Bay of Campeche spill in Mexico from 1979. But can we learn from it?
Thanks to a policy under George Bush I and Bill Clinton, the late 80s and all of the 1990’s were decades where the domestic oil industry was throttled into submission by literally bribing the Saudi’s with promises of protection from Saddam. Low energy prices delayed even the most casual effort to find an alternative to foreign sources of oil. I recall distinctly when gasoline went below $1 per gallon in 1999, and a huge part of that were actually taxes. When gasoline prices rose to $1.29, I recall one letter to the editor raging at the oil companies for “gouging”. With that kind of mindset, the BP spill seems almost inevitable. And the human response to the most hated industry in the world hasn’t changed much since Ida Tarbell wrote scathing articles about John D. Rockefeller over 100 years ago.
The drilling moratorium will hurt a lot of people already hurting, namely the coastal Louisiana folks who depend upon oil production and drilling. I have a cousin in Franklin , LA who is a directional drilling supervisor as was his father before him. It affects him and his family. Rig owners will have to make a decision very soon. Diamond Offshore, on Lary Kudlow’s show, June 10th, said they already have a contract ready to sign to send a rig from the GOM to Nigeria. This rig has about 110 permanent employees, many currently laid off, and if they move overseas, only 35 or so will retain their jobs. One requirement made by the Nigerian government is that nationals have to be hired for most of the jobs. Those jobs won’t come back. What drilling contractor will stay and wait out the moratorium when they can leave for foreign soil? Brazil , Cuba , Venezuela , Trinidad, or even further afield such as Nigeria or Vietnam would be glad to have those rigs. 100,000 people making above average wages can become unemployed or under-employed.
The result of the manpower hiatus between 1985 and 2001 was the lost of entire generation of engineers and geologists. All you have left are the gray-hairs, at least those who toughed it out (I threw in the towel in 1991 after the Gulf War resulted in low prices as the Saudi’s dumped oil on the market to pay for the war and keep Iraq poor); and, you have the relative newcomers – folks who have no collective memory of blowouts many of us lived through like Campeche or the huge blowout in Texas circa 1981 that took months to kill. The experienced engineers are either in upper management, retired, or returned to room temperature.
This is a failure of process, not a failure of procedure, equipment, or any deliberate act of negligence. The acoustic switch which some advocate as a preventative may not have done the trick. In talking with people I know with lots of offshore experience, and reading blogs like www.drillingahead.com the bottom string of casing (called a liner) may have come completely loose due to a bad cement job. In that case, it may have simply been pushed up the hole like a pea out of a straw and is jammed into the bottom of the BOP. In that case, nothing is going to shut the BOPs.
http://dailyhurricane.com/2010/05/acoustic-switch-would-not-have-saved-bp-well.html
The real problem, of course, is that if you have to shut in a well with the BOP, then someone has, by definition, already made a huge mistake. You control a well with the hydrostatic pressure, and in this case, they thought the hole was cemented “tight”. In fact, it obviously wasn’t and once the riser (the 5000’ of temporary pipe between the drill rig and the ocean floor) displaced the heavy drilling mud with seawater, thus reducing the hydrostatic head the high pressure oil and gas was pushing against, then the fate of the rig was sealed.
Who ordered the riser fluids displaced? Almost certainly that decision was made by BP in their engineering offices in Houston . Transocean did not make that call. Halliburton did not make that call. There is no sense of urgency sitting in an office in Houston calling the shots. But the people on the rig who probably were the most concerned about that decision were likely the very people who had the least authority to overturn the decision. That much I will bet on.
Once the fluid started to move, it flows into the mud pits. There is testimony that the derrickhand (the man who mixes the mud) and the mud engineers (who monitor and assist the derrickhand in making the mud) called the floor to tell them “we have mud everywhere”. We don’t have their personal testimony because all three men died. That mud flow was a clear sign that the bubble from below was coming up the pipe. At that point, they would have tried to shut in the well. At that point, they have already lost control of the well. But if the engineer is right about the entire liner coming loose and shooting up the borehole, it would be too late, as the pipe would already be jammed into the BOP. The BOP, acoustic switch or not, would not have been able to close on the pipe (there was also drill pipe in the hole which would have simply acted as a guide for the liner surrounding it.)
As for BP. This likely would not have happened to anyone else, except perhaps Exxon-Mobil. The very large majors are the most arrogant and BP has a reputation among the industry as self-important, we-are-the-best-and-you-are-peons air of superiority, and, also, among the slowest paying, foot-dragging tightwads in the patch.
