Posted on 09/11/2010 2:34:34 PM PDT by Hojczyk
was a triumphant evening for British Petroleum and the crew of Transocean's Deepwater Horizon. Floating 52 miles off the coast of Louisiana in 5000 feet of water, the oil rig was close to completing a well 13,000 feet beneath the ocean floor—an operation so complex it's often compared to flying to the moon. Now, after 74 days of drilling, BP was preparing to cap the Macondo Prospect well until a production rig was brought in to start harvesting oil and gas. Around 10:30 in the morning, a helicopter flew in four senior executives—two from BP and two from Transocean, to celebrate the well's completion and the rig's seven years without a serious accident.
What unfolded over the next few hours could almost have been written as a treatise in the science of industrial accidents. As with the Three Mile Island nuclear plant partial core meltdown in 1979, the chemical leak in Bhopal, India, in 1984, the space shuttle Challenger disintegration in 1986 and the Chernobyl nuclear plant explosions and fi re that same year, there is never one mistake or one malfunctioning piece of hardware to blame. Instead, the Horizon disaster resulted from many human and technical failings in a risk-taking corporation that operated in an industry with ineffective regulatory oversight. By the time the blowout came, it was almost inevitable. "It's clear that the problem is not technology, but people," says Robert Bea, an engineering professor at the university of California–Berkeley. "It was a chain of important errors made by people in critical situations involving complex technological and organization systems."
(Excerpt) Read more at popularmechanics.com ...
NOT much of an investigative report.
Biased, inaccurate, overly simplified, many errors.
Has resulted in my cancellation of PM which is turning into not much of a magazine anyway.
It would take less time to say what is correct in the report than what is wrong... a lot less time.
Only God help us that they got the thing stopped (at least for awhile)
I’m not saying that abandoning deep water drilling has to end, but I am saying that this well needs plugged with several thousand feet of concrete.
Sorry, I never read anything that says “must read”, but that’s just me.
You’re right. It’s way too early to have a clue what really happened.
My old friends at the nuclear plant where I worked will study this accident in great detail to learn whatever lessons there may be. We studied every accident we could, from TMI to the Sioux City plane crash to a friendly fire accident in Desert Storm.
“Yeah, like the Feds know how to operate 5 mile deep wells.”
Correct, so they’ve chosen the easy way out. We just won’t be doing that anymore.
Maybe you would call it a must read. I call it a very biased analysis that brings in a bunch of other disasters just to fill the pages.
In so many words this was garbage.
The assumption is that by giving the feds more authority that they would have done anything different. I doubt it. The commanders at Pearl had all the authority they needed. They just made the wrong decisions. It was a classic case of bookkeepers overriding the engineers.
And we do much the same in the oil industry (study past failures of many kinds for lessons learned and apply them).
The article is correct in some areas such as Normalization of Deviance and BP’s cowboy culture.
It is dead wrong about the integrity of the industry or the regulators or the generalization that nobody knew how to handle a deepwater blowout... I assure you, many did and do know how to handle a deep water blowout. Plans had been submitted to MMS, BP, state and federal governments within a week of the blowout to cap the well in almost the same way it was capped 60 days later. They were ignored. The whole event became a political and media spectacle.
Those who have been in this industry for decades sweat bullets and are a continuous thorn in the side of anyone who wants to take shortcuts. Some have taken the responsibility in the industry as keepers of the license to operate and the CEOs of just about any company worth their salt knows what this means... loss of access to resources, death of the company and maybe even the industry. We were around to see the nuclear industry die and some of us even saw the Santa Barbara Channel spill and what that did.
It is also dead wrong in statements such as, “... The same offshore techniques and equipment that worked in shallow hydrocarbon formations seemed to function fine at ever greater depths...” This is pure crap. The author demonstrates his ignorance since the fact is that we have learned that almost nothing works in deepwater the same as it did in lesser depths. Dramatic changes have been required and have been made... they are above the ability of some to manage. They are dang sure above the ability of a trainee to supervise.
