The Gushing Oil Leak Disaster

[AAReagles]

BP has also be strong armed into paying $20 billion to the US to pay.

I believe it when I see it.

[anthonyvop]

I believe it when I see it.

It will be over $20 billion when it is all done.

[Bob Riebe]

I don't know what America you live in but in the Real America BP is being reamed big time by both the media and the Politicians.
BP has also be strong armed into paying $20 billion to the US to pay. Including paying for things that they had noting to do with.

Chicago politician, Chicago politics.

OH yes, the Obama wants them to pay for the workers he has put out of work by preventing drilling operations.
I wonder if at night Pres. Obama looks at a mirror and chants- mirror, mirror, on the wall....

It may be just a false leak to distract the media from Obama, but it was said to day that Rhambo may be on his way out.

[Jag_Warrior]

Places I have been had their emergency valves checked, at the very least, weekly. Some "dump and divert" valves were checked daily. Checks on emergency valves that couldn't be done but twice a year were supplemented with emergency area evacuation drills, done weekly but at different times, and if you didn't take them seriously, you'd be looking for a job.
Things fail. The valve in question may have failed to close completely and against the 5000 psi I read about somewhere, the valve gate and seal would have been eroded away in no time at all. Just like your dripping faucet at home gets worse as the water erodes the hole larger and larger. You can go into any business and find violations. Sometimes you get by with it, sometimes you don't.

Ultimately, I think this will come down to a
"production first" type of accident. They were doing things they had done before and gotten away with it. It wouldn't surprise me if what was being done is a sort of industry standard.

It sounds like you've worked around these rigs and seem to know about these systems, so I'm directing this to you: according to this, about 45% of these BOP's are prone to failure. Is it because of lack of funding or lack of technology that the failure rate is so high? And should we not assume that it's not a question of if, but when, another deepwater well is going to pop?

Last year, Transocean commissioned a “strictly confidential” study of the reliability of blowout preventers used by deepwater rigs.

Using the world’s most authoritative database of oil rig accidents, a Norwegian company, Det Norske Veritas, focused on some 15,000 wells drilled off North America and in the North Sea from 1980 to 2006.

It found 11 cases where crews on deepwater rigs had lost control of their wells and then activated blowout preventers to prevent a spill. In only six of those cases were the wells brought under control, leading the researchers to conclude that in actual practice, blowout preventers used by deepwater rigs had a “failure” rate of 45 percent.

Details Emerge on Weakness in Well Design

[Hondo]

Sorry Jag, I don't have a simple answer. There really is no one cause root failure. In my experience in petro-chem and other industrial production related industries, I can only offer my opinions based upon experience.

Because Mother Nature guards her hand so well there will always be a card she hasn't played yet that makes "when" a constant probability in any business that fools around with geology. Obviously, the more extreme the environment, the more difficult the remedy.

The biggest problems I see nowadays are as follows, also bearing in mind that the failure of one BOP or ESP device doesn't necessarily have to end in catastrophe. In addition, product testing can create a false sense of security. Prior to WW II the US and Germany both developed magnetic proximity warheads for their torpedoes. All the tests were hugely successful and very expensive so the testing was stopped and the weapons were put into production. In the field the weapons failed miserably when the war started. Amongst other things, the tests failed to take into account that the strength of the earth's magnetic field varies in different areas. OK:

Cost Cost Cost. Big business got to be big business by not spending any more money on production than they absolutely have to. When the salesman says this would be the minimum you need to do the job but we recommend you upgrade to this, the company will always go with the minimum. Always. Later on they might bite the bullet and upgrade the device but most just struggle along cursing the maintenance headache it has become.

Too much emphasis on paper trails. Managers trained for administration and bean counting with little actual hands-on experience with what they have been tasked to manage. They don't really know what is going on and have to rely on the advice of subordinates, some of whom may be in the cya mode.

Communication between the various shifts of operating personnel. They don't pass new developments on to each other or quickly forget them if they do. Yes there is a log book and sometimes they read it, but forget anyway.

