BP — the company accepting responsiblity for the current environmental disaster in the Gulf of Mexico began as Imperial Oil, became Anglo-Persian Oil with its discovery of vast reserves in present-day Iran, then Anglo-Iranian, then British Petroleum, and now just BP — a huge multinational company that includes two of John D. Rockefeller’s original Standard Oil companies — Amoco and Sohio. BP has a lot of America in it but remains in many ways a very British concern, which is to say plodding and bound by bureaucracy. They tend to rely too much on tradition and good luck.
I claim only modest expertise here, having for a few years written about energy and oil in particular. I worked in the Middle East covering OPEC in the 1970s and knew lots of BP folks back then. Some of those contacts are still active. I also know something about industrial accidents and environmental disasters having investigated the Three Mile Island nuclear accident for the Carter White House. God I am old.
Remember at Three Mile Island the reactor operators were taught how to pass the license test, not how the reactor actually worked, so when they were faced with unknown conditions they made uninformed — and bad — choices. The same sort of behavior seems to be happening in the current oil spill. We have already in this accident a record of people guessing too often when they should have known. Much of this is an artifact of bureaucracy.
Did you know that oil was discovered in 1943 in Sherwood Forest? The prospect of even a small domestic source of oil was a big deal in wartime England so drilling crews from Anglo-Persian were quickly set to work. But the drilling itself was slow — so slow that replacement drillers were eventually brought in from Oklahoma. The Americans quickly finished the wells while apparently also making quite an impression on the local girls.
There’s a lesson here, so stick with me.
The British drillers followed company rules that said a drill bit was good for a certain number of feet then needed to be replaced. Each drill bit replacement required pulling hundreds — later thousands — of feet of drilling pipe out of the well then replacing it along with the new drill bit. Drilling went slowly because most of the time was spent not drilling but pulling or pushing pipe.
The drillers from Oklahoma, in contrast, used one drill bit until it stopped being effective no matter how many feet that took. In Sherwood Forest they could go 15-20 times as far with each bit as the British crews had, which means the well was finished 15-20 times faster. There’s more to this story than just nationalism; it shows a generally poor approach to both resource utilization and problem solving on the part of BP.
Remember BP had a catastrophic Texas refinery accident back in 2005 that led then to a change in company leadership. The old CEO was lax on safety to the point of embarrassing the company so he was let go a year before his normal retirement. The new guy, Tony Hayward, whom we keep seeing on the TV news, took over at the start of 2007 but not enough at BP appears to have changed. Three years isn’t much in the oil business and this new accident proves it. There were plenty of warning signs about this well and BP ignored them all. You would think BP had learned their lesson after Texas City, but apparently not.
There is plenty of bad behavior in this current crisis to go around, not all of it coming from BP. Right from the start, for example, the Obama administration took an optimistic approach. Why? BP was downplaying the problems to save its share value, but why was the White House doing so, too? Among the coverups were the underwater oil plumes which BP still denies exist. Evidence says they are massive yet the head of NOAA said initially that they were very low in concentration. Why?
My guess it is because Obama thinks it is more important to appear cool than to be correct. We can hope he’s unlearning that lesson now, though there is as yet little proof of that.
We all — BP, the government, and the American people — are looking at this accident far too narrowly. Looking at the number of failed attempts to cap or slow this well hardly inspires confidence. Yet at heart we’re always told those two safety wells being drilled will save the day, though they will take two months to do so. Eventually plugging the well with concrete is a sure theng, we’re told.
Or is it? What about the safety wells and their drilling platforms? Are they in better shape than the platform that exploded and sank?
No.
According to people who should know what they are talking about, BP’s rig currently drilling the first relief well has worse safety violations than did the BP rig that exploded killing 11, creating this enormous mess. Why aren’t we reading or hearing about this? I mean anywhere other than here? (If you are a reporter, this paragraph contains the real news. Yes, I am telling you how to do your job.)
How could BP ignore all the warning signs before the blowout? They simply didn’t expect it to happen. Thirty years had passed since the Ixtoc-I accident that was the last to happen in the Gulf. Good luck and several changes of BP management bred complacence and ignorance. I suspect the people involved with the well did not even realize how close they were to losing it since they had personally never lost one before.
The offshore oil industry will never be the same again, which is probably good. As the oil slick grows, this could be the end of the deepwater industry in the US. Or maybe this will be the straw that finally gets us an energy policy. I’m hoping for that at the least.
For now BP is trying to cope, doing whatever they can think to do, but no real lessons will be learned until this is all over… if then. The CEO of BP, Tony Hayward — he’s history. He was promoted specifically to create a safer corporate culture and couldn’t do it in three years. Maybe nobody could. But certainly BP wasn’t — and probably isn’t — prepared for tomorrow.
What are your thoughts on the reports that the Obama administration changed the recommendations of their experts to say a full shut down of offshore was necessary when the experts were saying this could make things worse?
“The old CEO was lax on safety to the point of embarrassing the company so he was let go a year before his normal retirement.”
That’s not the way I remember it. The CEO left because of potential charges of perjury in an embarrassing court case.
Amend my last sentence to read: “The CEO left because of potential charges of perjury in an embarrassing court case about his personal life.”
Lord Browne was forced to resign after a classic British privacy battle in the courts, where the Daily Mail sought to publish details of his personal relationship with another man, which Lord Browne fought all the way to the Supreme Court and then lost.
Once the details were published his position was undermined by the clear fact that he had perjured himself to protect the nature of this relationship becoming public by giving false statements to the court; as well as allegations of misuse of company funds for his secret partners benefit.
This was a classic type of British sex scandal and public expose by our tabloid press and though Lord Browne had already indicated his desire to retire in the next few years, due in part to problems at BP, including but not limited to the Texas Refinery scandal, this was effectively the final nail in his coffin.
This could of been easily checked and reported as such. See:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/6612703.stm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Browne,_Baron_Browne_of_Madingley#Resignation
OR I could have handled it properly, as I did.
Here are the facts of the case:
1) The previous CEO provided lax leadership that contributed to the Texas refinery accident. This was determined in several investigations.
2) The normal retirement age for BP CEOs is 60. This is in their corporate governance.
3) His retirement was accelerated by a year because of the Texas accident.
