Posted on 09/08/2014 5:26:02 AM PDT by thackney
A federal judge’s ruling that BP was reckless in the lead-up to the Gulf of Mexico oil spill hinged on mishandling of well integrity tests and a decision to drill deeper than was deemed safe, among other factors the judge said were “motivated by profit.”
For years, the London oil company has been waging courtroom warfare over the events before the worst oil spill in U.S. history, pointing to alleged mistakes by cement contractor Halliburton and rig operator Transocean, which owned the Deepwater Horizon rig where 11 workers died in an explosion as the disaster unfolded.
U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier’s ruling, released on Thursday, attempts to string weeks of testimony and reams of documents into a tapestry of facts and theories to form an account of the actions that caused the 87-day spill. In 153 pages of a dense technical essay, the judge assigned most of the blame to BP and said its conduct was grossly negligent.
Central to the findings is a botched safety test conducted as operators prepared to seal and abandon the well for production later — a complex operation that involved pumping in cement to keep oil and gas out of the wellbore.
The test aimed to check whether the cement could sustain sustain heavy reservoir pressures after workers removed the blowout preventer — a safety device placed on the wellhead used during drilling — and the rig moved on to other jobs. On the day of the blowout, Barbier found, key BP employees misinterpreted pressure readings from the test and, by displacing weights in the well, allowed high pressures to overwhelm the Macondo well a mile beneath the Gulf surface.
But the “reckless” BP behavior that led to the spill began earlier than that, according to Barbier’s court filing.
Drilling deeper
Eleven days before the blowout, Barbier wrote, BP chose to drill an extra 100 feet into the frail sandstone reservoir in order to reach a certain depth before abandoning the well temporarily.
Drillers pump dense fluids into their wellbores to counter the upward pressures of the reservoir. It’s a careful balancing act, and some regions deep underground aren’t suitable for it.The judge found that BP drilled beyond a pressure-safe window called a drilling margin.
Based on the testimony of a U.S. expert, the judge concluded the additional drilling beyond the drilling margin left the wellbore “in an extremely fragile condition” and caused debris to enter the well. When the cement was pumped in a few days later, that debris would make it impossible for the it to form a barrier to keep hydrocarbons in the oil-soaked rock out of the wellbore. That was one reason for the blowout.
“BP’s decision to drill the final 100 feet was the initial link in a chain that concluded with the blowout, explosion, and oil spill,” Barbier said.
Financial incentive
Time is money, and the clock was ticking. The day of the extra drilling, Barbier wrote, the British oil giant was 60 percent to 70 percent over budget on the Macondo well, and Transocean’s Deepwater Horizon cost $1 million a day. The work was eating up time BP needed to drill other wells.
Two days before the blowout, BP began to pour cement casing into the Macondo well, while the debris was still inside. The casing was placed in debris at the bottom of the well, which caused it to buckle, Barbier wrote.
BP used cement leftover from work at another Gulf well. That particular Halliburton cement slurry wasn’t designed to be changed into light “foam” cement, a kind used to deal with fragile rock. It eventually failed to keep hydrocarbons out of the well, not because of the compromised chemistry of Halliburton’s unstable cement, as BP alleged, because of its misplacement, due to the debris, Barbier found.
Pressure builds
One of the procedures BP needed to complete before pumping the cement into the well was to switch a two-way, up-and-down flowing valve near the bottom of the well to a one-way, downward flow, in order to keep cement and fluid from coming back up the wellbore.
Finishing that operation before pumping the cement is part of BP’s internal best practices, but BP only attempted to convert the valve after the cement had been run. Given the specific circumstances, Barbier said, that move wasn’t unreasonable, but it was risky because it could allow debris to clog the valve and prevent it from switching its flow.
The judge found that that is what happened, and the two-way opening later allowed hydrocarbons to travel up the wellbore, after an entrance through a breach in the cement casing.
