Deepwater Horizon movie review

So, last night I went to the most subsidized film in Louisiana history, Deepwater Horizon. Each Louisiana taxpayer spent $8 on the film.

***SPOILERS***

The film is good overall, but there were lots of little things that, as someone who has worked offshore, irked me. For example, Mr. Jimmy [OIM] asks, "What's the Bankston [OSV] doing here?" An OSV (Offshore Service Vessel) next to a MODU (Mobile Offshore Drilling Unit) is a more common sight than not; MODUs are hungry beasts that must constantly be replenished with food, fuel, and drilling supplies. It's in furtherance of showing the audience of BP's impatience with finishing the well, so most of the little annoyances are forgivable. Another scene has a crewman throwing a coin down the moon pool and the camera following it to the BOP on the seafloor and it's a nice shot that shows what's going on (in reality wanton littering offshore is verboten). There's also the seafloor belching gas as the reservoir acts up, which is total bullshit, but scares the shit out of the audience.

There were a couple of changes made from reality that served no purpose in the story that I question. For example, in fighting the kicks, the movie drill crew diverts to overboard. In reality, the crew went to the mud gas separator instead. There are some differences between the two (diverting overboard has slightly more capacity but risks sheening), but for a blowout of that magnitude on that still a night, they probably would have blown up either way (not even the overboard divert lines had enough capacity for this size blowout). If it made no difference, why change the movie if it doesn't further the story? A small change, but one I noticed. There was a bit too much foreshadowing and it was heavy handed (the oiled pelican on the bridge of the Bankston annoyed the piss out of me).

Overall, the crew was depicted as professionals who who got overwhelmed and pressured, but then did the best they could humanly manage in the aftermath. There's some horsing around that's common in reality. A VERY realistic line: "Have you gone Democrat? It's pronounced Slum-BURGER!" (making fun of the pronunciation of the oil services company Schlumberger, pronounced, Shlum-bear-jay). There's also a fictional scene where a crane operator runs up and applies the brakes on a swinging crane to save the evacuation, only to be blown out the cab after success to fall to his death. A noble portrayal, but reality was more ordinary. The crane operator was transferring supplies back and forth between the Bankston and the MODU when the explosion happened, was knocked down, and died.

Some of the most touching scenes are the wife calling the emergency contact number and finding out her husband's rig is on fire. I'm not going to lie: I thought of my wife at that moment. It was really touching. Also the USCG getting call after call about the rig on fire sent chills up your spine.

Donald Vidrine's character, played by John Malcovich, was scary. Personally, I don't quite think he nailed the "Cajun" accent, but he came very close. Vidrine's character was diabolical, yet in a fairly mundane way. His veiled threats are, unfortunately, very realistic.

The film contained a very, very realistic depiction of a vapor cloud explosion. The jetfires I think they even underplayed. There were some action sequences that were a bit too drawn out. The real disaster happened much faster than depicted. There is a lot of action and suspense in the film and they sustain it quite well as the movie unfolds. The Deepwater Horizon was a middle aged drilling rig that had been worked hard and had a lot of overdue maintenance it was pointed out, but they missed a biggie in the film: one of the DP thrusters was kaput.

This was definitely a "Hollywood-ized" version of events, but overall I liked it. The fictionalized parts were mostly for storytelling purposes and generally didn't detract from the big picture of what really happened.

One last thing: Popular Mechanics writer argues who should really be responsible for the Macondo Blowout.

BP's estimate of the Macondo Blowout

What Did BP think the flowrate of Macondo was while it was still flowing into the Gulf?

Well, there’s now an answer to that question.  This document is related to the Riser Insertion tool where dispersant would be injected into the wellhead.  You want to inject dispersant at an optimum ratio to the oil flowing.  For example, let’s say for every 10 barrels per day flowing, you want to inject 1 gallon of Corexit.  If you’re planning on injecting 10 gallons of Corexit, you then probably think there’s 100 barrels per day flowing. 

Take a look at Page 4 (and also note the document is dated July 6th, while the well was still flowing):

Bingo.  BP’s working assumption on the flowrate of the Macondo blowout DURING THE BLOWOUT was 53,000 Barrels per Day, which, by the way, also happens to be nearly spot on to the government’s spillrate calculation during the trial.  

UPDATE: I've had this conversation a few times with people.  Most everyone assumed BP lied about the flowrate during the blowout.  I paid very close attention and, if you watched closely, it usually wasn't BP making the "5,000 Barrels per day" estimate of the flowrate. It was usually a USCG officer saying, but they were always standing right next to BP, especially Doug Suttles:


I've repeatedly told folks that, if you paid very close attention, BP didn't actually lie about the flowrate. They used a USCG officer as a shield to save themselves a few nickels.  That's not lying; that's far worse.  It's cowardice.

