Deepwater Horizon: Systemic Problems

[RandomGuy]

Lessons not learned
Jan 6th 2011, 15:20 by The Economist online

A SINGLE barrier had been put in place at the bottom of the well so that hydrocarbons in the reservoir below could not get into the pipe that led to the surface. A “negative pressure” test had been run to show that the barrier worked. Now seawater was being pumped into the well as part of the procedure to finish it off, meaning that there was not as much pressure available to keep the oil down where it belonged as there had been previously; yet the workers on the rig, owned by Transocean, a contractor, had been reassured by the pressure test, and were not looking out as hard as they might have for signs that something could be going wrong. And it was. The barrier failed; oil and gas broke through in a powerful “kick”. Mud gushed onto the rig above as hydrocarbons forced their way up to the surface.

This was not the Deepwater Horizon, the Transocean rig contracted to BP which caught fire and sank after a blowout on April 20th 2010, leading to million of barrels of oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico. It was Transocean’s Sedco 711, operating under contract to S in the Bardolino field in the North Sea, on December 23rd 2009. Happily, in the case of Sedco 711, the rig’s blowout preventer, a stack of valves that sits over the well on the sea floor, worked as it should have done, and as Deepwater Horizon’s did not, closing off the well before a significant amount of oil could get through. But in its other particulars the mishap was “eerily similar” to what transpired four months later in the Gulf, according to the national Oil Spill Commission, set up by Barack Obama to learn the lessons of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, which released a part of its conclusions on January 6th.

...

Previous analyses of the Deepwater Horizon accident, including BP’s own, have argued that the failure of the cement was one of the key steps on the road to disaster. As BP’s then chief executive, Tony Hayward, said later, “To put it simply, there was a bad cement job." But that bad cement job was not in itself the key factor, says the commission. The key factor was that the company Mr Hayward was running failed to exercise proper caution before relying on the cement.

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Much of the blame is BP’s. But not all. The report says that tests by Halliburton, the company contracted to do the cementing, showed the cement being used was likely not to set stably and effectively in the well; but Halliburton did not communicate that conclusion—nor, it seems, all of the test results—to BP. And BP, for its part, did not draw the right conclusions from the data it did see. Indeed the commission found no evidence it had actually looked at them. Transocean, as well as failing to spread the word about the dangers of dealing with unbalanced wells in such conditions, seems to have trained its crew inadequately in how to respond to emergencies. It could also bear responsibility for the failure of the blowout preventer, which may well have failed due to poor maintenance, but that is still under investigation.

The criticism of Transocean and Halliburton is not just a problem for those companies; it is the foundation of the report’s assertion that the oil industry has a systemic problem. As the commission’s co-chair, William Reilly, has pointed out, there are oil companies with exemplary safety records. BP might just have been a bad egg. But the fact that all three companies working on Deepwater Horizon made bad errors of management and communication—and that two of those are contractors which are involved in more or less every offshore field there is—indicates that there are things that need fixing in the at udes and practices of the industry as a whole. These broader issues, and what might be done about them, are sure to make up much of the meat of the rest of the report, due for release next week.

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http://www.economist.com/blogs/newsb..._horizon_spill

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I left a lot of the article out. I would recommend reading the whole thing.

For reference here is the PDF file of the commission's summary.

[boutons_deux]

Trust corporations, never regulate them, because they are completely trustworthy and are extremely effective in policing themselves and placing human lives and the environment above profits.

btw, the people who work on the Alaska pipeline, run mostly by BP, says the BP "preventative maintenance" policy is really "run it 'til it breaks".

btw, the Alaska pipeline broke Saturday, again.