Valves and tests
One day before the blowout, BP and its contractors couldn’t decipher certain pressure readings: Why could they circulate fluids in the wellbore, but only at low pressures? After nine attempts to convert the valve to a one-way flow, the engineers decided it had worked because it could circulate fluids through the system. However, Barbier wrote, BP never verified that the valve had been switched.
The oil producer, he said, could have had the drilling rig crew reverse circulate fluids upward to check the flow of the well, but it did not. Rather than fixing the valve, the ninth attempt to convert the float collar – which involves pumping mud through the well system – actually created a breach near the bottom of the well, Barbier said, siding with a theory by one of the U.S. experts.
BP also decided not to run a test that could have demonstrated the integrity of the well, a move Barbier said went against BP’s own best practices. BP, the judge said, “had multiple reasons to suspect the cement job would fail.”
“BP’s decision was primarily driven by a desire to save time and money, rather than ensuring the well was secure,” he wrote.
Anomalies
Barbier found that BP misread results from the most crucial safety test required before an oil company can remove the five-story-tall emergency device called a blowout preventer. The test, called a negative pressure test, aims to check the integrity of the entire wellbore typically by measuring pressure build up in the drill pipe.
Hours before the blowout, the negative pressure test was taking much longer than normal because of unusual pressure readings — anomalies that should have alerted engineers aboard the rig to the fact that hydrocarbons could move in the wellbore, or that the test had failed.
“Instead of declaring the test a failure, however, the BP Well Site Leaders concluded that the test needed to be conducted on the kill line, rather than the drill pipe,” Barbier wrote.
A matter of time
Pressure and fluid readings from the kill line, which is a subsea pipeline used to choke off or control a well, were satisfactory, BP employees called it a success, and Transocean crew members agreed. But while the test shifted to the kill line, pressure built to 1,400 pounds per square inch in the drill pipe. Barbier said they should have declared it a failure.
About two hours before the blowout, BP Well Site Leader Don Vidrine told Transocean’s drilling rig crew to displace mud in the riser above the blowout preventer with seawater, allowing the wellbore pressure to drop. The riser is a pipe connecting a subsea well to the rig on the surface.
That resulted in reservior pressure overwhelming the wellbore, causing an upward blast of pressure called a kick, and then a blowout.
At 8:52 p.m., April 20, 2010, hydrocarbons entered the wellbore, and eventually escaped up through the riser to the Deepwater Horizon, where it reached an ignition source and exploded. Eleven workers on the rig were killed and other injured. Millions of barrels of oil spewed into the Gulf. Thousands of lawsuits followed, as did billions in fines, a multibillion-dollar lawsuit, criminal plea bargains and years of litigation.
Opening the floodgates
Barbier ruled on Thursday that BP bears two-thirds of the responsibility for the spill, and was grossly negligent, which could mean it will see Clean Water Act files up to $18 billion. He ascribed 30 percent of the blame to Transocean, which ran the negative pressure test. Both BP and Transocean had discussed the anomalies in the pressure readings, and both got it wrong, Barbier said.
As oil and gas were entering the Macondo wellbore, Vidrine was on the phone with Mark Hafle, a BP senior engineer in Houston, who later told BP’s internal investigators that he advised Vidrine that the critical safety test couldn’t have been a success if the kill line and the drill pipe had such inconsistent pressure readings. They spoke for 10 minutes.
Patently false
“If anyone at BP had instructed Transocean’s drill crew to re-run the negative pressure test immediately after the call,” Barbier wrote, the crew would have stopped the mud pumps and activated the blowout preventer.
The blowout, he said, would have been averted. BP later said its investigative team found no evidence “that the rig crew or well site leaders consulted anyone outside their team about the pressure abnormality.”
Barbier called that statement patently false.
BP said it strongly disagrees with Barbier’s ruling, and will appeal it immediately.
OMG! A for-profit corporation is motivated by profit! I wonder if the judge gets a paycheck...or does he do the noble thing and work for free?
BIG DITTO !!! - Yeppers, I thought the same thing.
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