Rig survivors: BP ordered shortcut on day of blast

(CNN) -- The morning the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded, a BP executive and a Transocean official argued over how to proceed with the drilling, rig survivors told CNN's Anderson Cooper in an exclusive interview.

The survivors' account paints perhaps the most detailed picture yet of what happened on the deepwater rig -- and the possible causes of the April 20 explosion.

The BP official wanted workers to replace heavy mud, used to keep the well's pressure down, with lighter seawater to help speed a process that was costing an estimated $750,000 a day and was already running five weeks late, rig survivors told CNN.

BP won the argument, said Doug Brown, the rig's chief mechanic. "He basically said, 'Well, this is how it's gonna be.' "

"That's what the big argument was about," added Daniel Barron III.

Shortly after the exchange, chief driller Dewey Revette expressed concern and opposition too, the workers said, and on the drilling floor, they chatted among themselves.

"I don't ever remember doing this," they said, according to Barron.

"I think that's why Dewey was so reluctant to try to do it," Barron said, "because he didn't feel it was the right way to have things done."
http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/06/08/oil.ri ... tml?hpt=T2

Hopefully that BP executive didn't survive.

If he did, he probably wishes he hadn't (at least when his name comes out).

Hi,



Not good enough. This is way too risky to depend on any one thing. I think they need to drill one (or two) intercepting wells as back ups *ahead* *of* time* and just leave a few feet to go. And I think they need to test the blowout "preventer", and they have to show that all parts of it are working, and they have to have backup manual trip switches -- like the $500,000 one that Cheney said they didn't need.

They use these almost everywhere else -- why not here in the USA?

This situation will continue until AT LEAST August, and maybe until Christmas, or maybe sometime next year -- and maybe until the oil runs dry... Have you asked the people living in the Gulf what they think of that? This oil will spread way beyond the Gulf of Mexico.

It took them 10 months to cap a well in 160 feet of water -- this one is in

five

thousand

feet

of water.

If the blowout preventer is functioning, then by definition it will prevent a blowout when an explosion occurs. Otherwise it would not be functioning.

Neil, for some reason you seem to want to make everything that happens on this planet a political battle, usually North against South, liberal vs conservative (when you are not blaming Dick Cheney for everything). You have even blamed me for the oil spill problem.

I think you should grow up and blame those who were specifically involved in making very poor decisions about the drilling on that platform. We will know a lot more in the coming months, but it appears that clear mistakes were made, and possibly crimes were committed.

Maybe because everything important that happens is a political battle.

If someone commits a criminal act of gross negligence, that is not politics. It is a matter for the judicial system (criminal and civil), and should be treated as such.

It is amazing the lengths that some are going to in order to blame everyone but BP. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Or in scientific terms, the explanation that requires the least number of assumptions is the one that is most likely to be true. Unfortunately, some on this forum who claim to worship science and rail against religion, act more like witch-doctors than rational human beings.

I'm not talking politics at all. I'm talking about a series of failures, starting with asinine rules written by the industry themselves and forced through by former oil men, and so weakly enforced as to be laughable (if it weren't so serious).

When profit driven organizations are given full control, this is what we get.

The total irony of this oil spew, is that those who were screaming "less government" before are now blaming the government for not doing enough instantaneously. So, which is it: small government and no regulations -- or, big government that takes over at the drop of a hat?

The rules we have allowed BP to use just one "fail safe" device (ha! what an oxymoron!) and not have anything ready to go if things get FUBAR. That is what happened, and now we see the results.

The Justice Department is doing a criminal investigation -- but the oil is all over the place, poisoning everything in the water column, and now we are mixing in dispersants. More poisons -- just great.

If you understand safety engineering you will know that no device can ever be totally failsafe.
Aeroplanes have several back up systems and redundancies built in to satisfy stringent regulations and yet they still crash.

Back to GOM - it's seeming more likely that BP designed the well badly from the outset with insufficient barriers between producing formation and surface. If all else had been good this would have worked. Possible failure of cement job may have then lead to a leak in the annnulus between two casing strings leading to a pathway for formation fluids to get into the riser. Failure of the BOP to operate correctly then lead to the gas kick becoming an uncontrollable blowout with the consequences we are now seeing.
If it were possible to stop the well flowing now, it might be catastrophic in that it would likely cause an underground blowout where formation fluid (oil) would escape through many cracks in the actual seabed around the well. This is the likely reason why BP have never attempted to shut the well in.
Containment of the oil is the only option until the relief wells are drilled and the oil bearing formations can be plugged with cement.

