Series of failures led to massive oil blowout

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Rig had history of spills, fires

<SCRIPT type=text/javascript>var collab_title = 'Rig had history of spills, fires';</SCRIPT><!-- /HEADLINE --><!-- MAIN PHOTO --><!-- /MAIN PHOTO --><!-- BYLINE -->
FRANK JORDANS, GARANCE BURKE
Associated Press Writers
Published: Friday, April 30, 2010 at 9:00 p.m.
Last Modified: Friday, April 30, 2010 at 6:19 p.m.

Excerpt:

"What likely destroyed the rig in a ball of fire last week was a failure ? or multiple failures ? 5,000 feet below. That's where drilling equipment met the sea bed in a complicated construction of pipes, concrete and valves that gave way in a manner that no one has yet been able to explain.

Oil services contractor Halliburton Inc. said in a statement Friday that workers had finished cementing the well's pipes 20 hours before the rig went up in flames. Halliburton is named as a defendant in most of the more than two dozen lawsuits filed by Gulf Coast people and businesses claiming the oil spill could ruin them financially. Without elaborating, one lawsuit filed by an injured technician on the rig claims that Halliburton improperly performed its job in cementing the well, "increasing the pressure at the well and contributing to the fire, explosion and resulting oil spill."

Remote-controlled blowout preventers designed to apply brute force to seal off a well should have kicked in. But they failed to activate after the explosion."
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Much more at:

http://www.houmatoday.com/article/20100430/ARTICLES/100439918/0/NEWS?p=all&tc=pgall&tc=ar

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Re: Rig had history of spills, fires

BP spends millions lobbying as it drills ever deeper and the environment pays

The oil major BP spends aggressively to influence US regulatory insight, and many would argue this has bought it leniency

Antonia Juhasz
The Observer, Sunday 2 May 2010
Article history

While the explosion of BP/Transocean's Deepwater Horizon drilling rig was a horrific event, it was neither surprising nor unexpected.

BP is one of the most powerful corporations operating in the United States. Its 2009 revenues of $327bn are enough to rank BP as the third-largest corporation in the country. It spends aggressively to influence US policy and regulatory oversight.

In 2009, the company spent nearly $16m on lobbying the federal government, ranking it among the 20 highest spenders that year, and shattering its own previous record of $10.4m set in 2008. In 2008, it also spent more than $530,000 on federal elections, placing it among the oil industry's top 10 political spenders.

This money has bought BP great access and, many would argue, leniency.

"I personally believe that BP, with its corporate culture of greed over profits, murdered my parents," Eva Rowe testified before Congress in 2007. The Congress was investigating the worst workplace accident in the US in more than 15 years, a massive explosion at BP's Texas City Refinery in March 2005 that killed 15 workers, including Rowe's parents, and injured 180.

The US Chemical Safety Board, an independent federal agency, investigated the blast and released a devastating indictment of BP. "The Texas City disaster was caused by organisational and safety deficiencies at all levels of the BP corporation," the 2007 report found. "The combination of cost-cutting, production pressures and failure to invest caused a progressive deterioration of safety at the refinery."

While experiencing its highest profits in its corporate history, BP implemented budget cuts of 25% in 1999 and 2005 at each of its five US refineries. The safety board found a pervasive "complacency towards serious safety risks" at all of them.

When the next great explosion at a US oil workplace occurred, it was of little surprise to learn that it was, again, BP at fault. It also came as little surprise that the location was the deep offshore waters of the Gulf of Mexico.



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http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/may/02/bp-deepwater-horizon-oil-spills

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Series of failures led to massive oil blowout

Series of failures led to massive oil blowout

Series of failures led to massive oil blowout

by H. Josef Hebert, Jeff Donn and Mitch Weiss / Associated Press
wwltv.com
Posted on May 13, 2010 at 6:55 AM
Updated today at 7:04 AM

WASHINGTON -- The first firm evidence of what likely caused the disastrous Gulf of Mexico oil blowout -- a devastating sequence of equipment failures -- drives home a central unsettling point about America's oil industry: key safety features at tens of thousands of U.S. offshore rigs are barely regulated.

Wednesday's hearings by congressional and administration panels -- in Washington and in Louisiana -- laid out a checklist of unseen breakdowns on largely unregulated aspects of well safety that appear to have contributed to the April 20 blowout: a leaky cement job, a loose hydraulic fitting, a dead battery.

The trail of problems highlights the reality that, even as the U.S. does more deepwater offshore drilling in a quest for domestic oil, some key safety components are left almost entirely to the discretion of the companies doing the work.

It remains unclear what, if anything, Congress or the Obama administration may do to address these regulatory deficiencies.

So far, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar has proposed splitting his department's Minerals Management Service in two to make safety enforcement independent of the agency's other main function -- collecting billions in royalties from the drilling industry.

But the events that unfolded in the hours before the blowout on the Deepwater Horizon rig suggest that much more will ultimately need to be done on the regulatory front.

As the day of the catastrophe got under way on the drilling platform 48 miles off Louisiana, workers were stabilizing the mile-deep exploratory well to mothball until production.

Shortly after midnight, nearly 22 hours before the explosion, contractor Halliburton finished pumping cement into the well. Heavy cement is used to fill gaps around the drill piping and block any surge of natural gas or oil.

As part of the planned routine, the workers next capped the drill pipe with the first of multiple cement plugs. The plugs are meant to stop any upsurge of gas or oil inside the piping.

The cement and metal casing along well walls were then checked. Positive pressure tests indicated they were sound.

But there are no federal standards for the makeup of the crucial cement filler, MMS spokesman David Smith confirmed Wednesday. Government and industry have been working to publish new guidelines later this year, but they will be recommendations, not mandates.

Also Wednesday, a group of Louisiana crab fishermen claimed in a lawsuit that Halliburton -- with permission of well owner BP PLC and rig owner Transocean -- used a new quick-curing cement mix with nitrogen. It supposedly generates more heat than other recipes and could allow dangerous bursts of methane gas to escape up the well.

According to the testimony and other evidence that has emerged this week, the first sign of trouble came shortly before dawn. Workers pumped out heavy drilling fluid for a negative pressure test to make sure underground gas couldn't seep into the well. That test failed: it meant the well might be leaking. Another test was
run. It too failed.

Workers debated what to do next. They eventually decided to resume work.

Further reducing protection from a blowout, heavy drilling fluid was pumped out of a pipe rising to the surface from the wellhead. It was replaced with lighter seawater in preparation for placing the last cement plug.

Federal rules say an operator must hold newly cemented well-wall casing under pressure for up to 12 hours before resuming drilling. Other than that, there are few rules about how long to let cement set.

Whatever the main cause -- cement or something else -- the last plug was still missing just before 10 p.m. on the 20th, when drilling fluid pushed by underground gas started kicking up uncontrollably through the well.

Read more at:

http://www.wwltv.com/news/local/Emerging-oil-rig-evidence-shows-lack-of-regulation-93668639.html