The famous Dr. Bea from Stanford knows less about deepwater drilling than I do about brain surgery. He has set himself up as a self proclaimed expert and is a pitiful grand stander. He is a former Shell Oil facilities engineer. The article quotes a few civil engineering professors. Civil Engineers are fine fellows for building structures and such but are rendering opinions outside their area of practice when it comes to deepwater or any other kind of drilling... in most states this is something the state board of registration for engineers finds worthy of prosecution.
The number of “blowouts” is over-stated since the criteria in the Podio and the MMS Studies included many minor instances and production leaks. The author paints a picture of reckless operations, this is wrong.
Anything done wrong will go wrong. Nothing is idiot proof... ever but this disaster was preventable. A good investigative reporter would be able to say why. BP violated at least 18 separate accepted oil field standards of practice. It was a sloppy operation that was poorly engineered and even more poorly led.
The BP report is a whitewash designed to sway public opinion in preparation for a civil jury trial. Where they could, BP has placed blame on others directly or shared blame but never taken full responsibility for anything. BP will sue Halliburton and Transocean in an attempt to stack the deck against criminal proceedings by DOJ that will attempt to pin gross negligence on BP. The best defense is a good offense and BP have started theirs. If BP are found guilty of gross negligence, and in my view they should be, it should mark the end of the company.
BP can say anything but at the end of the day there is only one name on the permit to drill and only one party held accountable for all the actions on the well... BP.
Same here.
I could smell it coming when they cited some left wing propaganda outlet saying BP was responsible for something like 829 out of 850 industry wide safety violations.
PM’s target audience is not the oil trade, it’s the general population. Those of us who have not been following The Oil Drum would find some of the details interesting.
That said, there is a willingness on the part of the authors to blame the government, and who knows? They may be right about that.
later
If the government is to blame it is for the pace of the response, the industry killing moratorium and the ham fisted ignorant and intentionally destructive regulations now imposed... most of these will not make things safer, on the contrary.
And yes, it is pablum for the general population. PM has become a rag catering to a mostly softer gentler kind of home repairman. Once upon a time it contained articles about how to build your own tractor, tank, speedboat, sailboat or whatever.
You’re right, and I miss those days. I used to take it then. But they did a good job of slicing up the truthers, and that buys them a little extra slack from me. For a while.
I agree but would amend the cowboy culture comment to Exploration side of the house which still has a wildcater’a attitude about bringing in a well, and compensation schemes encourages such. Once the well is turned over to production it’s a bit different. Initial drilling of a well is a relatively short duration compared to years of production so a few days makes more impact on an E&P early phases than succeeding projects. People need to understand the hand offs in this industry to have any clue as to what the mind set is when decisions are made. Each phase is a project unto itself, and treated kind of like a Profit Center. Maximizing a subsystem or in this case a sub project, in terms of followup projects coming along, can submaximize (screw up) the rest of the projects coming along, in this case all the way to the corporate level. My guess is the company made these decisions based on years of experience in cutting corners and felt it worth the risk.
bump
Those who can, do. Those who can’t, regulate.
Thank you for a well written and knowledgeable comment. I am retired, used to work for Transocean offshore. We hadn't begun to drill in such deep water then, but our men were conscientious and expert. But this article does not consult any Transocean drilling engineers, it just quotes those accademic professors. You are right, this is written in preparation for a law suit and is disgustingly verbose.
Our guys were great guys, really courageous and diligent. I am heart broken they lost their lives. They got overuled by BP to save money. We didn't have MMS or any other regulatory agency watching us in those days but we were careful.
Having read the BP report, I plodded my way through this compilation of speculation, rumor, and off-topic yammering,
scratching my head over exactly what the author’s agenda was. Then I got to that part about the Gulf being changed forever, and I had my answer.
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