Book Review: Bob Cavnar's "Disaster on the Horizon

I've read quite a bit about Macondo.  There's "Fire on the Horizon", "A Hole in the Bottom of the Sea", and now Bob Cavnar's "Disaster on the Horizon".  

The book is billed as 'an insider's take' on Macondo.  Cavnar worked in the field for 10+ years and has 30+ years of total industry experience.  He's been a Company Man on a drilling rig.  

The first half of the book, frankly, is completely skippable.  It's lots of summary of things that have been written better elsewhere.  Furthermore, Cavnar's background is more on the drilling side of things.  The further away from the wellhead he is, the less accurate some of his book is.  For example, he misses the 'how big is bubba's butt' problem with the survival capsules (both left full to the brim, but with less than their rated capacity because they were designed with IMO human factors guidance instead of 'Gulf of Mexico personnel' weight and space in mind).  The book also skips around a lot; sometimes its chronological, sometimes it's organized by topic.  A better editor might have gotten him to stick with one or the other.  

When you get to the second half of the book, things get much more interesting.  It also gets closer to Cavnar's real background.  One thing I especially like is how he tracks how carefully BP, particularly Doug Suttles, parsed his words to where he wasn't technically lying, but he sure as hell wasn't clearly communicating critical information.  

Cavnar also goes through some of the political implications.  He was a generally left/center member of the oil patch (a rarity), but he was also involved in a lot of lobbying activities.  He is dismissive of API's Gerard as a Republican hack who gives donations to money to politicians who will vote the industry's way anyway.  He also thinks that Tom DeLay really shot the industry in the foot with the "Permanent Republican Majority" project where senior, southern, centrist, industry-friendly Democrats were knocked off with gerrymandered districts in places like Texas and Louisiana and replaced with junior, backbench, Republican nobodies.  When Republicans lost control of Congress in 2006, instead of having industry friends on key committees, they had folks like Ed Markey controlling them.  Oops.  Cavnar is also surprisingly complimentary of Markey, who could see long term that repeated disasters would kill the offshore industry faster than any regulation; Markey was, at some level, just trying to get industry to swallow their medicine.  

The one big problem that I see with the later part of Cavnar's book was he thinks the Liner Hanger vs. Long String casing design was a fatal mistake.  While not trying to get too bogged down in the weeds, in my opinion, while it complicated the response to the blowout, it had little influence on the blowout itself and was a tertiary issue.  

In summary, there's some real value in the second half of this book, but the first half should be skipped through as fast as possible.  

Deepwater Horizon Trailer

Deepwater Horizon Movie Trailer released

CSB Video on the Macondo Blowout

The CSB has shed some new light to the subject.  The report is a very interesting read.

I still don't buy that the CSB thesis on the BOP failure (buckling via effective compression with an operable Deadman) is more plausible than the one suggested by the USCG (no working Deadman, pipe string buckling via rig drift off, BSR activation most likely by the ROV intervention), but it is plausible and there is some data to support the CSB version.  Both are completely plausible and it's mostly a judgement call on which is the more likely culprit (something not at all unusual, given the paucity of hard data).

Overall, there isn't much new that would effect BP, Transocean, etc. (although Transocean's maintenance people look like a bunch of Bubba's that don't know what end of a wrench to turn), but it raises some serious questions about BOP design that the industry at large needs to answer.

Courtwatch, BP Edition, Part 3

Four years ago, what we'd come to call the Macondo blowout / Deepwater Horizon / the BP Oil Spill occurred. The Atlantic / 4 Years Ago, Photo Essay

Previous Edition: Part 2

First off, a quick conviction update: A BP manager who was in charge of spill response has plead guilty to insider trading charges. His was an obvious crime. You've got to be pretty blatant to get the SEC to come after you. He sold all of his shares very early on after the well blew out and all of his family's shares. That's a little too flagrant for the SEC to give you a pass.

Probably the phase with the most variability is the "how much spilled" phase (NY Times: In BP Trial, the Amount of Oil Lost Is at Issue - Nice summary). Note that many of the fines are on a per barrel basis, so, if more barrels were spilled, bigger fines. I believe it's $1,100/barrel under regular negligence and, if gross negligence is found, it's over $4,000/barrel. By fudging their estimates, it's argued BP can best limit their total liability. Here's more on the sparing over the spillrate estimates.

Before I go into what I viewed in the courtroom, I'll point out this very important factoid: Actually, they kinda DID have a meter. During the last stages of the blowout, a capping stack with 2 orifices of known size were fitted to the top of the well. One of the two orifices was fitted with a pressure gauge that discharged directly to the GoM while the other was routed to the collection system of the Disco Enterprise & Q4000. There was a pretty good gauge of how quickly the well was flowing at that point in time (~50,000 barrels/day).

