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Opinion & Analysis

Monday, May 10, 2010

Coverage of oil slick catastrophe fails to address its cause

ANALYSIS: MOST REPORTING of BP’s Gulf of Mexico catastrophe has concentrated on the oil slick rather than its technical causes.

Last February, the 8,000-ton rig Drilling Horizon floated into position 80km off the US coast to drill exploration well Macondo in 1,522m of water. Designed for waters far too deep for anchors, the rig kept its position using satellite positioning and computer-controlled multidirectional thrusters. Including helicopters, boats, fuel and specialist services, the operation cost BP a cool million dollars a day. By April, Macondo had found oil and gas some 5,500m beneath the sea. The rig was therefore to be disconnected pending availability of production facilities.

Wells are drilled using rotating pipes which circulate a heavy “mud” that controls pressures and removes cuttings. As the well progresses, a succession of concentric tubes, “casing”, is lowered into the hole, with cement pumped into the annulus between it and the hole to secure upper layers. The next section is drilled at a smaller diameter, secured with a narrower casing, and so on, telescope fashion. 

At ground level a “wellhead” provides additional sealing of the annuluses between the concentric casings. During drilling, a blowout preventer (BOP) is bolted to the wellhead to control unwanted oil or gas influx entering the well. 

Weighing 200 tons and standing 12m high, it has up to six hydraulic valves which, to shut off the well, clamp around – and can slice apart – any pipe sticking through it. Typically, with the BOP sealing off the annulus, heavier mud is pumped into the well to overcome the pressure below until it can safely be opened and operations resumed. 

In deep water, the BOP, activated from surface, sits atop the wellhead on the seabed. The floating rig kilometres above connects to the BOP by a 50cm-diameter “riser”, which provides access to the well. 

On Macondo, the final 12cm-diameter casing was run to bottom, cemented by contractor Halliburton through a non-return valve at its foot and up the annulus, and hung off in the wellhead. This would leave the well ready for another rig to reconnect later. 

On April 20th, once the cement had set, the BOP was closed to pressure test the cement, casing, wellhead and BOP. Only two steps remained before disconnection: to pump a plug of cement into the well as an additional safety barrier against untoward pressure from below (it is unclear whether this was done) and to replace the heavy mud in the riser with seawater before removing the riser. 

Once full of seawater, the 1km-long riser exerted 200 atmospheres less pressure on the top of the well than when full of heavy mud. 

When the BOP was opened, this reduction allowed an enormous bubble of high-pressure gas that had inexplicably accumulated to burst into the riser, expelling the huge column of seawater out of the riser and 70m into the air. This lowered the pressure in the riser even further, which sucked in ever greater quantities of first gas then oil. 

With no wind to disperse it that calm night, the gas quickly spread across the rig until inevitably a spark somewhere ignited it. A huge fireball ensued and although 115 people managed to evacuate, 11 men died. 

Fuelled by uncontrolled gas and oil, the conflagration raged for 36 hours until the rig sank. In the immediate chaos, no one got to the control panel to close the BOP. The riser and control lines broke free of the rig and fell haphazardly onto the seabed where the riser continues to spew the oil that is causing such environmental alarm. 

BP’s efforts are now focused on using unmanned submarines to try to close the BOP, funnelling the escaping oil into a cofferdam, containing the slicks on the surface and drilling a relief well to intersect Macondo at reservoir level. 

How had gas built up in the wellbore in an apparently sealed casing? Faulty casing? Poor cement? Lack of plug? Defective equipment? Inadequate procedures? Insufficient expertise? Organisational dysfunction? Human error?
These are big questions which only a formal inquiry can answer. 

Tony Allwright is an engineering and industrial safety consultant. He blogs at tallrite.com/blog.htm 

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© 2010 The Irish Times

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Coverage of oil slick catastrophe fails to address its cause
Published column as JPG

More on this subject in a blog More on this subject in a blog post entitled BP's Macondo Catastrophe - How it Happened

 

 

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 What I've recently
been reading

The Lemon Tree, by Sandy Tol, 2006
“The Lemon Tree”, by Sandy Tol (2006),
is a delightful novel-style history of modern Israel and Palestine told through the eyes of a thoughtful protagonist from either side, with a household lemon tree as their unifying theme.

But it's not entirely honest in its subtle pro-Palestinian bias, and therefore needs to be read in conjunction with an antidote, such as
The Case for Israel, Alan Dershowitz, 2004

See detailed review

+++++

Drowning in Oil - Macondo Blowout
This
examines events which led to BP's 2010 Macondo blowout in the Gulf of Mexico. 

BP's ambitious CEO John Browne expanded it through adventurous acquisitions, aggressive offshore exploration, and relentless cost-reduction that trumped everything else, even safety and long-term technical sustainability.  

Thus mistakes accumulated, leading to terrifying and deadly accidents in refineries, pipelines and offshore operations, and business disaster in Russia.  

The Macondo blowout was but an inevitable outcome of a BP culture that had become poisonous and incompetent. 

However the book is gravely compromised by a litany of over 40 technical and stupid errors that display the author's ignorance and carelessness. 

It would be better to wait for the second (properly edited) edition before buying. 

As for BP, only a wholesale rebuilding of a new, professional, ethical culture will prevent further such tragedies and the eventual destruction of a once mighty corporation with a long and generally honourable history.