4) His retirement was later made immediate because of the scandal and perjury issue.
Trying to keep the story on oil and safety not homophobia and perjury, I left off unessential details and would do so again because they make no point that applies to this particular argument. He was already losing his job because of the accident. Perjury was incidental. And to say that he would have otherwise remained CEO absent the perjury or accident is wrong because of the age 60 rule. Get YOUR facts straight.
Who cares about this trivia in the context of this blog entry?
How many of next year’s Cringley Venture applications are going to start with lines like: “Alternative Energy Company X has developed a technology not susceptible to massive ecosystem destroying explosions.”
We have several good energy contenders but I don’t think they are far enough along for that particular argument to be useful. However I guess as long as they don’t involve undersea drilling you make a point.
“How could BP ignore all the warning signs before the blowout?”
I’ve read that 6 weeks before the explosion, BP notified MMS that they were having problems with the well and were going to begin shutting it down and plugging it. Which they were in the process of doing when the explosion occurred. How is this ignoring the warning signs?
Had they heeded the warning signs PROPERLY there would have been no loss of life.
I happen to know a few drillers and they tell me that if the published reports are true, BP probably did a lot of very foolish things. Any one of them shouldn’t have resulted in a blowout. But when they strung bunches of them together, they managed to defeat all of the failsafe protections they had.
At the core of each of these bad decisions was likely pressure from the top to save money.
Penny wise and pound foolish.
Hi Bob,
Typo in your bold para “this is paragraph contains the real news”.
Do you expect this event to change behaviour / regulation of US companies extracting resources from foreign shores pre and or post catastrophes?
No.
Bob,
As someone with many years in the Oil and Gas industry I have a few thoughts about BPs troubles, there is probably a decent story in there as well.
I take onboard your comments about British well techniques in WW2, but more than any other industry the oil industry is global. America has some of the best riggers and their influence can be seen on every rig in the world. I doubt that BP are hamstrung by techniques from the 1940’s any more.
The Deepwater horizon, bearing in mind its proximity to the USA, would in all liklihood be predominantly staffed by Americans.
It would also be interesting to see the breakdown regards the operation of the rig. So far the flak seems to be aimed at BP with very little aimed at Transocean or Halliburton.
Another question would be that for a company like BP who, as you said, had a reputation in America for cutting corners on safety, where were the regulators???
Surely, if as a country you had concerns regarding a company operating in your waters, you would have had the regulators all over them, ready to shut down operations for the smallest breach of accepted standards?
The Blow Off Preventor (BOP) valve failed. These valves are designed to stop the flow of the oil with no power from the surface. The BOP manual that was supplied to BP was not the correct manual for the valve that was actually installed. Who was responsible for that? At least one of the battery packs on the BOP was found to be flat. This is probably the main reason why the valve failed to stop the flow of oil. You should note that it’s a valve designed, installed and maintained by Halliburton. I would hope that the close links between Halliburton and the former VP Dick Cheney don’t prevent a full investigation into this failure.
That said as any oiler will tell you, if you are in a situation whereby you need to use the BOP, you have big problems. It’s a last ditch attempt to buy you some time and stop the flow.
It will be interesting to find out the real reason why it failed once they bring it to the surface for inspection. If it had worked you could have been talking about a small leak and the possibility of preventing the explosion that cost 11 workers their lives.
If, as a country, America’s only response is to fine and censure BP then you are punitively dealing with one of the perpetrators rather than looking at the obvious failures by multiple agencies, organisations and companies that should have prevented the disaster from happening in the first place.
Mr. Gregory–
Former Energy Task Force Chairman VP Cheney’s strange silence on this spill haven’t escaped notice.
Given your experience, and given Halliburton’s responsibility with respect to the design, installation and maintenance of the failed BOP valve–do you think BP was utilizing at those depths hydraulic fracturing provided by Halliburton?
The 2005 energy bill (passed by Congress) contained–at the behest of Cheney–what was called the “Halliburton Loophole.” This provision stripped the Environmental Protection Agency of its authority to regulate the drilling technique known as hydraulic fracturing–a process invented by Halliburton in the 1940’s. If this was the technique which contributed to the event, then regulators lacked authority under the law to manage it.
Laurence,
Speaking as an Englishman, I don’t particularly follow the details of the legislative process in the USA. I wasn’t aware of any ‘Halliburton’ loopholes, but I wouldn’t be surprised given the political power of Dick Cheney and his links with Halliburton.
If a regulator is stripped of powers then the politicians who voted that through have a certain culpability. There’s no point in having a watchdog with no teeth.
I don’t know if hydraulic fracturing was used on the Deepwater Horizon drill as that is a decision taken based on specific well conditions. Certainly at the depths we are talking about Hydraulic fracturing is accepted as a method of increasing the recoverable oil with certain environmental risks usually related to the chemicals used. My understanding is that it isn’t properly legislated yet in many countries, so it is certainly possible that it was used.
This was an exploration well that was in the process of being converted to a production well. Hydraulic fracture is a technique to enhance production. It would make the story juicier, but that wasn’t involved here.
Hydraulic Fracturing can also occur naturally.
Never having worked on any projects in the GoM, I can’t really advise on the specific subsea conditions there and if that was likely.
Granted. I meant the “Halliburton Loophole” wasn’t involved.
Many thanks for all of the information.
Here’s the MSM spouting off last November about that ‘Halliburton Loophole.’
https://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/03/opinion/03tue3.html?_r=1
the evidence at this point appears to indicate that everybody involved in this fiasco fouled up at minimum and (!) up more likely. BP’s greenhorn pushing everybody to slam shut the gassy, test-failing, under-engineered well that had contributing missteps from the subs cut too many corners.
the oil business got the least regulation they could buy, and that shows, also.
we have two more wells being poked into this three-mile-deep field at this time. we are told the idea is to drill down at least two miles, then slant right and poke through the well casing of the first runaway… well casing too tough for the BOP to shear and clamp, another dirty secret of the oil industry that started whispering around the conferences over a year ago.
1) how much safer are these relief wells with about ten minutes of regulator review?
2) if you can hit a 21-inch wide target at a slant after running a two mile string of ton-a-section drillpipe, slice it dead across without leaks, and squirt mud and cement in there in three months, you will never want for work again. T. Boone Pickens says it’s not going to happen in anything like BP’s timeline. last I heard, although he doesn’t know squat about river rat boats in Vietnam, he has some knowledge of oil.