Pride goeth before a great fall. BP is badly soiled, and should be. I would hate to be a BP engineer and walk into the Petroleum Club in Houston or New Orleans . If not outright catcalls, I would say they wouldn’t be invited to anyone’s table gladly.
The solution offered by one native on CNN this morning was to find the person who messed up and arrest them for 11 murders. My solution would be similar. I am confident at the end of the day, BP will try to shield their engineers from the blame, but ultimately you will see a lot of BP hands fired over this. But if the process does not change – i.e.- engineers are making decisions from a desk in Houston instead of on the rig, then we are set up for a repeat. The solution is to shackle that desk jockey to the driller’s console and see if he decides to displace the drilling mud with sea water before being sure the cement job was good. I will bet he would not have done it if they had been on the rig and had the sense of diligence that only comes with being in harms way.
Nationwide the call for action is in every blog, and every editorial page editor is urging “energy independence”. Energy independence is a chimera. Look at ethanol production, for instance. You drive a John Deere tractor made in France with German parts, planting Canadian seeds, and harvest it with a British built combine, haul the grain in a Volvo truck to a facility made by French engineers. You produce the ethanol to be sold in stations under the CITGO (Venezuelan owned) or TOTAL (French) banner, and call it American?
Battery power? Name all the Lithium mines in the U. S…… exactly. Lead? We’ve pretty much banned its mining here. We get most of our strategic and rare earth metals from Russia , Canada , and South Africa- our ‘friends’, for a price. Where do we mine the silica for solar panels? As the environment takes first place here, we have no qualms about buying these items from countries willing to mine them. The net impact upon the global environment is a sum zero game, but our U. S. environmentalists can smugly gloat over the “improvement” in the environment.
The bottom line is that there is no alternative to oil and gas. Every time someone gets a sense of urgency to reduce our dependence by greater efficiency or to find a diffuse mix of solutions that will reduce the oil and gas demand, prices fall and makes everything else more or less uneconomic. LED lighting is far more efficient that the old CRT tube in your TV. The problem is we all watch a 50” television instead of a 17” one. More efficient but still using the same amount of energy. We’ve painted ourselves into a corner.
Finally, the argument goes that this is a teachable moment. A time when we can learn from the complacency that came from not having a serious drilling accident in over 30 years in the Gulf. This event, described by the CEO of Diamond Offshore was a ‘black swan’ – a rare event which turns everything upside down. Indeed it does. But the author of the Black Swan, and perhaps and even better book called, “Fooled by Randomness”, Nassum Nicholas Taleb warns against trying to predict the unpredictable.
This spill COULD have been prevented, in that there was a way to have prevented this from happening, but seeing that way is much easier in hindsight…see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindsight_bias”>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindsight_bias But truth is that the possibility of such a catastrophic failure was not anticpated by BP, nor, likely could it have been as it would have been seen as an impossibly large problem.
Taleb also suggests that since we cannot know what the future problem will be, then the efforts to correct the current problem is not likely to be a solution to the future problem. In other words, all the coming regulations and preventative measures may well be for naught, as some human being finds a new way to screw something up like it has never been screwed up before…this “Ludic Fallacy”… http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludic_fallacy”>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludic_fallacy, the idea that simple solutions will actually be a proxy for a future unknown event suggests that when President Obama said that we need to assure that “this will never happen again”, then that is an impossible goal. There is and always will be a risk to drilling wells, whether on land or in deep water.
Postscript 6-15-10
It is becoming clearer by the day that BP took shortcuts. They did not run a bond log and Schlumberger employees flew off the rig barely 12 hours before the disaster begin. BP also used fewer centralizers, which may have contributed to a poor cement job, which seems the root cause of the problem. Initially, I scoffed at the notion BP would be held criminally neglegent. I am now of the mind that some engineers in Houston should be prosecuted for manslaughter of the 11 victims. That is harsh but at some point you have stepped over an engineering decision and into the realm of letting the bean counters in London direct the well. As grim as it sounds, I now firmly believe BP is criminally liable.
Postscript 7/14/2010
The evidence mounts of BP’s failure. The American Petroleum Institute (API) recommends you circulate out mud 1½ times the volume of the hole. They did only a fraction of that. There was no lock ring holding the casing back from the BOP… There is little integrity left to the inner liners. Only a outer casing can be secure and there is no promise those are in much better shape than the production string.