Interesting to note that all of the designs for the well were apparently approved by the MMS.

There is an interesting article heredespite being on an obviously biased website. (There is a link to a YouTube video that is supposed to show a "blowout", this is garbage, the driller pops the pipe with the mudpumps still running, the 3000psi or so blows off the mudbucket and throws the roughneck across the floor. Big error on the drillers part, but does question the knowledge of Zimmerman)

If the rules and regs are so bad, then they should be changed by Congress or the MMS (Obama Administration). The government has the power to change them at any time (after 18 months in office, the grace period is over for Obama).

As to whether the problems are related to "profit-making" organizations doing the drilling, do you think it would be any better if drilling was run by the government? I would say that the lesson of Chernobyl proves that wrong. Non-profits are also concerned about budgets, and if an individual person in charge makes a big mistake by taking excessive risks to advance their career, then it does not matter whether they work for a profit-making company or for the government.

I would agree with that. But a blowout preventer can have fail-safe features. If pre-drilling side wells in advance for deep water wells was the right thing to do, I am not opposed to that, it is just that I am not sure that anyone on this forum has the correct expertise to determine what is a proper fail-safe mechanism.

Not really disagreeing ... but adding my take on a few of your points.

Doubtful. But I don't think the issue is public vs private. Neither BP nor the government would properly price risk. True-cost pricing would make deep water drilling too cost prohibitive. What's the current projected estimate for the clean-up effort? I've seen some estimates in the 100's of billions USD when they include ecosystem destruction, losses to local industry and livelihoods, harm to neighboring countries, long-term repercussions throughout the larger economy, etc. Collected, these externalities describe the true cost of deep-water drilling risk in a closed system, and should be factored into the price of every barrel of crude produced this way. But like many other industries, such externalities are not considered. If they were, fossil fuel extraction and consumption in general would be cost comparable to other, more immediately expensive, renewable/green sources of energy.

It's like saying eating one fast food hamburger per day only costs $1 per day. This ignores deferred externalities including obesity, heart disease, diabetes, petroleum consumption required to transport flash-frozen foods, the effects of wealth flowing from your community to fast food HQ, etc.

Obviously, it's very difficult to build a true cost assessment. The complexity of interconnectedness and uncertainty is overwhelming. But in the BP/GOM oil spill case, we'll learn retroactively what the cost of catastrophic risk is. From the Economist: "Gulf oil blowout - That's one way to price in externalities"

For more on true-cost economics, the book An Introduction to Ecological Economics (Costanza, Cumberland, etc.) is a good start. True-cost economics is aka ecological economics because it applies a systems-theory approach to the topic of economics.


Chernobyl is anecdotal and proves nothing. It's like saying that:
1) The Chernobyl catastrophe was as a bad thing, and
2) Since Chernobyl was operated by the Ukrainian government,
3) therefore the Ukranian Government failed to prevent the bad thing, and
4) Since other countries also have governments,
5) therefore other governments will fail to prevent the same bad thing.

I agree with the rest of your comments re: incentives and excessive risk.

Chernobyl happened in 1986 before Ukraine became an independent nation (it was still part of USSR).

My point is that public run enterprises are not more competent than private run ones. In theory, public entities are more interested in the public good than private ones, but in practice (for many reasons) that rarely holds true because individuals who work for the public entities act in the their own best interests, not the public's best interest. Also, people who work for public entities (and the entities themselves) are typically immune from civil lawsuits, and even sometimes immune from criminal lawsuits, and thus are not held accountable for their actions. Private entities have much more to loose.

One good thing about this incident (if there is any good thing) is that BP has enough money to pay tens of billions (or even more) to try and correct the damage done and pay liability claims to those who will be impacted.

Oh it's still politics. Haven't you noticed the enormous influence oil has on governments around the world? Oil companies and politicians are constantly greasing each others palms.

There is a difference between the politics of oil, and drilling for oil, which is a matter of regulatory compliance and adherence to safety issues that are the best interests of society and the companies involved. If a company violates drilling regulations or commits an act of gross negligence (which often can be treated as a crime in the US), then the judicial system should handle that free from political influence. The same holds true for transgressions by financial services companies (another area where crimes may have been committed).

Regarding who is getting greased up, there is plenty of that to go around whether oil is involved or not. For example, US President Obama spent $740.6 million (USD) in his 2008 presidential campaign, eclipsing the combined $646.7 million that Republican President George W. Bush and Democratic nominee John Kerry spent four years earlier. So I would say that Obama was already greased in money before he took office, although I don't think much of it was from oil companies.