3) assuming the hydraulics of the issue make the physics of shooting a cement cap workable. first time, remember.
4) don’t worry, all the guys who did the last one learned all the lessons ever needed, right?
we are going to find out how much oil this basin holds when it washed up on the shores of England, Ireland, and Scotland. this I predict is going to be a total fail in all respects, across all dimensions.
I can’t help but notice none of the solutions that simply shut off the well work, but the ones involving recovery of the oil (according to BP) are “making progress”. Seems to me BP is still intent on recovering the oil from their gusher of the century, environment be damned.
We’ll see when the “relief wells” are finally in. Will they really be used to simply plug the gusher, or will there be a pipe up to a waiting tanker?
I don’t have any inside knowledge about the oil business, but in the plumbing world the word “relief” applies to redirecting the fluid to create flow elsewhere thereby reducing the flow where it’s not wanted. The complete solution involves sealing off the unwanted opening after the flow is reduced. They must capture the flow from the other well or the polution will continue. After the first well is sealed well enough to hold back the pressure the relief well can be used to continue to capture oil or shut off. Why not continue to use it?
“The drillers from Oklahoma, in contrast, used one drill bit until it stopped being effective no matter how many feet that took. In Sherwood Forest they could go 15-20 times as far with each bit as the British crews”
Funny you mention this – One of the may causes of the disaster was the fact that nasty drill bits were being over used by BP. Rather than a nice clean hole, these old bits result in nasty wells with leaks and/or obstructions – These bits also tend to break off – putting them further behind schedule. Obstructions result in false
negative pressure tests.
BP damaged the blowout preventer and then delayed testing of the blowout preventer at low pressures. – giving false negatives results.
https://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/30/us/30rig.html?pagewanted=1&partner=rss&emc=rss
The MMS should not be collecting royalties from the same comanies they are regulating – basic conflict of interest:
https://www.treehugger.com/files/2010/06/jon-stewart-blasts-bp-760-safety-violations.php
Bob you have it backwards — BP since privatization, and especially under John Browne, had reinvented itself as an anti-bureaucratic can-do operator with a firm grip on costs. That’s why it was so successful … until now. The real question is, in turning the mindset around to be less “imperial” and more “American”, did they end up with a culture of corner-cutting and dangerous risktaking?
Perhaps the right comparison is with the Royal Bank Of Scotland, which was similarly reinvented by a charismatic chief executive, bought a period of stunning growth at the cost of selling it soul, only to meet its nemesis when the banking crisis broke.
You raise an interesting point about BP embracing too well the cowboy mentality. Most of my friends in the oil business work for Chevron or Aramco, which can be sometimes hard to tell apart. Those guys are very engineering-driven and not cowboy-like at all. They are appalled at the stories coming out of BP. So I guess it depends which American company you are emulating…
well bob it looks like your as ill informed as your president is and also as anti british
BP employs more people in the US than it does UK i think 20,000 in the US versus 10,000 in the UK has americans on the board of the directors and hasnt been called british petroleum in over 12 years.
Also i believe believe Halliburton also had a big part to play in the well blow out but i see them very absent from your article
Really is the best example you can come up for BP being slow and plodding something that happened in 1943. Why don’t we talked about exxon cutting corners or the bhopal gas disaster in indian where a american company killed 3000 people
No matter how you slice it, this disaster is the result of poor management, plain and simple.
If you are an investor in BP, I’ll point out to you a rule of thumb a friend of mine who lives off of investing tells me: when you invest in stocks of companies you are investing in their management, nothing else.
BP was a big company. But it was poorly managed. Do I speak in the past tense prematurely. Yes. But not by much.
[…] If you want to read something about the oil disaster that should scare the crap out of you… […]
The blame game is always easier than fixing problems or finding a solution to avoid similar problems in the future. No matter what the causes are for the current problem, the demand for oil as a cheap energy source is what ultimately drives companies to drill wells a mile under water. If you drill enough wells, or transport enough oil in huge tankers, or burn enough fuel releasing CO2 into the atmosphere, you’re bound to have unpleasant problems. Every individual that uses energy should stand up and take a bit of responsibility here. Finding ways to use less energy and finding alternative energy sources should be seen as a benefit / opportunity. It’s absolutely certain that there will be more than enough people looking into who to blame, espousing conspiracy theories, etc. It would be nice if we could get a lot of people finding ways to be more energy efficient to help limit the demand for oil obtained in ways with such obvious risks.
I totally agree with this and have been disappointed that there has been so little conversation about this. I view myself as partly responsible because of my oil consumption driving drilling etc. However I feel hamstrung when I think about how to reduce my consumption, because despite doing what I can, I am caught within a society that has been built around oil.
Anyway, I’ll keep hoping we start having conversations about the bigger issues as a result of this.
I wonder if the emergence of the Chevrolet Volt, beginning in November of this year, will start to change things.
Remember, the dynamism of business is always at the margins. The introduction of electric cars then, could quickly become a game changer – say in only three or four or five years.
If you had a volt, or some other car that uses a similar technology, then your contribution to the problems of todays world would shrink dramatically.
As we develop new and better ways to create and store electricity things will improve even more.
Oil will always be a bit of a problem. We won’t stop using it. But I think demand for it in this country might just be peaking right now.
Well Tim, it all depends on where you get your electricity from.
As it happens, many electric plants around the world use fossil fuels to generate electricity.
Our society is *really* dependant on fossil fuels.
Way to use “the blame game” yourself to get your point across. Bravo!
It’s unfortunate that the economic recover package created by the Obama administration could not have targeted getting us off of oil. Imagine if Obama had stated a bold objective for our nation like Kennedy did about going to the moon. Then when something like this happens, it would only strength our national resolve. Obama could point to it as yet another example of why we need to get off of oil as an energy source.
Yes, but then, after the disaster happened, conspiracy people would link it to Obama saying he orchestrated the whole thing. Can you imagine the mess??. We may be better off leaving well enough alone. ( “well” enough alone ?? sorry about that)
I heard (no agenda podcast?) that inspectors were there hours before the explosion, and told them to shut it down before it exploded. The guys running the rig disagreed. The inspectors told them they were leaving immediately, and had to call for a helicopter to come out to pick them up.