Promotions to the control room based upon seniority rather than ability. Some control room operators can lose 2/3rds of their automatic control loops and still fly the thing by the "seat of their pants" just by watching their before and after information only loop data. Others can't run a pencil sharpener unless it is in automatic.

Routine. The operations crews have set routines of duties during their shifts. Once those are completed and barring any emergencies, they have the rest of the shift to hide out and nap, play cards, read, fool around on the internet, and watch movies on small dvd players. Except for napping and card playing, it's the same in the control room. When a panel alarms the operator will look up, check the nature of the alarm, cancel and reset it, and go back to his crossword. In short, the job is now interfering with their personal time.

Always blame the instrument, The lying transmitter. If operations doesn't like the numbers they're being shown, it's an instrument problem and never a process or product problem until proven otherwise.

Engineering. They have plenty of mechanical, chemical, and electrical engineers but very few, if any, process control engineers. As a result automatic measuring and control devices are selected based upon cost and installed where they can't accurately measure the process anyway. Like being too close to a 90 degree bend in the pipe. Some of these gunfighters are fresh out of school and eager to make a name for themselves by cutting costs and raising production.

An example. I got a call one night from the control room that I had a lying level transmitter on a vessel that was "swinging up and down" and causing a high alarm every 5 minutes. It had to be the transmitter because the measured flow into and out of the vessel remained the same. In this case a pressure transmitter was being used for a level transmitter which is not uncommon and ok to do in many applications. After looking at the loop on my laptop I went out to the vessel and hooked a communicator up to the transmitter. Sure enough, it was swinging. I continued to ponder the situation while cursing the annoying cloud of steam that came out of the process drain about every 5 minutes fogging everything up. Every 5 minutes...Hmmmm. I realized every time the steam cloud happened the indicated level also dropped. The only vent open on the vessel was a 4" pipe running from the top of the vessel down to the process drain. The added steam pressure was making the level look higher than it was. When the steam vented off, the indicated level dropped again. Ok, but why after ten years did this just start happening. I called the control room and asked if any changes had been made in how the product was handled before it was sent to us. Nope. Ok, I told the shift manager he had steam build up in the vessel and if he would send an operator out to open a top vent the level swing would stop. He did and it did. I then called an other area and asked if there had been a change in how they handled the product. They said there had been a change. There was no need to allow the product as much cool-down time so it was being sent, still hot, through the system. All the change forms had been filled out and approved and memos had been sent to the affected areas. I called my control room back and told them the news and after 10 minutes of rooting around, they found the memo. The next 2 nights I got the same call from my control room about the same problem (they had already forgot) and I told them to open a top vent. I made sure all the I/Es were in on the joke. I soon got a visit from the area electrical engineer who stated they couldn't leave that top vent open due to rain and other contamination. He wanted to raise the alarm level on the loop by changing the upper range value. I told him that would stop the bogus alarms but would not stop two very expensive automatic control valves from constantly wearing themselves out responding to bogus level changes. You might want to consider going to a capacitance or sonar level transmitter mounted on top of the vessel, that would be the proper thing to do. Nope, don't want to spend the money. Final solution and still there when I left 2 years later...operations went out on top of the vessel and built a tent frame out of broomsticks and duct tape and lashed it to the vent pipe flange. Then they took the top half of 4 rain suits and duct taped them together and tied the whole mess to their tent frame.

This one incident I have related has most of what I listed. It is a true story. Stuff like this is done everyday at manufacturing plants all over the country. We will continue to have accidents until the purse gets opened a little wider and human nature as far as job performance goes improves.

[Jag_Warrior]

Cost Cost Cost. Big business got to be big business by not spending any more money on production than they absolutely have to. When the salesman says this would be the minimum you need to do the job but we recommend you upgrade to this, the company will always go with the minimum. Always. Later on they might bite the bullet and upgrade the device but most just struggle along cursing the maintenance headache it has become.

