Multi-billion dollar corporation/s and they seem to be run by bean-counting, corner-cutting, can't-be-bothered-to-do-it-right, stooges who together put the better part of a trillion dollars in economic and environmental damage on the line through their caviler attitudes.

One mistake I can see. Even a couple that interlock. Accidents happen and machinery fails. But at some point the general level of incompetence just glares out at you.

http://www.sootoday.com/content/news/full_story.asp?StoryNumber=46363

Madness, fear, loathing ensue. Condemnation seems too mild. If things are this screwed up exactly what are we fighting for? America used to be about truth and doing the right thing. Or at least being effective and getting things done. Even if what we do isn't always the right thing. We were effective. We could get things done.

This is different. This isn't a best effort that went sideways. This is cutting-edge engineering operated by rejects from Project Runway. When did we turn into clowns whose core competence is limited to financial smoke and mirrors, and tooth veneers?

My instincts tell me to kill this thread right now...but then if I listened to my instincts I wouldn't have all the cool scars.

Be on notice, this thread could disappear at any second. If you have something constructive to say, say it. If you just want to rant then do it somewhere else, perhaps up in a tall tree or someplace with pretty flowers.

-Blast

Offhand I can suggest decoupage, hang gliding and possibly aquaculture.

That is a politician's speaking and should be taken as such. Still...

There are three main parties here: BP is not alone. It's not clear to me precisely who is responsible for what part. Also, most of these changes and deviations were both inspected and approved by the federal government.

From an engineer's perspective this isn't a problem at all:



You just put in two rams spaced so that one is guaranteed to have good cutting pipe. The question is if they did so.

What interests me most, and has at least a token "Preparedness" angle to appease the Sheriff, is this:



How good is this testing? Is the preventer designed to rely only on testable devices or on one-use-only mechanisms? If all of the testing is performed correctly and thoroughly with no errors, are there still known ways the device might fail? Is the gear testing merely cursory (is there a flashlight in my kit?) or functional (does the flashlight actually work?) Design-for-testability is not easy but it's not far from the design-for-repairability most engineers already know to do.

It doesn't do any good to have a complicated mechanism in your kit if you can't be sure it will work when needed.

The linked article has some interesting information, if true. Unfortunately a lot of the information presented is a statement from a Congressman, who while he may be a fine upstanding person, does not have credentials or work experience (outside of legislative committees) in this very complex and specialized field of engineering.

Much of the information presented seems to be out of context, like the 260 failure modes reference. Safety critical engineering always identifies lots of failure modes, ideally all of them, then you assign probabilities to the modes and evaluate the impact. Based on probabilities and impacts you build in redundancy, mitigations, or other means of addressing the failures until you meet the safety criteria.

Nothing is 100% failsafe. Airliners are statistically the safest way to travel and have lots of safety critical systems. These systems have a design criteria of less than one catastrophic failure (loss of airplane etc.) per 1x10^9 hours of flight. This is mandated by government regulation. I don't know what the criteria for oil field equipment is or what if any regulations exist. I suspect there are few if any and most of the current practices are the industries attempt at self regulation / best practices. It would be interesting to see what sort of safety analysis / fault trees exist for the BOP and offshore oil equipment.

oh, just FYI - not personally a fan of the oil companies or some of their practices, just trying to add to a constructive discussion.

- Eric

For a useful rundown on what a blowout is, what causes them, how they are prevented, and how a BOP is supposed to work is covered at:

Blowout at Lodgepole1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gp9jMIXz1dg

There look to be at least five parts but the first one and the first half of the second cover the basics of what you need to know. The rest seems interesting but because I'm on a dial-up connection I haven't had time to download more than the first two segments.

The Lodgepole well is, of course, a well on land and so the BOP is right where you can get to it and it is a much simpler design than the type used on undersea rigs. But many of the basics are similar in design and function.

I selected the Stupak release because it brought many of the pieces together in one spot. Most of the substance in the release was testimony from people in the oil, and oil services, businesses. While Syupak is certainly a politician the piece is made up mostly of simple statements of fact that are believed to be true. The proportion of political content seems to me to be quite low.

All of these articles many of the same sources and quotes but they also add a bit. The NYT a bit more than the other two.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/11/us/11hearings.html?pagewanted=2&fta=y

http://www2.wsav.com/sav/ap_exchange/nat...rs-find/123166/

http://www.theindychannel.com/news/23526647/detail.html

Thanks guys, you are doing great so far. I really appreciate it.

-Blast

A rich source of engineering information from reliable sources. Written in a from that even i can understand. Lots of links to detailed information:

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6428?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+theoildrum+%28The+Oil+Drum%29

DISCLAIMER: This is not a knock on one company or a political statement, its a fact of business in the 21st century. Though each reader can most likely make personal inferences to situations they have seen in the course of their professional life.

No global corporate business structure today with stock holders is immune from what the quote above. The fact is that when companies take over other companies and so on and so on, you end up with accountants and lawyers running aspects of a company that they have no (pardon the pun)business running. They figure when they look at all the corporations under their umbrella that if Company A is run by a manager that makes $X a year, then Companies B, C & D, should also be run by managers that make the same. Even if before managers in Companies B, C & D made much more based on the value of their production and the idiosyncrasies of their line of work.