Anyone have a link to that story?
So, the argument that they were lucky, or ignorant seems wrong. Seems they knew and were told the risk and they criminally decided not to heed the warning.
think that came out from the Louisiana USCG hearings. good place to start chasing that is NOLA.com’s coverage about two weeks after the well blew. lot of frank talk in there.
Bob:
My guess is a gas bubble came to the surface from a not cemented enough well knocking the rig enough to cause a spark and the gas blew up, not the rig.
Bill
Orlov rings true
http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2010/05/american-chernobyl.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhvRQyRdVEI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9D3epQL704
DRILL BABY DRILL
Thank god, this has really taken a lot of heat off of our tarsands!
on the bright side, there are two “mideasts” underneath each other across North Dakota, Montana, Saskatchewan, and a little bit of Wyoming.
on the dull side, drilling mud always spills. for some reason, full of nasty stuff like hex chromium. you don’t raise a lot of cattle around a well with a lot of mud spill. and the pipelines to haul the oil through our National Park lands aren’t there.
Watching the effort to contain the oil leak via ROV camera streams has been extremely interesting but at the same time excruciatingly painful. While there is little doubt that working 5000 feet below the surface with ROV’s is, to say the least, difficult, I can’t help but notice the grossly inadequate tools being used and lack of skill by those using them. It is very hard to understand why BP has not taken advantage of the perfectly good flange on top of the BOP as a means to attach a containment device.
Engineers are very good at telling you why something will not work but they really suck at thinking outside the box, and that is what is needed. It is time to replace BP’s decision makers with someone like Clinton C. Myers. Sometimes a bigger hammer is the right tool!
[…] Imperial Oil. What do you think of this […]
It is a well known fact that regulated industries end up controlling their regulators to serve the interests of the regulated industry. A good example is the FDA which has responded to the drug industry by raising the cost of approving new drugs which acts as a barrier to entry and prevents the major drug companies from having to compete with lean aggressive biotech companies. Successful biotech companies get bought up by the major drug companies because they can’t raise the $billion to get a new drug approved.
How about oil? Compare and contrast regulation of the oil industry to commercial aviation. A rough estimate the technical difficulty of making commercial air travel safe is that it is about 10x harder than extracting and transporting oil safely. Why is it that commercial aviation has a stellar safety record compared to any other method of travel and the oil industry repeatedly causes disasters? When there is an air disaster fewer people fly which is bad for the business of all air carriers. When Nocturnal Aviation Airways cuts corners, other air carriers urge the FAA to hammer them because it is in their interest to prevent competitors from lowering prices by cutting safety corners before a crash hurts their own businesses. In the oil industry it is in the interest of other oil companies for a competitor to cause a disaster. No one will drive less because the Gulf of Mexico is trashed for generations. Demand for cheap gasoline will not decrease due to the disaster and people will require that the demand be met. BP will be a weaker competitor and the business of BP’s competitors will not be hurt. There will be no massive lobbying effort for safer oil extraction or pool of campaign contributions for politicians who back oil extraction safety because the pool of money controlled by the oil industry dwarfs the pool created by people who care enough about the issue to write checks. The BP disaster is a bonanza for environmental organizations. I bet that contributions are way up, but it is still Godzilla vs Bambi and I suspect that at least some environmental organizations are aware of the fact that these disasters fill their coffers.
I am hoping for replies that convince me to be more optimistic.
Charles,
You can be more optimistic because this might push us all over the tipping point. I’m hopping this is a water shed moment which will change attitudes.
Americans represent 5% of the earth’s population, consume 25% of the world’s energy, and generate 30% of the world’s pollution. The gulf crisis might just get us to come to grips with these numbers.
Now, I gotta get back to work installing my windmill.
Jim
Source?
Where did you get these numbers?
I think you could say that the biggest problem in the country today is the corporation. A similar problem, though to a lessor extent, appears to exist in the UK as well. This has something to do with our laws in regard to corp governance and the laws that gov. corporate behavior especially as to politics.
This is a very old problem.
Remember, once upon a time, before WWII every city had a street car system, then after the War, GM created a subsidiary to buy up the street car lines, tear out their tracks and replace them with buses, which GM sold.
(In this endeavor, GM might have been helped by the oil companies – it’s been 28 years since I heard the details back in College).
The modern limited liability corporation was created in 1862. Remember, before the start of the Civil War in 1861, the United States had the broadest distribution of wealth in the history of the world – even with 3 million citizens held in bondage. The war was started to remedy that. Yet 25 years after the completion of the war the U.S. had enormous concentrations of wealth as well as huge amounts of people living in squalor. The reason for all of this, of course, was the invention of the limited liability corporation.
We have yet to resolve ourselves to control them and limit their power in the social life of our society, but other countries have.
I’m hoping the current era will finally address all of this, the Supreme Court not withstanding.
this analysis is very similar to the way governments deal with the illegal drug business ..
go after the producers, sometimes the dealers, ignore the users ..
it is an ecosystem at fault, but no one wants to look at that
The difference is that illegal drugs provide absolutely no benefit to society, in fact they are harmful. The controlled use of energy has benefits.
No, this is justifiable venting at a corrupt company (an order of magnitude more violations), which ignored its own lax requirements for well management. As the Right Wingnuts tell: “It’s all about personal responsibility”. They conveniently forget that adage when they seek to egregiously social costs all the while privatizing profits. Fair’s fair.
now, lay off the wingnuts. Rush took personal responsiblity for his Vicodin problem… he switched to Oxycontin. that’s action!
fact is, everybody talks a good game, but damn few step up to the line and play it as they say it. and the louder they say it, I have come to learn, the less they mean it.