Note: I wrote my own reports on Macondo
in
May, June, and July 2010

+++++

Published in April 2010; banned in Singapore

A horrific account of:

bullet

how the death penalty is administered and, er, executed in Singapore,

bullet

the corruption of Singapore's legal system, and

bullet

Singapore's enthusiastic embrace of Burma's drug-fuelled military dictatorship

More details on my blog here.

+++++

Product Details
This is nonagenarian Alistair Urquhart’s incredible story of survival in the Far East during World War II.

After recounting a childhood of convention and simple pleasures in working-class Aberdeen, Mr Urquhart is conscripted within days of Chamberlain declaring war on Germany in 1939.

From then until the Japanese are deservedly nuked into surrendering six years later, Mr Urquhart’s tale is one of first discomfort but then following the fall of Singapore of ever-increasing, unmitigated horror. 

After a wretched journey Eastward, he finds himself part of Singapore’s big but useless garrison.

Taken prisoner when Singapore falls in 1941, he is, successively,

bullet

part of a death march to Thailand,

bullet

a slave labourer on the Siam/Burma railway (one man died for every sleeper laid),

bullet

regularly beaten and tortured,

bullet

racked by starvation, gaping ulcers and disease including cholera,

bullet

a slave labourer stevedoring at Singapore’s docks,

bullet

shipped to Japan in a stinking, closed, airless hold with 900 other sick and dying men,

bullet

torpedoed by the Americans and left drifting alone for five days before being picked up,

bullet

a slave-labourer in Nagasaki until blessed liberation thanks to the Americans’ “Fat Boy” atomic bomb.

Chronically ill, distraught and traumatised on return to Aberdeen yet disdained by the British Army, he slowly reconstructs a life.  Only in his late 80s is he able finally to recount his dreadful experiences in this unputdownable book.

There are very few first-person eye-witness accounts of the the horrors of Japanese brutality during WW2. As such this book is an invaluable historical document.

+++++

Culture of Corruption: Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks, and Cronies
Culture of Corruption: Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks, and Cronies

This is a rattling good tale of the web of corruption within which the American president and his cronies operate. It's written by blogger Michele Malkin who, because she's both a woman and half-Asian, is curiously immune to the charges of racism and sexism this book would provoke if written by a typical Republican WASP.

With 75 page of notes to back up - in best blogger tradition - every shocking and in most cases money-grubbing allegation, she excoriates one Obama crony after another, starting with the incumbent himself and his equally tricky wife. 

Joe Biden, Rahm Emmanuel, Valerie Jarett, Tim Geithner, Lawrence Summers, Steven Rattner, both Clintons, Chris Dodd: they all star as crooks in this venomous but credible book. 

ACORN, Mr Obama's favourite community organising outfit, is also exposed for the crooked vote-rigging machine it is.

+++++

Superfreakonomics
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It is really just a collation of amusing little tales about surprising human (and occasionally animal) behaviour and situations.  For example:

bullet

Drunk walking kills more people per kilometer than drunk driving.

bullet

People aren't really altruistic - they always expect a return of some sort for good deeds.

bullet

Child seats are a waste of money as they are no safer for children than adult seatbelts.

bullet

Though doctors have known for centuries they must wash their hands to avoid spreading infection, they still often fail to do so. 

bullet

Monkeys can be taught to use washers as cash to buy tit-bits - and even sex.

The book has no real message other than don't be surprised how humans sometimes behave and try to look for simple rather than complex solutions.

And with a final anecdote (monkeys, cash and sex), the book suddenly just stops dead in its tracks.  Weird.

++++++

False Economy: A Surprising Economic History of the World
A remarkable, coherent attempt by Financial Times economist Alan Beattie to understand and explain world history through the prism of economics. 

It's chapters are organised around provocative questions such as

bullet

Why does asparagus come from Peru?

bullet

Why are pandas so useless?

bullet

Why are oil and diamonds more trouble than they are worth?

bullet

Why doesn't Africa grow cocaine?

It's central thesis is that economic development continues to be impeded in different countries for different historical reasons, even when the original rationale for those impediments no longer obtains.  For instance:

bullet

Argentina protects its now largely foreign landowners (eg George Soros)

bullet

Russia its military-owned businesses, such as counterfeit DVDs

bullet

The US its cotton industry comprising only 1% of GDP and 2% of its workforce

The author writes in a very chatty, light-hearted matter which makes the book easy to digest. 

However it would benefit from a few charts to illustrate some of the many quantitative points put forward, as well as sub-chaptering every few pages to provide natural break-points for the reader. 

+++++

Burmese Outpost, by Anthony Irwin
This is a thrilling book of derring-do behind enemy lines in the jungles of north-east Burma in 1942-44 during the Japanese occupation.

The author was a member of Britain's V Force, a forerunner of the SAS. Its remit was to harass Japanese lines of command, patrol their occupied territory, carryout sabotage and provide intelligence, with the overall objective of keeping the enemy out of India.   

Irwin is admirably yet brutally frank, in his descriptions of deathly battles with the Japs, his execution of a prisoner, dodging falling bags of rice dropped by the RAF, or collapsing in floods of tears through accumulated stress, fear and loneliness. 

He also provides some fascinating insights into the mentality of Japanese soldiery and why it failed against the flexibility and devolved authority of the British. 

The book amounts to a  very human and exhilarating tale.

Oh, and Irwin describes the death in 1943 of his colleague my uncle, Major PF Brennan.

+++++

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