Finding fault with British Petroleum

It doesn’t appear that British Petroleum caused the gulf oil spill through its own negligence; apparently it was just an unfortunate accident.

It seems to me that we humans want to assign blame when a disaster like this one occurs. Most of us want to point to a simple answer to the problem; or to one person or institution who should shoulder the blame. Maybe we find security in doing do. It probably makes the world around us seem less unexplainable and less uncomfortable.

But unfortunately the world is a dangerous place and the best strategy is to face it, and all of its complexities head on.

The gulf oil spill report

President Obama formed a commission to investigate British Petroleum’s roll in the explosion and sinking of the Deepwater Horizon, the deaths of 11 people and the resulting oil spill.

The presidential commission investigating the accident recently announced its findings and made the important point that the oil spill could not be blamed on BP and its attempts to save money by skimping on safety.

 Fred Bartlit, who is chief counsel for the presidential commission that investigated BP said; “To date, we have not found a single instance where human beings made a conscious decision to favor dollars over safety,”

There was pressure on the employees to get things done quickly and move on. But this is understandable considering the expenses involved.

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Difficulties in oil drilling

Think about the engineering problems that you would need to solve if you wanted to drill oil in deep water.

• First of all, you need to find the oil under the ocean bottom.
• Then you need to tow your oil rig hover deep into the ocean and make it over one spot. You can’t attach it to the ground since you are a mile above the ocean floor.
• Now you need to send down a shaft for the drill that is a mile long
• After that, you start drilling and the oil that you are looking for might be 3 or 4 miles underneath the ocean floor.

You are doing all this while fighting wind and storms on the surface and ocean currents moving in different directions at different depths. And don’t forget about the extreme pressures involved.

Now imagine the difficulty involved in plugging an underwater gusher with damaged and coiled metal from the shaft being pushed around by ocean currents. While at the same time, you need to  use many of your resources to do triage on your public relations and attempt to minimize your legal exposure.

And imagine having to work with a federal government whose main contribution to the whole situation is to just get in the way. The federal government’s major activities were to threaten legal action and to manipulate reports written by scientists about deep water drilling.

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I’m just glad that there are people willing to take on those problems.

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The explosion of the Deepwater Horizon

No one is sure of the exact reason why the explosion occurred on the Deepwater Horizon, but here is the most probable situation according to an internal investigation team selected by BP.

One important idea that you have to remember is that accidents like this one never have just one cause; there is always a whole chain of events that go wrong in order for the disaster to occur.

The simplified a list below which came from ; Synopsis of BP’s Deepwater Horizon Accident Investigation Report.

Here is the accident chain:

1. Bad Cement— The crew was going to temporarily abandon the well in order to build a construction facility. They poured cement down the casing but the slurry mixture that they used might not have been right for the extreme pressures in the drill shaft.

2. Damaged barrier in the drill shaft— Deep in the shaft there is something called a float collar which is located between the drill and the shaft and functions as a barrier to gasses. This might have been damaged.

3. The well team didn’t properly pressure test the well.

4. The increase in the amount of combustible hydrocarbons coming up the drill shaft wasn’t noticed in time.

mud gas separator

5. Mud gushered uncontrollably out of the drill shaft onto the rig. This mud was saturated with combustible hydrocarbons. The crew was unable to prevent the blowout by closing a valve, so they connected the pipe to a mud gas separator. This mud gas separator was quickly overwhelmed.

6. There might have been a design issue with the mud gas separator. Hydrocarbons might have been vented onto the rig and possibly into confined spaces on the deck.

7. The fire and gas control system did not prevent ignition.

8. The explosion may have damaged the emergency disconnect sequence.