[…] Cringely What about the safety wells and their drilling platforms? Are they in better shape than the platform that exploded and sank? […]
Every project that has some likelihood of endangering life or property needs to be prepared for the worst case, or even the worse worse case. I think that it might well be that what is happening in the Gulf at the moment isn’t the worse. I can imagine say an earthquake-induced fissue could unleash oil at maybe 10 times the current flow rate. But is anyone expecting that – probably not. I imagine since we started drilling for oil or gas, millions of wells have gone in. Maybe only dozens have had a problem within an order or two of magnitude of the problem. But clearly the probability of such an incident as we have was never going to be zero. Somewhere, someone (probably many times) would have considered the scenario we have, and probably outlined the consequences. And while some measures seem to be used in oil-drilling (such as the infamous BOP), clearly it doesn’t mitigate all possible scenarios. So what happened? Simply put, the risk was accepted. We accept risk all the time. Every time I drive to work, I accept the risk that if one of my front wheel falls off through mechanical fatigue, I will likely die. I can imagine that car builders could have mitigated this by making the wheel twice as strong, or maybe adding redundant front wheels. Wheels have detached on cars so this isn’t an unknown scenario. However the manufacturers, and to a greater extent the drivers accept this risk, as the cost of mitigation is too high to be affordable, and the probability of it eventuating is small even though the impact is large. The same goes for flying in commercial aircraft. I am sure they could build planes with an exit door on every row, and we all wear parachutes. We all could be trained to use these, obtaining an air passenger licence before we fly. I imagine this might have been considered in the past, but it will never be implemented. Partly this is due to the fact it only mitigates against some failures, that parachuting is risky in itself, and the cost and complexity of implementing it would be mean flying as we do today would just not happen. So we accept the risk.
The big difference however with the oil leak is that people doing the risk accepting are not those primarily impacted by it. BP nor the government regulators are really now impacted by the results of this catastrophe. Fundamentally all they risk is their job, reputation and some money. It would seem to me that this is the case for nearly all resource exploitation. Unless you can force those doing or regulating the resource extraction to directly live with the consequences, you are going to have what has happened. I’m not sure how you change this behaviour, without significantly impacting on our so called prosperity. Clearly every similar resource project needs to be examined and thought about in a different way. For instance for deep-sea drilling, you might need to demonstrate and deploy technical options that mean you can always close the well when the worse worse happens (if this is even possible). Of course this mechanism in itself might also go wrong, so you need to thing about this as well. Ultimately the viability of such projects is challenged, but I think that this must be so. Hopefully this will become a wakeup call for all of us – and particular for those in project development and regulation need to ask themselves “Am I morally able to accept this risk?”
Well said! Regarding the earthquake problem (causing a type of oil polution that can’t be capped) perhaps California should do much more off shore drilling. If we extract ALL the underground and under water oil we will not only achieve independence from foreigh oil but elimiate the risk of an earthquake causing oil polution.
[…] reading Robert X. Cringely’s post on the oil spill, I felt obliged to comment. I feel the biggest problem with the whole oil leak […]
Let’s hope this opens some US legislative eyes to what needs to be done. BTW my reply to Bob should have appeared under Peter Neal’s post. What happened there?
Ironic headline, because to us Canadians, the name “Imperial Oil” evokes a totally different, more red, white and blue imperialism. Imperial Oil Ltd. is Exxon’s 100% owned Canadian subsidiary, though their retail operations are branded Esso. See http://www.esso.ca.
Your assessment is pretty much right on the money, and it ties into the arguments made by Canadian economist Jeff Rubin in his 2009 book Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller (details at http://tinyurl.com/nwlyw7). In a nutshell, he says the economic effects of peak oil will come faster and more aggressively than most people are anticipating, and he predicted that the effects would start to become noticeable to the general public with an almost-inevitable, massive offshore spill, probably in the Gulf of Mexico. I can’t recommend the book highly enough.
All this American Schadenfreude, thank god they’re taking the heat right now but no one is watching our oil sands…
The American consumer wants cheap cheap cheap gasoline, no matter what the cost is. The invasion of Iraq? No biggy. Oil stained pelicans, that’s bad…
Anyone who owns or who has ever owned a car is directly responsible…
I’ve never driven a car, not guilty!
And you’ve never bought food delivered via transport truck? Nor ridden on public transit powered by diesel buses? Nor lived in a house heated with natural gas or some other hydrocarbon-based fuel (or electricity generated by burning coal, for that matter)?
Really, if you live in our society and own pretty much anything, you’re somewhat “to blame”. Blaming the general population is unhelpful, since even those who wish to help often find that something they do causes problems somewhere down the line.
While much is made of this being a major disaster, more oil is spilled in the Niger Delta *every year* than has been lost in the Gulf of Mexico in this one incident.
“With 606 oilfields, the Niger delta supplies 40% of all the crude the United States imports and is the world capital of oil pollution.”
https://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/may/30/oil-spills-nigeria-niger-delta-shell
Oil drilling is risky, and poor decisions on drilling and inaction on maintenance are probably common to all oil companies. In the Niger delta, it is ExxonMobil and Shell.
Let’s see the people concerned about environmental damage in the Gulf of Mexico turn their attention to the Niger delta and demand equally-strict standards there as they want applied in US waters.
For more on this:
https://www.google.com/search?q=oil+niger+delta+vidal&btnG=Google+Search
Bob X – – One need not know much about the oil industry generally, or drilling oil wells specifically, to provide the sort of insight that is actually helpful in this situation. Good thing, because you know almost nothing of the oil business. Yet you still failed to latch on the real issue here.
The generic issue here, is disastrous failure in complex systems — mechanical and human. Whenever such a thing happens, the cause turns out, again ‘generically’, to be a cascade of highly improbable mini-failures, which align to result in disaster. In this case, to be more specific, the masses will eventually learn from deep investigation, probably in court, that whatever the series of smaller failures that joined up to cause this horrible event, the linchpin failure was in the blowout preventer. It is sad that the real story will only be clear once the news media run their sensationalist course trying to turn this into a B movie script about evil business. Of all the media sources, only Business Week have had informative, roughly correct and insightful stories and analyses of this awful oil spill.
What you and others will someday realize is that there was indeed a highly credible plan to avoid a subsea gusher, called the blowout preventer. These blowout preventers have triple redundancy, have built-in supposedly fail-safe programming, and are tested very frequently per bp and government regulations, and gee, why didn’t this one work?