What I mean is that yes, bean counting, cost cutting measure are the bottom line for businesses in 2010, but the true financial hardship on large corporations today is that their boards are looking at management as a stop gap not as innovators.

CEO's are the no longer product of "the come up from the bottom to run the company" approach. They are more akin to the free agency contracts you see in the NFL and Baseball.

I have no input on engineering, congressional wordsmithing or oil production.

An excellent series of 40 photos by way of:
http://scienceblogs.com/classm/2010/05/images_of_the_deepwater_disast.php

Thanks for the good sources of information. Reading through things it looks to me like this will end up reading like a typical aviation accident report, lots of indicators and opportunities to prevent the accident upstream of the final critical bit of bad luck/decision making. If I followed everything, they were actually done drilling and getting things ready to move on so in theory they were actually past the most dangerous part. Capping things off sounds risky but less dangerous than the actual drilling.

Hopefully those in the industry will look for effective ways to brake the chain of events that lead to the accident in a couple of places. Usually you would try to break the chain as early as possible. Adding backups to backups and more last ditch fail safes usually just adds complication and cost with little real benefit.

Based on the experiences in my industry, I would be willing to bet that the press (and lawmakers) will find a couple of big newsworthy things to focus on and demand "fixes" for those things, regardless of cost/benefit or any real effectiveness.

That last bit is more cynical sounding and broad brushed than I meant it to be but I will let it stand.

- Eric

I have comforted myself a bit by falling back into my natural cynicism and fatalism. My ability to "embrace the horror" is wide and deep but it isn't limitless. The apparent overall level of technical incompetence and carelessness is still maddening. Brain dead levels of stupidity, protected by arrogance, is nothing new, it has been with us seemingly since we climbed out of the trees. But at least back then the ones who got careless just got themselves and their family lunched.

The stakes are higher now. Not just the lives of oil workers and corporations. We are talking about the lives and well being of the populations of thousands of miles of coast. That and a good chunk of the US ecology and economy.

In that light the pursuit of quarterly profits and stock prices seems trivial. Which makes the numerous errors and carelessness unforgivable. This is made all the worse because corporations, and the people who run them, have no shame. The lack of empathy and shame are the defining characteristics of a sociopath.

I could go into detail what it might mean that the largest corporations and the people who run them are sociopaths but I'll leave it for your imagination.

I posted it on another thread but there are some interesting, and frequently updated maps of the situation at:

http://www.deepwaterhorizonresponse.com/go/doctype/2931/53979/

Indeed - change a few words and it's going to look like an NTSB report.

There were two or three tests in the morning indicating a leak and (maybe) one late in the day saying no leak. Then they went ahead anyway. Why?

Maybe they were extraordinarily dumb - but maybe just "ordinarily dumb". Perhaps that's standard practice to test until you get the answer you want.

Or is that test so unreliable that experience has taught them that when other (unmentioned in the reports) tests in the days before are good that false positives are that common? Are false negatives rare compared to false positives?

Oilfield workers are not renowned for broad strategic thinking. Who made the decision to go ahead? Was there proper supervision? Was there a designated "safety officer" and firm criteria for referring decisions back to shore?

Finally it's important not to hang BP until we're sure this isn't business-as-usual across the entire industry. Nothing in the reports I've seen so far suggests their procedures were out of the ordinary.

Looking at the Lodgepole and Ixtoc 1 incidents, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill looks to have the potential to even surpass the worlds worst oil spill in the Persian Gulf during the first Gulf war in 1991. I don't think they will be able to cap the well before the start of the Hurricane Season. Estimates are that the well is spewing around $5 Million per day (a little dent in the $75 million a day profit) or about one third of one percent of US daily consumption. Basically the oil spill is peanuts in terms of actual cost liabilities for BP or any other of the big four Cartel, which control the worlds oil supply. Look at what the company is doing in the Canadian oil sands in north-eastern Alberta. Its not even on the RADAR in terms of public opinion. Cheap petrol is what they are concerned about.

^^^ There isn't nearly that much oil under the well. Supposedly it's got "tens of millions of barrels". If that's correct, it won't even be the biggest spill in the gulf even if it all leaks out.

Weather will not help the siphoning scheme at all but I _think_ that most years the weather doesn't get bad for another couple of months.

I don't understand...

"No global corporate business structure today with stock holders is immune..."

The second excuse trotted out (the first: "It wasn't our fault") after some costly stupidity is that the stockholders wouldn't put up with the cost of doing something correctly and safely. Is erroneously 'betting' on cheap parts and poor design cheaper than paying for the cleanup?

If the 'fear' of the stockholders really is behind all these decisions, let's let the stockholders pay the resulting bills.

"The prospect of an extended leak has intensified concerns over what compensation BP is willing to pay, since a law passed after the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill requires companies to pay for cleanup costs but no more than $75 million for other damage." From an article from the Washington Post

This is cute. Who is responsible?

