This diary is in 2 parts. First a rant, and then onto a new Manhattan Project. So here goes ...
Let's play a little thought experiment. Imagine that you or I had our very own money tree known as an oil well. Let's say it went way over budget and cost $385 million to build, or roughly the original value of the Deepwater well. Let's say that we expect to get 25,000 barrels a day out of it, much less than the million or so barrels that's currently spewing out. At a price of $77 per barrel, that comes out to just under $2 million a day or about $700 million a year. So, over 5 years, we'd be looking at about $3.5 billion.
Now, not being any type of an oil expert, I've chosen what I think are likely to be realllly exaggerated costs as well as greatly under-estimated incoming revenue. I don't know what the actual life of an oil well is — more than likely, it's a lot longer than 5 years. So these are very rough, back-of-the-envelope guesstimates.
So now we have our hypothetical $3.5 billion money tree. Let me ask you— how much would you be willing to pay to make sure your very own, money-making, oil well doesn't blow up?
Yep, suddenly that $500,000 blowout preventer's looking pretty cheap.
Like going to the moon or flying a commercial jet, drilling for oil is always going to be inherently dangerous. But we human beings figured out a long time ago how to deal with insanely dangerous activities.
Planning for catastrophes happens every day. A commercial jet can lose more than one engine and still land safely. We could build jets that would just drop out of the sky like a rock, but the risk is so high that we require manufacturers to put in multiple backups and fail-safes. Any number of failures can occur — the hydraulics can go out or part of the fuselage can come apart. But we've planned for that. We assume that someday, somewhere and somehow, something on that plane will fail. We do this so that, WHEN the worst does happens, there is at least a CHANCE that the plane will be able to land safely.
Running into burning buildings is inherently dangerous, but thousands of firefighters do that every year and come out unharmed. Mountain climbing, speedboat racing, sitting on top of 100,000 gallons of rocket fuel and blasting off into space are all inherently dangerous. And yet, every year, thousands of people do these and more. Safely, repeatedly, day after day after day. Where the risk of catastrophic failure is exceeding low, but the outcome of that failure is anything but, we humans figured out long ago how to manage it and work around it.
Which brings us back to BP. As we've discovered, just like with everything mechanical, there are multiple ways that an oil well can fail. These kinds of odds are not a remote possibility. They stack up one upon another, making it a virtual CERTAINTY that if you're in the business of drilling for oil, at least one of your wells will eventually blow up in your face.
So now, instead of $2 million a day of cash coming in, BP's looking at millions and possibly BILLIONS of dollars of liability on its hands. I'm sure their shareholders are just thrilled that, for a mere half a million dollars, they could have been sitting pretty on that $2 million bucks a day.
So here's where you and I come in. See, if it were my oil well, I wouldn't have just one blowout preventer — I'd have four. I wouldn't have just one concrete casing — I'd have several. Because I'm trying to protect a freakin' $3.5 billion money tree. I'd have backup upon backup upon fail-safe. And then, I'd have backups upon THOSE fail-safes.
You wouldn't have to tell me to comply with EPA's minimum oil well requirements. I wouldn't even REMOTELY be interested in filling only the bare minimum EPA requirements. With $3.5 billion to protect, I'd be THRILLED to do 3, 4 or even 5 times what the EPA requires.
$3.5 billion vs - let's say that it costs an extra $50 or even $75 million to put in multiple levels of safety back-ups. Guess what — to protect my $3.5 BILLION money tree, $75 million is chump change. And any CEO who flat out refuses to fork over that paltry amount of money to keep their well from exploding should be fired for gross incompetence.
Because, if that were my oil well, an explosion would only have to happen to me ONCE. The FIRST time that my $2 million a day turned into billions of dollars of liability would be the LAST time that happened. And if it did happen, every last one of my OTHER wells would be shut down until they had multiple levels of back-ups upon back-ups as well.
Because the cost of NOT planning for catastrophic failure is just way too high. So how is it that, spill after spill after spill, these oil companies have YET to figure out that not only is it better to prevent a well from exploding, it's a whole lot CHEAPER to do so as well?
Okay, okay, rant's over. Now on to the new Manhattan Project. BP is clearly out of ideas as to what to do next. However, we can use this catastrophe as an opportunity to actually figure out the best way to handle this. BP has received thousands of ideas on how to stop this spill. Instead of just waiting while they fiddle and fuss their way around to capping the well, I think it's time to test and develop some new ideas.
I'd like to see an open water laboratory set up, maybe about the size of a football field, divided up into individual 5' x 10' areas. Within each of these areas, there could be scale models of the most promising new ideas set up. An area the size of a football field (about 45,000 sq ft) can hold 900 of these mini-labs. Then they could be broken up into 3 main divisions: 300 labs for ideas on how to stop the spill, 300 labs on how to get the oil out of the water, and 300 labs on how to replenish the ecosystem. Each one of the "stop the spill" labs should have a fountain coming up from the bottom to replicate the gushing oil head.
Once the most promising ideas are identified, they could be moved to a larger lab area where they could be studied more closely. I'd also like to see a large reward offered for whoever comes up with the best idea (or ideas) in each division.
As horrific as this catastrophe has been, this is the right time and place to develop a lot of new technology. I'm hoping we will...