The blowout preventer is owned by the drilling company, who also owns the rig and manages operations on the rig. Blowout preventers have actual ‘knobs and levers’ (simplistically put for ease of reading here) that allow them (in an emergency) to be turned off or on using robot vehicles on the sea floor. It is now obvious that the knobs and levers were NOT doing what they were supposed to do – – close the leak – – even with manual intervention. Would it surprise you if the blowout preventer had been ‘modified’ by its owner? Ok, no prob, let’s just look at the engineering drawings of the modifications and we can figure this out. Would it surprise you if there were no such “as modified” engineering guides and drawings?
The idea of a blowout preventer is to stop a well from leaking / flowing come hell or high water. A well ‘blowout’ can stem from human stupidity or just from surprising natural events way down the well bore. The blowout preventer doesn’t know the difference – – its design function remains the same – – stop the leak. These blowout preventers today are so smart they know to ‘shut the well’ when there is a power failure, lost communications to the surface, a huge pressure spike, and more, all without human intervention.
But this one did not close when activated by the operators, did not close when the situation should have tripped fail-safe circuits, did not close by manual robotic intervention on the seafloor. There was / is something massively wrong with this device that bp do not own or maintain — and it’s the same with all the oil companies. Which is not to say bp is clear of blame.
The business model all oil companies (offshore at least) use involves hiring specialists via contract, quite often. This ‘system’ evolved not, as the media might gleefully assert, to relieve the oil companies of responsibility, but rather, to allow various ‘commodity’ facets contributing to the oil business manage that facet better than a huge oil company might. In the 70’s and 80’s, whole industries adopted similar methods to better focus their staff and dollars on ‘core competencies’. GM, for example, has other companies that make their car seats and brakes and batteries, for example. This in theory lets GM focus on the core things that truly make car companies competitive, like engine design, body design, marketing, etc. Same in the oil industry. Oil companies have focussed ‘core’ advantages like how to find oil better than anyone else, how to bring it to market safely and efficiently, etc.
If GM’s car seats started spontaneously combusting, then GM, not the car seat maker, would take the financial and PR hit. Rightly so. This is the same thing happening in the bp oil leak situation. The oil firms all hire drilling companies to drill holes, seismic companies to shoot seismic in search of new oil, etc. Just as GM would spend SOME time checking that the seat maker was doing its job properly, oil companies require and check that rigs, blowout preventers, manpower, provided by contractors are in good working order. In addition to that, the government had substantial regs requiring inspections, testing, safety standards etc, on all equipment.
This model, quite clearly, will not work going forward. I believe all oil companies will own their own blowout preventers going forward. It is even possible they will start owning their own rigs again (as was done in the 60’s).
I was disappointed to see you jump on the bandwagon with the rest of the media here Bob – – not because it’s a forbidden topic, but because you have nothing productive or insightful to say in this rare instance.
Interesting point here in that the GoM is home to some of the deepest of the deep sea rigs and BP along with every other Oil Major is completely in the dark of how to shut the well down.
We have the BOP that failed, we had robots trying to cut pipes, we’ve had Top Kill and many more….but BP admit that no one has any guaranteed method of shutting down a well that deep.
Why have permits to drill been granted to the oil companies when they have no idea of how to shut it down if a problem happens.
That failure has changed an accident into a disaster
I worked in the Alberta oilpatch for twenty years in the last century and the three biggest blowouts were all Amoco’s. It was common knowledge among the service hands working on Amoco rigs that the site personell couldn’t fart sideways without asking the office in Calgary for permission. I would bet money there was a similar situation with BP. I would also bet that the disastrous decision to displace the mud in the riser with seawater was made my some guy in the office who figured that it would save a day of rigtime (a lot of money).
Mr Garner
You and everyone else appear to have swallowed whole the ‘let’s all hate big oil’ koolaid. The blowout preventer is a failsafe device. Multiple times over. It is not owned or maintained by bp (exxon, chevron, any other big oil company). This failure happened because the parties who DO own this particular device tinkered with it, incompetently, and withheld that fact until well after the event.
The idea that staff on a rig cannot fart sideways is complete falsehood. And even if it were true, what caused this mess did not happen on the rig. It happened in some repair yard onshore, way prior to drilling this well,
Pay attention here folks. I know quite well what I am speaking of.
It was BP/Transocean’s (not clear yet who) decision to proceed KNOWING they didn’t know. Both knew that the BOP had failed tests. BP decided to proceed in order to save a few million dollars that they were behind on this well and the next which the DH was late getting to.
This was not an accident. Available documentation is clear: this was criminal negligence.
Link to documentation please.
Read the NY Times. They have been documenting the course of the story.
Robert:
You may well have a point. The exact outcome of the final (pre-explosion) blowout preventer test, in gory, data-intensive detail, will help inform that verdict.
I still see a vast distinction between the party who owned and modified the blowout preventer leaving its exact final design as ‘unknown’ (undocumented), and the parties who relied on the blowout preventer to work in an emergency. Society will not see much of distinction, in the end. IF the rig owner had bp’s annual profits, society / media would be going after the rig company and before they went after bp. Similarly, the director of the orchestra is the target of the good or the bad reviews much more often than the cellist and pianist. That is why all the major oil companies will very soon make important changes to their business models.
Accidents happen. Engineering is not human- or nature-proof.
Fact is, THERE IS NO MONEY TO BE MADE or to spend or the public demand in our current economic and political environment for preparing for major disaster or effectively dealing with the sh*t that we create in continuing our way of life. We know really well how to spread pesticides everywhere to grow more food, or blow up a mountain to smithereens to get the coal, but not what to do with the runoff. It would not surprise me if by the time humans landed on Mars, our plans for dealing with any oil spill still consisted of not much more than plastic water floats and mops/paper towel *technology* that we’ve been using for the last 50 years.
Yes there’re still lots government bureaucracy to be eliminated and efficiency can be improved, but to really plan and prepare for disasters takes funding and coordinated effort that takes resources. Your local fire department can’t afford drills if they’re cut. Agencies can’t regulate or even review an incident response plan if those positions are fired. Ye the political populism of the day is less government and hands off corporations so they can create “jobs, jobs, jobs” and “low prices.” What is the price for cancer and death to the marine and tourism industry to the South? Never mind the fact that Wall Street banks and real estate industry, under an already lax government watch, are mostly responsible for the Housing Bubble and crash that wiped away most of our pensions and downsized our income, still we rather “run government like a business or corporation” and trust big corporations like BP or ENRON to regulate themselves so they can give us “Jobs! Jobs! Jobs!” Then the next disaster will hit, and we will again blame the government for not being prepared.
