Drowning in Oily Mistakes

Technical and foolish mistakes found in the book entitled
“Drowning in Oil: BP & the Relentless Pursuit of Profit - A Review”
by Loren C Steffy, McGraw-Hill; 1 edition (November 5, 2010)

Page	Avoidable Mistakes and Technical Errors
xv	“Public mistrust of oil companies in the America grew ...” The definite article should not be there (especially not on the very first page of text).
2	BP’s 35,000 foot Tiber well in the Gulf of Mexico was not “the deepest well in history” (p2). That honour belongs to the USSR which over nineteen long years in the 1970s and 80s drilled the Kola Superdeep Borehole to a vertical depth 40,230 feet in Siberia. In Qatar in 2008, well BD-04A was drilled to an even greater length, 40, 318 feet, but this included a 35,768 foot horizontal section, so reached nothing like the massive depth of Kola. The Macondo field is not an ancient graveyard of decomposed dinosaurs. Macondo’s oil and gas, like all hydrocarbons, were formed from decomposed marine life (such as phytoplankton, algae and bacteria) which died in largely the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous periods, 245-145 million years ago, albeit when dinosaurs roamed on land. And no oilfield is “a massive underground pool”; oil is found within in the tiny spaces of porous rocks.
3	Gas inflows do not “kick at the drill pipe” – they push fluid in spurts (“kicks”) up the inside of the drill pipe. Ixtoc, a Mexican well in the Gulf which blew out in 1979 and whose oil reached over 160 miles of Texas beaches did not “taint” (or “sully” – p180) them ; it devastated them, and marine life, though the environment eventually recovered. Mr Steffy seems to be downplaying Ixtoc to make Macondo look worse.
4	BP may have been “spending half-a-million dollars a day for the Horizon”, but the total spread cost (including services, boats, helicopters etc) would have been double that. Therefore a delay of 1½ months would have amounted to a budget overrun of some $45m, not $20m as stated. ($40m eventually appears on p165).
5	Drilling mud doesn’t “lubricate the well” and does a lot more than “tamp down the pressure”. It lubricates the drilling bit, removes cuttings, and plasters the wall of the hole. “Drilling too quickly” does not cause mud loss. The only thing that does is when the mud pressure is greater than the formation pressure, the plastering is unable to contain the mud, and the formation cracks under the stress allowing mud to flow into the openings and/or into the pores instead of returning to surface. The drilling crew did not pump mud “out of the hole” and replace it with seawater. They did this to the riser, the big pipe that connects the rig to the wellhead on the seabed. The same mistake is made on p173 and 175. This should not have been done until the well was not only “capped” (as stated), but dead beneath the cap, ie the mud in the hole was heavy enough to prevent inflow, augmented by a cement plug as additional safety. The main reason for displacing the riser (not the hole) from mud to seawater is not to recover the mud but to avoid polluting the sea with mud.
6	Interesting that roustabout Stephen Stone apparently finished his 12-hour shift and went straight to bed, not even stopping for meal.
7	The “huge machines … pump mud” not “from the well” but into it.
8	Drilling fluid would have been shooting not “from the top of the derrick” but to it.
10	“The nightmare well, with its mile-long conduit into the belly of the earth” in fact measured 5023 feet (0.95 miles) to the seabed plus a further 13,337 feet (over 2½ miles) to the bottom of the well.
12	Mike Williams, an injured survivor, found his “left leg useless” but in the next paragraph “got to his feet”.
22 & 28	“London’s tony St. James Square” – should that be “tiny”? A curious “tony” reappears on p28.
25	It isn’t only wells in 5,000 feet of water that require remote operated submarines, as inferred. No diver can work beyond a thousand feet, if that. From then on it’s got to be remote operated vehicles (ROVs).
36	Strange avoidance of the concise term “Hungarian Jewess” in favour of “Hungarian of Jewish descent”, in referring to Lord Browne’s mother.
39	BP’s pioneering and speedy development in the 1970s of the North Sea’s first elephant, the five-platform Forties field, was anything but the product of a “plodding, risk-averse culture”.
57	To say that Piper Alpha was destroyed by the ignition of “gas from a ruptured line” is misleading. The disaster was initiated by a leak of condensate which exploded, causing an oil fire which in due course heated gas risers causing them to fail and this in turn allowed the gas to ignite and explode.
58	Forties Alpha was an offshore production platform not a “drilling rig”, though it contained one.
159	“Water is lighter than oil”. Not it’s not! This error makes a nonsense of the accompanying explanation of fluids flowing in a reservoir.
166	ALL wells, not just those which are “modern” and “drilled far offshore”, are “far more complex” than “a shaft of metal piercing the ground”. From p166, the author repeatedly uses “drill string” when he should say “production string”. The drill string is used solely for drilling. The production string is the final, ie innermost, casing cemented in the hole. Dick Cheney became a “lightning rod for controversy” over Halliburton only after he left Halliburton to become US VP and had divested himself of all stock and interests.
167	Where the liner is hung off inside the larger casing, cement is not used to pack off or seal the two together. The liner is cemented to the hole wall from the bottom up; the two pipes are sealed to each other at the top of the liner by activating seals made of rubber and lead. The tie back is not an alternative to the liner; it is an optional addition to the liner – it “ties back” the liner to the wellhead to provide a continuous production string from bottom to top.