The permits for drilling, the regulations that must be adhered to and the consequences for not adhering to them - all political. Nothing that is of sufficient importance can be separated from politics.

In the US, the consequences for not adhering to regulations, or for committing gross negligence for the spill in the Gulf of Mexico will be settled in the courts. Any changes needed to the regulations and/or decisions about future drilling permits will be settled in the political sphere.

the temp job i'm currently working at is with a private enterprise, major nuclear reactor facility, and i can guarantee you that it's a lot safer because of government oversight.

every day we start out with a meeting on safety; the crew takes turns reading from various safety manuals, including a pocket version that we are required to carry with us constantly.

when we see something that is unsafe, we are required by law to report it... it's called a "nuclear notification", and we are repeatedly told that there will be no backlash for reporting unsafe working conditions.

the other day i was randomly picked to sit in on a focus group that evaluated the effectiveness of these recent fixations on safety... everyone from the facility bus drivers to the pc repair techs goes through the same safety training.

bp has some of these same safety practices at their facilities, but it was obviously ignored in this gulf incident, largely because of a lack of government oversight, i suspect... the bush administration that gave us bernie madoff basically de-regulated everything, including the oil business.

At no time did I ever suggest that there should not be government regulations and oversight. Never. But that is not the same as having the exploration and drilling done by government employees.

Unfortunately, government oversight at the MMS seems to be lacking. That is not unique to the oil industry, because we have found out that the SEC oversight of the financial industry was even more lacking and even more incompetent than the MMS oversight of the oil industry. The SEC failure to discover the Madoff $50 billion fraud scheme is just one example:

The Madoff Files: A Chronicle of SEC Failure
Thursday, September 3, 2009

Washington's top cop for Wall Street, hamstrung by bureaucracy and inexperienced investigators, failed to thoroughly pursue multiple warnings about Bernard L. Madoff's multibillion-dollar Ponzi scheme, according to a scathing new critique of the Securities and Exchange Commission by its internal watchdog.

The report, issued Wednesday by the commission's inspector general, offers the first detailed examination of one of the agency's most public embarrassments.

It says the SEC received repeated allegations that Madoff was probably cheating investors, including detailed road maps provided by outside businessmen, only to fail to discover the fraud.

The SEC opened inquiries five times in a 16-year period. But in each instance, inexperienced officials, at times ignorant of other agency probes into Madoff, took his explanations at face value and did little to verify them.

Madoff himself told the inspector general that he was "astonished" that the SEC did not verify whether he was carrying out the billions of dollars of trades he claimed to be making after he supplied the agency with account details.

"The SEC never properly examined or investigated Madoff's trading and never took the necessary, but basic, steps to determine if Madoff was operating a Ponzi scheme," the inspector general, H. David Kotz, concludes in the report.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... 03851.html

Your facts are completely 100% backwards.

The financial industry was deregulated by the Clinton Administration, led by his Treasury Secretary Bob Rubin (who was set to again be Treasury Secretary under Obama until the financial system collapsed in 2008). The Clinton deregulation allowed financial institutions to issue credit default swaps without the same collateral as would be required by insurance, even though a credit default swap is basically insurance against failure of debt instruments (in this case mortgage backed securities).

I cannot honestly say that Bush (had he been President at that time) or the Republicans in Congress were opposed to the Clinton's deregulation, but Clinton spearheaded the deregulation effort and could have easily vetoed any bill from Congress if he had been opposed to it.

The Legacy of the Clinton Bubble
By Timothy A. Canova
http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=1229
(excerpts)

[color=darkblue]THE CONVENTIONAL wisdom has held that economic policy was a great success under Bill Clinton in the 1990s and a failure ever since. Hillary Clinton has made the comparison often, promising to end “the seven year detourâ€

Please stay on topic.

BP is getting more and more flak from Obama and he seems to be stirring up a general anti- Brit feeling. Trying to deflect criticism from himself??

To reinforce what I have already said, no matter what errors or shortcuts were made by BP, the blowout preventer is ENTIRELY the responsibility of Transocean - they own it and are responsible for it's maintenance and testing. Why are they getting no flak?

I'm not sure where you are hearing anything "anti-Brit"? And, what more would you expect for anybody in the Federal government to do? The things that they (the government/MMS) should have done, were missed in the months and years before this accident happened.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=127561853

BTW, the problems with "fracking" for gas and oil are coming in for belated scrutiny.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=127593937

Obama is getting a lot of flak, so he has give someone else flak to deflect criticism away from him. One cannot even fathom the reaction if this had happened during the Bush presidency. Anyway, it is always best to blame the one with the "deepest pockets".

