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Opinion &
Analysis
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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
+++++++++++++
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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Good to report that as at
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What I've recently
been reading
“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
See
detailed review
+++++
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
+++++
A horrific account
of:
|
how the death
penalty is administered and, er, executed in Singapore,
|
|
the corruption of
Singapore's legal system, and |
|
Singapore's
enthusiastic embrace of Burma's drug-fuelled military dictatorship |
More details on my
blog
here.
+++++
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,
|
part of a death march to Thailand,
|
|
a slave labourer on the Siam/Burma
railway (one man died for every sleeper laid), |
|
regularly beaten and tortured,
|
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racked by starvation, gaping ulcers
and disease including cholera, |
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a slave labourer stevedoring at
Singapore’s docks, |
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shipped to Japan in a stinking,
closed, airless hold with 900 other sick and dying men,
|
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torpedoed by the Americans and left
drifting alone for five days before being picked up, |
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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”
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.
+++++
This much trumpeted sequel to
Freakonomics is a bit of disappointment.
It is really just
a collation of amusing
little tales about surprising human (and occasionally animal) behaviour
and situations. For example:
|
Drunk walking kills more people per
kilometer than drunk driving. |
|
People aren't really altruistic -
they always expect a return of some sort for good deeds. |
|
Child seats are a waste of money as
they are no safer for children than adult seatbelts. |
|
Though doctors have known for
centuries they must wash their hands to avoid spreading infection,
they still often fail to do so. |
|
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.
++++++
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
|
Why does asparagus come from Peru? |
|
Why are pandas so useless? |
|
Why are oil and diamonds more trouble
than they are worth? |
|
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:
|
Argentina protects its now largely
foreign landowners (eg George Soros) |
|
Russia its military-owned
businesses, such as counterfeit DVDs |
|
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.
+++++
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.
+++++
Other books
here |
Click for an account of this momentous,
high-speed event
of March 2009 |
Click on the logo
to get a table with
the Rugby World Cup
scores, points and rankings.
After
48
crackling, compelling, captivating games, the new World Champions are,
deservedly,
SOUTH AFRICA
England get the Silver,
Argentina the Bronze. Fourth is host nation France.
No-one can argue with
the justice of the outcomes
Over the competition,
the average
points per game = 52,
tries per game = 6.2,
minutes per try =
13 |
Click on the logo
to get a table with
the final World Cup
scores, points, rankings and goal-statistics |
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