Posted on Evans Liberal Politics, May 2, 2010, commentary by Paul Evans.
Gulf oil spill: The Halliburton connection, © The L.A. Times, April 30, 2010, by Margot Roosevelt and Jill Leovy, excerpt quoted verbatim:
Investigators delving into the possible cause of the massive gulf oil spill are focusing on the role of Houston-based Halliburton Co., the giant energy services company, which was responsible for cementing the drill into place below the water. The company acknowledged Friday that it had completed the final cementing of the oil well and pipe just 20 hours before the blowout last week.
Continuing with the L.A. Times article:
In a letter to to Halliburton Chief Executive David J. Lesar on Friday, Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Beverly Hills) chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, and Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.), chairman of the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, called on Halliburton officials to provide all documents relating to "the possibility or risk of an explosion or blowout at the Deepwater Horizon rig and the status, adequacy, quality, monitoring, and inspection of the cementing work" by May 7.
In a statement Friday, Halliburton said "it is premature and irresponsible to speculate on any specific causal issues." The company had four employees stationed on the rig at the time of the accident, all of whom were rescued by the Coast Guard. "Halliburton had completed the cementing of the final production casing string in accordance with the well design," it said. "The cement slurry design was consistent with that utilized in other similar applications. In accordance with accepted industry practice ... tests demonstrating the integrity of the production casing string were completed."
More than two dozen class action lawsuits have been filed after the explosion against BP PLC, the British company that leased the Deepwater Horizon rig, against the rig's owner, Transocean Ltd. and against Halliburton. BP is "taking full responsibility" for the spill and will pay for legitimate claims by affected parties, company spokeswoman Sheila Williams said.
Cement is used at two stages of the deep-water drilling process. .... ((Read about the rather interesting process of cementing in an oil well in the original article)).
Cementing a deep-water drilling operation is a process fraught with danger. A 2007 study by the U.S. Minerals Management Service found that cementing was the single most important factor in 18 of 39 well blowouts in the Gulf of Mexico over a 14-year period -- more than equipment malfunction. Halliburton has been accused of a poor cement job in the case of a major blowout in the Timor Sea off Australia last August. An investigation is underway.
According to experts cited in Friday's Wall St. Journal, the timing of last week's cement job in relation to the explosion -- only 20 hours beforehand, and the history of cement problems in other blowouts "point to it as a possible culprit." Robert MacKenzie, managing director of energy and natural resources at FBR Capital Markets and a former cementing engineer, told the Journal, "The initial likely cause of gas coming to the surface had something to do with the cement."
Read the full article, here.
Read, Deepwater Horizon oil spill: Barack Obama flies in amid mounting criticism, The Guardian, May 2, 2010, by Ed Pilkington.
Read and watch: Gulf oil spill swiftly balloons, may move east, USA Today, May 1, 2010, by The Associated Press, excerpt quoted verbatim:
VENICE, La. (AP) — A sense of doom settled over the American coastline from Louisiana to Florida on Saturday as a massive oil slick spewing from a ruptured well kept growing, and experts warned that an uncontrolled gusher could create a nightmare scenario if the Gulf Stream carries it toward the Atlantic.
President Obama planned to visit the region Sunday to assess the situation amid growing criticism that the government and oil company BP PLC should have done more to stave off the disaster. Meanwhile, efforts to stem the flow and remove oil from the surface by skimming it, burning it or spiking it with chemicals to disperse it continued with little success.
Watch, New Orleans fears new disaster, AlJazeera English YouTube video, May 1, 2010 -- 2:00.
See Oil spill: we are the problem. Time to tax gas. Massively, Daily Kos, May 2, 2010, by Jerome a Paris.
Check out the eKos Earthship!
Read, Gulf of Mexico worst Case Scenarios-- Listing the Players and Possible Terrorist or Nuke Tie-in, OpEdNews, May 2, 2010, by Rob Kall.
Commentary by Evans Liberal Politics owner Paul Evans: In 1984 I myself worked as a cementer for the Wooster, Ohio field office of Halliburton. It was backbreaking work, but the pay was very good. I remember struggling to drag pipe through hip deep mud in some of Ohio's oil well locations. I also remember working thirty or more straight hours on the job.... It would be several straight days "on call" and then maybe several straight days off duty and off work.
When you were on call, you could work a lot of hours in a row, and that included driving tear drop cement trucks at questionable speeds on rural roads when you'd been at work for twenty or thirty hours. I remember having worked about twenty-five or so straight hours and coming back into the yard at three thirty in the morning and getting sent out again on another job. These working conditions are the norm at Halliburton's facilities, at least they were in the mid 1980s. The reason for it is pretty obvious: Halliburton pays relatively high wages, and the fewer workers they have to hire to make up their local work force, the higher the profits, since the work is not so regular and the oil field service industry goes through spurts of activity and inactivity.
There were only four Halliburton employees stationed on the Gulf of Mexico rig when it suffered the blow-out.... In my experience, four employees is barely enough to handle crewing a basic 3,000 or 6,000 foot well in some farm field in Ohio, and it seems to me, nowhere near enough for a huge oil rig in the middle of the Gulf. However, apparently a crew handling casing on a rig in the Gulf is often no larger than two men. "Need pr" comments on this article: "There will be a weight log on the cement to show how consistent the cement job was. They should have taken samples to test the strength of the cement. I hate Halliburton but I seriously doubt this (is their) fault. There is a audio from a worker that was on the rig available and it sounds like they failed to notice the pressure on the well head when they opened the BOP."
Need pr continues: "they had salt water in the production tubing when they opened the Blow Our Preventer (BOP). The well had a gas kick and blew the salt water out of the tubing. The pressure was so great that that it blew the water 200 feet in the air, the gas settled around the rig and that's what caused the initial explosion. The link is on Hurricane Trackers website and I believe the audio was from a right wing radio show who was trying to claim terrorism. The caller was listening to the show and gives a detail account of the initial problem."
No doubt the company was cutting corners and working their employees long hours, and this whole process is very much inherently dangerous. Of course the report on this has not yet come out.
In my case, when I was working for Halliburton, at the time I medically needed to take tranquilizers for my health, and they found out about it and gave me the option of being fired or resigning, so of course I resigned. Nowadays workers cannot be fired just because they need tranquilizers, but at the time, that law didn't exist, and Halliburton's insurance didn't cover their drivers if they took tranquilizers, so that was the end of that job for me. I wasn't having any problems with management or my job, their insurance just didn't cover them for me, so I was out of luck.
You may remember that former Vice President Dick Cheney was the head of Halliburton from 1995 until 2000. During his tenure there, the number of offshore subsidiaries of Halliburton increased from 9 to 44. Last year -- or was it as far back ago as 2007, when they opened the offices, there -- of course, the company itself transferred it's focus of operations to Dubai, United Arab Emirates. I'm sure there's a huge tax break involved in THAT decision, right?
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