What about the eleven dead people? What about the prospective loss of $660 million from the damaged seafood industry (per year)? What about the loss of $757 million from the recreational fishing (per year)? What about the loss of $517 million from the wildlife tourism industry (per year)? What about all the lives and jobs affected for the next several years?

How far will the oil spread, in the end? What happens if it gets into the Atlantic?

The bottom line is this: As long as We the People allow thinking and laws like this to continue, the problems will be continuing. If we just keep shaking our heads and saying to each other, "Isn't this awful", nothing is going to change.

Sue

Corporation, n., An ingenious device for obtaining profit without individual responsibility.
Ambrose Bierce 1842-1914, American columnist and writer of horror stories, The Devil's Dictionary 1906

The overview:
http://scienceblogs.com/effectmeasure/2010/05/only_the_ducks_are_dead.php

In a snapshot of what I fear we can expect Transocean, the operator of the Deepwater Horizon drill rig has filed suit to limit their liability to about $27 million:



The rig was, before the fire and sinking, worth about $650 million. But due to wear and tear its price has been marked down to about $27 million. Which, under this law, may be all they are on the hook for.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704635204575241852606380696.html?mod=wsj_india_main

On the happy side, at least for Tranocean, they have been paid by their insurance company the $401 million for the inconvenience of loosing of the rig.
http://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory?id=10567273

A slightly less charitable take on the situation:
http://www.cityam.com/news-and-analysis/...urance-payments

Nice to know that it doesn't take much effort to see how Transocean made a very nice profit off the blowout. If I was a cynical sort I might use the potential for a windfall profit from insurance as a logical reason why safety and best practices were not topmost in their mind. If you squint your eyes just right you might just make out how there might have been no down side for them. Good thing I'm not a cynical sort.

Congress is responsible.

Clearly, in the context of that time, the concern in Congress was that nobody would ever drill again. You can't buy insurance for an unlimited loss and you can't get investors without some way of limiting risk. And in a capitalist society, no investors means it doesn't get done.

After Valdez the "cleanup" costs looked horrific but the compensation limited to the lost income of a few fisherman - much lower. To Congress at that time it probably made sense to leave oil companies with what seemed to be the big problem and limit the lawsuit lottery risk (and fraud) that comes with lost income claims. However it appears that Congress, uh, didn't do a good job on the lost income side of things.

The purpose of a corporation is to make expensive projects possible.

A corporation places an upper limit on an investor's loss. You'd never get a nickel of investment or funding from anyone for anything if every transaction had a risk of wiping out the investor. And as I said, in a capitalist society, no funding means it ain't gonna happen.

Without corporations the economy would look like medieval Europe, where a project didn't happen unless some wealthy individual sponsored it (which also means there would be no class mobility).


If the insurance payout was $401M then that establishes the value of the platform at the time of loss. The $27M estimate became meaningless the instant the insurance company put a value on the rig. Indeed I'd think tax authorities and the SEC might be interested in asking why an asset worth $401M was booked at only $27M.

With all due respect I think you missed it. Insurance was paid on some proportion of the value immediately before the explosion and fire, $401M. Whereas the Limitation of Liability Act of 1851 limits liability to the value after the explosion and fire, $27M.

Help keeping up with the nightmare in the gulf. A fine collection of links, articles and collected information:
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6463

I wonder how the BP brand will be affected in the long term. I remember growing up seeing the Exxon sigh everywhere and after the spill is slowly disappeared. Now I see BP signs everywhere, wonder if they will start to disappear as well.

BP can't rely on the Limitation of Liability Act of 1851 act. First of all, they caused the accident (I think this is what "privity" means in this context). But more important, the 1990 Oil Pollution act supercedes the 1851 act in this situation.

Finally, the value of an offshore oil drilling platform that has burned and sunk in several thousand feet of water is not $27M, it's zero.

Yes, and no. As I understand it the Oil Pollution Act applies to owners of the vessel or those who contract the vessel, in this case the oil rig. The Limitation of Liability Act applies to the operators of the vessel. Trasocean was contracted to BP to do the drilling, operate the rig.

The "privity" section is a determination of fault. In other words the limit to liability attaches only if the operators of the vessel were not at fault. Which is a judgment call because while they were hands-on at the time they were under close supervision of BP and dependent on Haliberton's concreting job. One estimate of odds that the judgment will favor Transocean, that the Limit of Liability Act does in fact limit their liability, is roughly 50-50.

An interesting development. Granted, it is, in the main, unsubstantiated but some of the details seem to have been to confirmed. If this is even mostly true it would be pretty damning.

http://adropofrain.net/2010/05/rumor-schlumberger-exits-deep-horizon-hours-before-blowout/

Of course this does play into confirmation bias on my part because it fees my initial impression of gross incompetence and willful avoidance of established standards and procedures. And feeds my sense of anger, disappointment, and frustration.

Follow the link on that page to The Oil Drum for a lot more insight, commentary, information. A good proportion of it being well thought out and reality based.