So you think it's primarily cost, but also something to do with lacking the technology? That sounds reasonable. I had the good fortune to work with a former employer's aerospace division years ago (military contractor). Dude, it was like being Danica Patrick at a sponsor party. I can't swear to it, but I think even the carpets were made from shredded $100 bills. With government contracts (especially military), you create your profit margin when you write the proposal... and you'll easily get at least that level of profit (and probably more). My sense with oil, and most other industries, is that there is more unknown risk (for profit). But still, reading that TransOcean's study showing a roughly 45% failure rate of BOP's was pretty shocking. What's worse is that BP apparently modified this BOP in a way that wasn't kosher. So they took something that only worked about half the time anyway and really FUBAR'ed it. I heard something yesterday about some "shear mechanisms" that some BOP's have and some don't. I'm going to try to find a good illustration on those as soon as I get time.

IMO, deepwater drilling is an important sector. But clearly we've let the industry drift too far off on its own. It's not an area I've paid much attention to, outside of reading the odd Popular Science article over the years. But we've expended many more resources trying to understand space, and only a fraction of that amount understanding the deep sea. Since we need these rigs to function properly, and most of these various "green technologies" are still in their infancy, now is the time to devote more resources to developing whatever technologies are need to get BOP failure rates (well) below 45%... or maybe developing alternative safety measures.

[Hondo]

I'm also saying there may be better, higher quality, more appropriate BOP devices out there that are far superior to what was used, but at a higher cost. The devices on the BP rig may have only met the minimum "as designed" specifications and therefore were ok for use. Kind of like the Titanic. The Titanic actually had more lifeboat space than was required by the minimum standards of the day.

As far as the real story on industrial safety and short cuts taken in the field goes, you'll have to spend a few years out there on your tools before you know and understand the truth. You'd be amazed to know how often a leaking, spewing pipe has a chunk of pointed broomstick handle driven into it and then secured with a duct tape wrap to plug or slow down the leak. Maybe they'll shut down and fix it and maybe they'll start looking for a wider broomstick.

[dunes]

I don't know what America you live in but in the Real America BP is being reamed big time by both the media and the Politicians.
BP has also be strong armed into paying $20 billion to the US to pay. Including paying for things that they had noting to do with.

Strongarmed 20 billion wont ever come close to restoring the jobs perminitly lost and the industries habitat that made them; those will never recover.
Being reamed big time but allowed to continue there stalling and destruction of the gulf and its surrounding states, Allowed to continue to drill in the future in the gulf, and in the ocean.
Let someone else clean up thier mess and send them the tab for everything when its all back to normal, until then stay out of the gulf and out of our country.How many chances would you give someone who destroyed your surroundings and way of life before you stoppeed them permenitly.


Money doesn't cover nor replace what they destroyed in the gulf.
And I'm only speaking of what BP did with this latest disaster and how they handled the after effects.Scapgoating,stalling and passing the buck.

[dunes]

Nobody is, or perhaps will be. The only thing I'm glad about this is that this happened on Obama's watch, not Bush's - otherwise we'd never hear the end of it from our distant cousins in other countries, much less the American media.

I'm sure this will help us all to hide away in memory all the things that happened to poor old Georgy Porgy Boy.
That wasn't my point and reguardless how you feel about Obama he too should have and could have done more. Only difference between George's Katrina and Obama's BP is Obama still has time to do the right thing.

[BT46B]

I'm sure this will help us all to hide away in memory all the things that happened to poor old Georgy Porgy Boy.
That wasn't my point and reguardless how you feel about Obama he too should have and could have done more. Only difference between George's Katrina and Obama's BP is Obama still has time to do the right thing.

I believe Obama is indeed trying to do the 'right thing' whatever that may be his hands are really tied with lack of options I believe. But if this had happened on Georgy Porgy's watch it would have been a grand cover up for all his buddies in BP and Halliburton, at least to the best of his ability to do so.