Until we start taking society survival more seriously than Wall Street’s chart of the day, we will always put more weight on our perfectly cost-engineered project plans and cut the hours spent on the risk analysis and incident response plan. Also it’s time to start thinking about being responsible for the whole product life-cycle in our industry practices to create a sustainable world. Nature doesn’t clean up our sh*t any more, not within our short attention span anyway. Disaster Preparedness and Planning are like will and trusts, and an investment for the future. Investment – isn’t that what Wall Street preaches all the time?
Front Row Seat has some valid points, but in my experience as a consulting engineer, passing off liability is sometimes an important factor in the decision to outsource some ‘facet’ of business, while other times it’s because it’s less cost and actual risk than learning to do that facet in house. In the case of the BOP, I think it is the latter. Imagine the additional grief BP would be getting if they had designed their own BOP, instead of using the ‘proven’ Haliburton technology, and then had this failure.
However, to Bob’s point about the competence of BP management, they have been trying to capture the flow from the well now for a month or so, but they haven’t been able to position tankers to load the oil into yet?
heh, sorry, I’m going to need a bit more info before I take your word for this.
However, the REAL story is 1) failure of any regulatory oversight.
https://www.nerdpocalypse.net/not%20prepared.html
2) the interaction of physics and failures (sorry, I’m such a nerd that I can look at the physics and chemistry of the disaster and marvel at it).
https://www.nerdpocalypse.net/Gulf%20Oil%20Leak.html
(click on gas physics, hydrate, oil chemistry)
3) and… this really really sucks…. that the US is not the world leader in the technology anymore
https://www.nerdpocalypse.net/Norweigians.html
(oh, yeah, the website pretty well demonstrates that you can’t keep even moderately complex discussion in your head without cognitively enhanced websites….)
How a serious commentator can draw inferences about a company’s behaviour from events which allegedly happened in 1940 is beyond me.
I spent my entire working career in the oil industry working for BP and I was not even born in 1940.
You will recall that BP acquired Amoco and I think you will find that almost everyone involved in this tragic incident is american or inured in american oil industry practices.
Bob,
So what are the alternatives to oil/coal? From what I can tell, all sources of energy have problems. Some can create environmental problems (oil spills, air/water pollution, waste nuclear fuel) while others seem to be unreliable (intermittent wind, poor solar panel performance).
I’m all for protecting the environment. I am happy to use alternative methods. Still, the alternatives seem to have a high cost with low reliability. So what does one do?
I don’t think we should remove fossil fuels until we find a good substitute? What is there? You once wrote about a company (That Google bought/invested in) that had small kites to generate electricity. Is that still around?
Before we flee fossil fuels, I’d like to know that we aren’t going to hang ourselves by raising the cost of energy. And despite what the party line that this will just mean less driving for consumers; it will also raise the cost of farming, transportation, and general living/consumption, which will increase the numbers on welfare. That’s not helpful….
Seriously, I’d love to hear some options.
Absent new physics (a Mr. Fusion engine), there is no other option. No other chemical source has both the energy density and portability of gasoline. Europe, bless their Freedom Fried hearts, get along nicely on about half as much per capita ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum#Consumption_statistics for those demand data). Given the sprawl of the USofA, without gasoline, the country dies in no time flat.
Europe uses more trains (electric) and proportionally more diesel for transportation.
Stricter emissions regulations here in the U.S. have starved us of diesel options in the light passenger vehicle market.
Pure electric vehicles are coming, but will be expensive, so expect slow adaptation.
Does that mean we can start using nuclear power now?
There really is only one Delorean with a Mr. Fusion engine, and it’s a fake.
Conventional nuclear electricity charging all-electric vehicles would eliminate the fossil fuel problems but create nuclear waste problems. Of course we could use the electricity to create hydrogen fueled rockets powerful enough to shoot the waste into a solar escape orbit.
I have a few questions regarding the management of the this disaster:
1. Why aren’t experts from the other major oil companies being consulted? I have not once seen an interview with the CEO of Exxon, Shell, ConocoPhilips, or any other major oil company invited to contribute a solution. In such an international disaster, shouldn’t the best and brightest be consulted, regardless of company/national affiliation? We can divide the bill later.
2. With over 700 deep water oil rigs operating in the gulf, couldn’t someone “borrow” one close by to drill the “relief” well, rather than waiting for BP to bring in it’s own rig? Maybe they are doing this, but again, I haven’t seen or heard anything regarding where this rig is coming from.
3. Isn’t there any way to “thread” a long pole, tipped with a conventional explosive, into the opening of the well and several hundred yards below the ocean floor, the detonated to seal the hole?
— 3. Isn’t there any way to “thread” a long pole, tipped with a conventional explosive, into the opening of the well and several hundred yards below the ocean floor, the detonated to seal the hole?
Why do people assume that blowing up the well hole will seal it?? In the first place, in order for this to work, the resulting loose material has fill the well hole, and have a pressure gradient greater than the gusher. Watching old films of Red Adair blow up gushers doesn’t inform. He used explosives to snuff the fire, not seal the well. My view of physics says that “blowing up” the ground, no matter the depth in the well hole, will simply fracture the rock, thus creating multiple lanes to the surface. Remember that water, as all liquids, is incompressible. The force of the explosion will be forced into the rock surrounding the well hole, assuming that the detonation point is sufficiently far enough below the floor (into bedrock). Fracture city. Unless there’s an engineer (mechanical or civil) on the thread who knows otherwise.
Incorrect. There are only 33 deepwater rigs in the gulf. I guarantee you that is correct. BP had two (2) rigs onsite to drill duplicate relief wells within a week or so of the blowout. There have been 2 rigs onsite nearly this whole time — both drilling.
Bob,
Amoco’s corporate headquarters were in Chicago (well, Chicagoland) before it was purchased and absorbed / merged into BP. I’ve continued to wonder what if any ties the Obama administration (or its leadership and principle advisors) has to BP that result from the intersection of its Chicago connections that BP’s meaning particularly those that derive from Amoco. I haven’t seen any reporting on this. That may mean there is nothing there. Or has no one looked or reported, yet?
