Dick Cheney's operating philosophy was to consider an event with a one percent probability of occurring as certainty when evaluating the policy/response of the administration.
The one place we need that kind of thinking is when we drill for oil, especially underwater.
Wonder why this happened? I did.
The more I read the more I realize this was no accident.
More below the fold.
The tradeoff - safety v. speed
The tension in every drilling operation is between doing things safely and doing them fast; time is money and this job was costing BP a million dollars a day. But Williams says there was trouble from the start - getting to the oil was taking too long.
Williams said they were told it would take 21 days; according to him, it actually took six weeks.
With the schedule slipping, Williams says a BP manager ordered a faster pace.
"And he requested to the driller, 'Hey, let's bump it up. Let's bump it up.' And what he was talking about there is he's bumping up the rate of penetration. How fast the drill bit is going down," Williams said.
Williams says going faster caused the bottom of the well to split open, swallowing tools and that drilling fluid called "mud."
"We actually got stuck. And we got stuck so bad we had to send tools down into the drill pipe and sever the pipe," Williams explained.
That well was abandoned and Deepwater Horizon had to drill a new route to the oil. It cost BP more than two weeks and millions of dollars.
http://www.cbsnews.com/...
[diarist comment - So now we're behind schedule and need to go faster to make up for lost time.]
When equipment is damaged
Williams said there was an accident on the rig that has not been reported before. He says, four weeks before the explosion, the rig's blowout preventer (BOP) was damaged. A key component is a rubber gasket at the top called an "annular," which can close tightly around the drill pipe. Williams said that during a test, they closed the gasket.
But while it was shut tight, a crewman on deck accidentally nudged a joystick, applying hundreds of thousands of pounds of force, and moving 15 feet of drill pipe through the closed blowout preventer. Later, a man monitoring drilling fluid rising to the top found chunks of rubber in the drilling fluid. A supervisor dismissed the fragments as "... no big deal."
http://www.petrostrategies.org/...
[diarist comment - Makes one wonder why there is no safety interlock so that nudging a joystick by accident when the blowout protector is closed does nothing. Same as I wonder why Toyota did not program their electronic throttle to disengage when the brakes are applied.]
Why the annular seal is so important
"According to Williams, when parts of the annular start coming up on the deck someone from Transocean says, ‘Look, don't worry about it.' What does that tell you?" Pelley asked.
"Houston we have a problem," Bea replied.
Here's why that's so important: the annular is used to seal the well for pressure tests. And those tests determine whether dangerous gas is seeping in.
"So if the annular is damaged, if I understand you correctly, you can't do the pressure tests in a reliable way?" Pelley asked.
"That's correct. You may get pressure test recordings, but because you're leaking pressure, they are not reliable," Bea explained.
http://www.cbsnews.com/...
[diarist comment - Although I'm no oilfield engineer, it would appear that no other measurement coming out of a well has greater importance.]
Another problem with the blowout preventer.
The BOP is operated from the surface by wires connected to two control pods; one is a back-up. Williams says one pod lost some of its function weeks before.
Transocean tells us the BOP was tested by remote control after these incidents and passed. But nearly a mile below, there was no way to know how much damage there was or whether the pod was unreliable.
"What is the standard operating procedure if you lose one of the control pods?" Pelley asked.
"Reestablish it, fix it. It's like losing one of your legs," Bea said.
More tradeoff - safety v. speed
During a safety meeting, the manager for the rig owner, Transocean, was explaining how they were going to close the well when the manager from BP interrupted.
"I had the BP company man sitting directly beside me. And he literally perked up and said 'Well my process is different. And I think we're gonna do it this way.' And they kind of lined out how he thought it should go that day. So there was short of a chest-bumping kind of deal. The communication seemed to break down as to who was ultimately in charge," Williams said.
Source for both blockquotes - http://www.cbsnews.com/...
The shortcut that probably . . .
"The morning of the disaster, according to Williams, there was an argument in front of all the men on the ship between the Transocean manager and the BP manager. Do you know what that argument is about?" Pelley asked.
Bea replied, "Yes," telling Pelley the argument was about who was the boss.
In finishing the well, the plan was to have a subcontractor, Halliburton, place three concrete plugs, like corks, in the column. The Transocean manager wanted to do this with the column full of heavy drilling fluid - what drillers call "mud" - to keep the pressure down below contained. But the BP manager wanted to begin to remove the "mud" before the last plug was set. That would reduce the pressure controlling the well before the plugs were finished.
Asked why BP would do that, Bea told Pelley, "It expedites the subsequent steps."
"It's a matter of going faster," Pelley remarked.
"Faster, sure," Bea replied.
Bea said BP had won that argument.
"If the 'mud' had been left in the column, would there have been a blowout?" Pelley asked.
"It doesn't look like it," Bea replied.
http://www.cbsnews.com/...
Why you don't take shortcuts when your equipment is deficient
To do it BP's way, they had to be absolutely certain that the first two plugs were keeping the pressure down. That life or death test was done using the blowout preventer which Mike Williams says had a damaged gasket. Investigators have also found the BOP had a hydraulic leak and a weak battery.
"Weeks before the disaster they know they are drilling in a dangerous formation, the formation has told them that," Pelley remarked.
Source for both blockquotes - http://www.cbsnews.com/...
More shortcuts you shouldn't take when your equipment is defective
BP hired a top oilfield service company to test the strength of cement linings on the Deepwater Horizon's well, but sent the firm's workers home 11 hours before the rig exploded April 20 without performing a final check that a top cementing company executive called "the only test that can really determine the actual effectiveness" of the well's seal.
http://www.cbsnews.com/...
A spokesman for the testing firm, Schlumberger, said BP had a Schlumberger team and equipment for sending acoustic testing lines down the well "on standby" from April 18 to April 20. But BP never asked the Schlumberger crew to perform the acoustic test and sent its members back to Louisiana on a regularly scheduled helicopter flight at 11 a.m., Schlumberger spokesman Stephen T. Harris said.
http://www.nola.com/...
Did BP knowingly omit the annular seal (O-Ring) at the bottom of the well, which may have allowed a clear path for gas to reach the surface, popping like a champagne cork once the heavy mud was replaced with sea water?
See the lower portion on the Times Picayune diagram at the link
http://www.nola.com/...
http://media.nola.com/...
Summary and Conclusion
There's probably more, but these events certainly constitute the highlights available at the time of this writing.
There can be little question that the management of this project was motivated by speed at any and all costs. As a result, we are facing Chernobyl in the Gulf, an area that likely will be affected for hundreds of years.
When one reads the various accounts of problems with the critical components of drilling equipment and the conscious decisions to ignore them, it becomes evident that the attitude of BP management is perhaps the most significant problem.
Management attitude flows down from the top.
And do not forget that eleven men lost their lives as a result.