However, it is not yet clear why the blowout preventer failed, and there is a lot of eyewitness testimony being shown on American TV that a BP executive got into an argument with the drilling company and told them to use sea-water instead of mud down the hole (mud helps reduce the pressure) and that was the main cause of the blowout. BP management told the workers that the drilling rig was costing $750,000 per day, and they needed to speed up completion of the well so it could start producing, and that they were already $26 million over budget because of delays. So things really do look bad for BP.

I am not sure that the average American even knows that BP is a British company or that the name was previously British Petroleum. BP TV ads in the US tend to lead people to believe that BP stands for "Beyond Petroleum". Up until the spill, they were masters of public relations.

The blowout device had a dead battery, and faulty hydraulics. They knew it was suspect.

New Estimates Put Oil Flow Rate Significantly Higher

Reporter: Documents Show Years of BP Neglect



What the frack?

The EPA should not be regulating fluids (usually water or steam) pumped into an oil well to increase production unless it presents an environmental hazard. This procedure is only done into oil and gas reservoirs, not drinking water sources, so I don't understand how it could be an environmental hazard.

Any regulation of these procedures should be by agencies responsible for regulating the oil business, which includes both state and federal agencies, depending on ownership of the properties.

BTW, this seems off-topic to me, having nothing to do with the oil spill in the Gulf.

your facts are dead wrong, as usual... there were multiple investigations of bernie madoff that were done during the bush administration... wrt the bush de-regulation of everything:

"...Part of this is due to an oversight by Congress that effectively deregulated credit default swaps in late 2000. The Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 (H.R. 5660 and companion bill S.3283 ) was introduced in Congress during the last days of the Clinton administration. Neither bill was debated in the House or Senate. They bypassed the substantive policy committees in both the House and the Senate so that there would be no hearings or opportunities for recorded committee votes. The leadership of the Republican-controlled Senate and House inserted the Act into an omnibus budget bill during the waning day of Bill Clinton’s lame duck administration, which was in no position to veto anything. It gained some notoriety afterward for containing the infamous “Enron Loophole.â€

please look at the name of this forum, it's called "off topic"

only from people who deliberately ignore the facts:

"Writing on Wednesday on the Huffington Post website, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said the MMS had been corrupted and captured during the eight years of the George W. Bush administration. -- An acoustic switch could have averted the disaster, and, Kennedy said, "[i]n 2000, the Minerals Management Service while weighing a comprehensive rulemaking for drilling safety, deemed the acoustic mechanism 'essential' and proposed to mandate the mechanism on all gulf rigs."[2] -- But "between January and March of 2001, incoming Vice President Dick Cheney conducted secret meetings with over 100 oil industry officials allowing them to draft a wish list of industry demands to be implemented by the oil friendly administration. Cheney also used that time to re-staff the Minerals Management Service with oil industry toadies including a cabal of his Wyoming carbon cronies. In 2003, newly reconstituted Minerals Management Service genuflected to the oil cartel by recommending the removal of the proposed requirement for acoustic switches. The Minerals Management Service's 2003 study concluded that 'acoustic systems are not recommended because they tend to be very costly.'" -- MMS is now "the poster child for 'agency capture phenomena,'" Kennedy said. -- "[T]he real culprit in this villainy is a negligent industry, the festering ethics of the Bush Administration and poor oversight by an agency corrupted by eight years of grotesque subservience to Big Oil." ..."
http://www.ufppc.org/us-a-world-news-ma ... witch.html

Well, actually Obama is getting flak from Democrats as well, primarily for his slow and laid back response to the crisis.

I don't know much about the proposed MMS regs you mention above, but it sounds to me like if this was such a slam dunk then Obama could have reversed it within his first 18 months in office. I don't think Obama has reversed those Bush regs, has he? I remember that Obama issued a whole bunch on executive orders his first day in office, but I guess these were not one those? I heard that the acoustic switches were not very effective, and not just that they were expensive.

Of course, maybe the story you posted isn't exactly accurate. For example, if the meetings between Cheney and the businessmen were secret (and I believe they were secret, as is usually the case when an administration asks others for their opinions) then how do you know what happened in the meetings?

Personally, I would put much stock in what a heroin drug addict says. RFK, Jr plead guilty to heroin possession when he was 29 years old, and I seriously doubt he stopped using heroin at that point in his life.