168	The centralizer controversy is curious: centralizers are cheap to buy and quick to install. The shortage of fittings was doubtless why the number was not increased – to fetch more would have led to a helicopter trip and several hours delay, and much embarrassment.
169	Surely BP had a shore-based engineer with absolute authority to take such decisions (eg on centralizers)? The “loss of circulation” was extremely serious. It is almost inconceivable that cementation operations would proceed without first rectifying this.
171	This kind of higher level planning meeting would never have been taking place in the “drillers shack” but in the main accommodation/office module.
172	“Cementing a well a mile below the surface of the water is as much art as science”. No it’s not; it’s nearly all science. · And this cementation took place 3½ miles below the surface. · And it is not/cannot be “spread at particular points”. It is all pumped out of the bottom of the liner or casing and works its way up the outside. · And cement is not “poured” into the hole, it is pumped.
173	It is not “time-consuming” to evaluate a cement bond log: you can visually interpret what it says at once. Nor was the cement job “temporary”; it was permanent.
174	The toolpusher does a lot more than “oversee the materials and personnel”. He is the rig owner’s senior representative, responsible both for the integrity of the rig and for ensuring BP’s instructions are executed.
175	An “hour-long discussion” on a rig consuming $1m/day would cost BP $40,000, not as stated “a half-million dollars”.
178	The author needs to define what he means by “worst spill ever in American waters”. The quantity of oil spilled may have been more, but the environmental and wildlife damage it did was certainly far less than done by the Exxon Valdez and arguably less than Ixtoc’s. Macondo was less damaging because · the crude was more volatile than that carried by the Valdez, · was far offshore allowing it to spread and biodegrade more readily, · the weather conditions were warm which further enhanced degradation, · dispersants were applied liberally both on the surface and at depth, and · there was a massive effort to protect the seashore through booms
181	Oil prices – including futures – are driven primarily by OPEC. The price of everything is driven by something. Oil company collaboration does not reduce the fierce competition in those areas where they do not collaborate. “The three parties then hired a litany of contractors”. No they didn’t. Only BP, as operator for the three, did the hiring. “A [major] rig operator may have fewer than 20 customers worldwide”. This is wildly underestimated.
183, 184 & 185	Confusion over volumes and units as noted above. Regarding Macondo volumes, the author should have noted that nothing was properly measured. Nearly every figure bandied about, from 2,000 bbl/day to 80,000 or more, was based on nothing other than humans eyeballing the flow as depicted by underwater TV cameras and comparing this – by memory – with measured flows they might once have seen on dry land. This involved no science whatsoever.
186	“While BP’s response to the Horizon disaster may have been …”. Should read “the Texas City refinery disaster”.
191 & 227	Two very limited and poor descriptions of what was a singularly brilliant project in the way the BP team brought Macondo back under control. The author clearly hasn’t a clue about this and didn’t bother to find out.
200	“The Horizon’s [BOP stack] was on the seafloor a mile below the surface and accessible only by remote underwater submarines”. And, more significantly, by the control systems. ROV inspections are rarely required.
208	If the fishermen were so devastated by Macondo, where was the TV footage showing dock after dock full of idle fishing boats? (Answer: BP employed most of them for booming, clean-up etc).
209	There weren’t many tarballs, especially compared with the Exxon Valdez crop. President Obama in a famous photo-op only seemed to find one of them.
212	Oil does not “inundate” the land, not unless all the pipelines rupture together.
218	The Congressional Committee “would expect contrition” but would not get it. But on the same page, BP’s Tony Hayward is reported as saying “I’m deeply sorry”.
219	The author seems surprised that Mr Haywood would attempt to protect both BP and his job.
228	The capping of Macondo by BP was not “a small victory”. It was a massive, historic victory.
230 & 235	“United Kingdom” always takes a definite article. (Just as “the America” - on page xv - does not!)
241	“The basic design (of drilling wells) hadn’t changed for 90 years”. That’s because the problem it solves hasn’t. Similarly, the basic design of cars hasn’t changed for 90 years, for the same reason.
244	As regards maintenance schedules for BOPs, the first port of call should be Cameron the manufacturer
247	The final killing of Macondo through relief wells was not “symbolic”. It was actual, and by the way another remarkable technical accomplishment.
248	There was no “infamous Piper Alpha blowout”. The platform was destroyed by a fire cause by escaped condensate and, later, gas. The wells were shut off by their automatic subsurface safety valves and played no part in the disaster. “The drill bit is turned at an angle as it nears the problem well”. In fact it is steered throughout its course towards its target. A description of how the relief wells were actually drilled and steered would fascinate many readers.
249	Some people’s livelihoods may have been “devastated” but most were merely suspended. There is no evidence of long term damage to fishing areas.
251	That the Gulf’s richest but most difficult fields should end up concentrated “in the hands of just a few giant companies" is not unusual in costly high-tech businesses. Just look at Boeing and Airbus.
257	The author is incorrect to infer that there is something intrinsically wrong with striving to get “more for less”. In fact it is admirable, provided minimum standards are adequately defined and met.

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