Correction: that –> and
In the coming global financial collapse, the lucky residents of the Gulf coast will be collecting tar balls to burn to keep from freezing to death.
Interesting that you mention the problems they had with Sherwood Forest well were due to following a rigid procedure until the guys from Oklahoma came in and show them how to cut corners and be more efficient. Now I see a story citing a Senate committee report that shows they may have learned “too well” and took too many dangerous shortcuts.
https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE65D4T120100614
This is the heart of modern corporations where the bottom line is king and all the CEO worrys about is making the numbers and collecting the cash prize.
Life itself is a series of calculated risks.
It works quite nicely when corporations get to socialize costs and privatize profits, that’s Bob’s point, in a nutshell.
Those that calculate the risks, decide how to proceed, then get to pay the piper when it all goes in the rubbish can. Fair’s fair.
in the 1940s, there were several makers of deep rock well drill bits.
the best one, the longest-lasting by one or two orders of magnitude, and the one that was watched cradle to grave by employees of the manufacturer lest anybody divine its secrets was American.
Hughes Tool Company of Houston. the inventors of “secret, go away, we will tell you when you can run your drill engine, once the bit is in the shaft again.”
which might explain why the Okies could drill all day and into the night while the Brits would take two turns and call tea-time.
i like this blog a lot very informative keep up the good work.
For all of you beating the drum about Halliburton’s Blow-out preventer. It was manufactured by a Company called Cameron….not Halliburton.
correct.
Learned an interesting fact this weekend. A good well in the GOM produces 12,000 barrels a day. A great well produces 25,000 barrels. Estimates for the Deepwater Horizon well are now 40,000 to 55,000 barrels a day. BP managed to lose the best producing well in the Gulf.
it’s a trick. BP is providing cheap oil to the Gulf fishermen who were complaining about the cost of bunker fuel. all they have to do is scoop it up. then in a couple months, BP will raise the cost of bunker.
Incorrect. For this particular oil bearing formation, any production rate over about 20 thousand bbls per day is on the upper edge of the statistics. The best well in the gulf from this rock formation produced about 50 thousand barrels a day. BUT – that well encountered the thickest formation in the entire gulf, hundreds of feet of so-called pay. The Macondo pay is much much thinner, and so maximum rate is likely closer to 20 or 25 thousand per day on the upper end.
Isn’t it interesting, folks, that the entire country/media has access to the public records of the production rates for all the gulf wells drilled into this particular rock formation, yet NOBODY in the media has bothered considering that dataset as the correct source to estimate how much the Macondo well is flowing? No — instead, they talk about how much fluid seven firehoses could handle. Incredible.
Front row, are you saying the maximum flow rate for the spill cannot be more than 25,000 bpd? If so, how do you explain the 40,000 to 55,000 for the current estimates? (asking, not bitching…)
IMPHO the best one-liners that got on the company bulletin board about why BP hasn’t stopped the oil yet are:
* They sent the guys who clean the restrooms.
* The oil’s going to flow until the bonuses to stop it get really, really huge.
Good ones!
I was just thinking how the financial industry nearly destroyed the world’s economy, and for that they got bailed out, and those still employed often got bonuses to boot. People — anyone with a 401k — lost a third to half their savings from this, ruining their retirement plans.
Compare that with one well blowing out. A horrible thing, but how many of you have lost your retirement plan due to this?. No bailouts for the oil companies — instead, they have to give the government money for the services of the coast guard and such. Don’t get me wrong – this is probably closer to how things should work — accountability. My point is – – I wish we could turn time back and charge the financial industry for all the pain we’ve all felt from their screw-ups.
What we have coming from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is what we should expect from an attorney in that position: ambulance chasing.
A lawyer chases an ambulance to fix blame and seek compensation. The attorney’s presence does nothing to safe the life of the victim or help him/her heal.
The White House sent DoJ SWAT teams to oil rigs, not oil inspecotrs after the blowout. the White House continues to harp daily about fixing personal blame and compensation, two things that are already guaranteed in a slew of federal and international laws, instead of taking any action whatsoever that might stem the flow of crude oil into the Gulf.
Ambulance chasing.
I have read several articles from experts and laymen alike that say that BP can’t plug the leak because the well casing is fractured. Sealing it from the top would only cause the whole well to blow out, leaving a massive hole between the surface and the oil at 120,000 psi. Here is one of those theories:
https://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389×8519473
If any of this is true, we (the world) are truly screwed. Our only hope are the relief wells.
Which raises a question. The article I read on this estimated 2.5 billion barrels in the field. If the relief wells do not work, how much of that oil will be spewed into the Gulf before pressure drops enough that the hole closes on its own?
Oops. Further reading last night indicated the Macondo field has about 100 million barrels, not 2.5 billion. I must have gotten the larger number from a reference to the Deepwater Horizon’s previous job, the Tiber prospect.
Bob,
What are the odds that BP will attempt to shirk liability by pursuing an option pioneered by Enron and GM – that is spinning off companies with enough mass to take the blame, yet small enough for the parent company to escape massive litigation? I ask because I’ve been seeing U.S. Congressional proposals (House and Senate) being made that allow BP to be hung out to dry, retroactive kind of stuff. Senators and Representatives see that this is likely to go on and they are positioning themselves to say that they made sure BP paid the price for their mistake. Will BP spin off the GoM rigs with US$2-3 billion in cash and rename the parent corporation to British Petroleum International?
I’m game for giving history a chance to repeat itself.
A friend in the industry told me the incident was made much worse that it should have been, had the initial fire been allowed to burn . . . the oil would have burned instead of spilling into the sea, and the pipe between the ocean floor and the rig would have remained intact. But fire ships hosed down the rig in an attempt to put out the fire. All that water eventually sunk the rig, putting out the fire, and wrecking the intact pipe as the rig went down . . . thus the best intentions lead to things being made worse . . . or perhaps it was failure to anticipate and have a proper response to this eventuality communicated and practiced ?
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BP has a long history of doing terrible terrible things. It’s changed it’s name so many times to avoid the bad press. It was actually BP along with the help of the CIA who overthrew a secular, reasonable government and replaced it with the Sha.
I believe BP is mostly owned by the British Royal Family (who have themselves ordered terrible terrible things to be done) and are Eugenics practicing Scum.
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