The person (Dr. Tom Hunter) that noticed the lineup and made the initial calculations was actually a nuclear weapons engineer. He had a PhD from Wisconsin and held roughly the same position as Dr. Oppenheimer had. He worked for Sandia National Labs and was a part of a taskforce led by DOE to fix the blowout and monitor BP's actions. I actually got to sit in the courtroom for some of his testimony. He retired about midway through the blowout and decided to stick around to help make things right, despite being paid by nobody to do so. His testimony was pretty amazing. If a lawyer could sit down and dream up the most reputable witness possible, Dr. Hunter would be high on that list. He definitely spoke like an engineer (he wasn't very polished and kinda stuttered), but his command of the numbers was firm. His testimony cemented the government's position pretty well early on in the spillrate phase of the trial. BP didn't spend a lot of time cross examining him and was probably just glad he was off the stand. I would have liked to see BP try impugning his integrity, after all, Dr. Hunter was just in charge of making sure US Nuclear Weapons go boom. The best testimate to Dr. Hunter's integrity is that his calculation, which was made with not much more than a 4-function calculator in the field while the blowout was going on, was never questioned by anyone, even scientists and engineers on BP's dime.

Here's the final government report on the spillrate:
Federal Government Report on Oil Spill [PDF]
For reference: ~4.9 million barrels total
Note that the government narrowed in on a single number which was then subjected to peer review and was published far in advance of the trial. For a ballpark figure, it amounted to an average of ~50,000 barrels/day.

In the leadup to the spillrate portion of the trial, BP played a little dance with the numbers. They constantly complained that the government's figure was too high, but not saying by how much nor would they expose their own reports until just before the spillrate portion of the trial. Off the top of my head, it wasn't until about 3 weeks prior that they posted their number on their website.
BP Report on how much oil spilled
For reference: ~3.26 million barrels total
Note that BP actually had about 3 different numbers, all of which coalesced around ~40,000 barrels/day. Both the Feds and BP agreed on the total oil collected by the capping stack before the well was finally shut off.

The initial shock was, 'wow, BP's number isn't much different from the Feds.' Everyone expected a super-lowball estimate from BP, but actually (in large part because of Dr. Hunter) they were pretty hemmed in by that final flowrate measurement, which everyone agreed was about as accurate as possible under the circumstances. The biggest difference between is the Feds assumed a constant or decreasing flowrate; BP's report argues that the flow rate kept increasing over timer due to erosion. Since the endpoint is fixed, they were just arguing over the slope of the curve (pointing up or pointing down). The Feds claimed that reservoir depletion was the governing factor. BP argued that erosion of the partially-closed BOP rams was what governed the flowrate.

As I mentioned, I saw some of the Federal witnesses (the Feds went first). I also got to see a couple of the BP flowrate estimate witnesses. The later was using an OLGA model. He was pretty reputable. He had (as memory serves) the highest of the BP estimates.

The first BP witness, however, was a haughty British geology professor out of Imperial College of London. He had the lowest of the BP estimates and depended on reservoir modelling for his results. He used equations of his own derivation based upon first principles. I got to witness some of the cross examination which (I think) was done by the same young prosecutor that led Mix's prosecution. He tore into the Brit professor, going into how much money BP had donated to Imperial College, how he used to work for BP, how his flowrate estimate was only lately published and wasn't peer reviewed. The professor, who didn't handle the pressure well, retorted, 'well, it was posted on the internet and I've received some really nice comments from people.' Not exactly as impressive as a peer-review.

What will Barbier do? The levels of uncertainty on this measurement are far beyond what scientists are usually comfortable with. There's no question I think that the Federal estimate is more reliable, but if Barbier would just take the mean of the two estimates, I wouldn't have a big problem with that. How much oil spilled?

Billions of dollars are on the line (a $16 Billion dollar question). Many of those dollars are reserved for coastal restoration in Louisiana. What choices Barbier makes will be worth paying attention to for a number of reasons.

NOTE: Some minor edits after publishing.

UPDATE: The dates for the final phase of the main BP trial were just announced today:

Richard Thompson (@rthompsonMSY) tweeted -
"Mark your calendars: Phase 3 of #BP oil spill trial, the "penalty phase," to begin 1/20/15 and end 2/5, per order issued this morning."

More story here.

A Hole in the Bottom of the Sea

A Hole at the Bottom of the Sea: The Race to Stop the BP Oil Gusher

A Hole in the Bottom of the Sea focuses on the post-blowout oil spill response (capping, top kill, top hat, etc.). In Fire on the Horizon, the rig didn't blow until page 200 or so. In this book, the rig blows up on page 30 and the well intervention lasts past page 200.

The writer has a background as a science writer for National Geographic. On the plus side, that means he has a firm understanding of things like measurement uncertainty, error bars, etc. On the downside, he has no technical background so there are some errors that are pretty blatant (for instance, he confuses erosion and corrosion, two completely different processes) that still make it into this edition.

Note that I picked up the post-Fukushima paperback copy. This book has been through at least 3 editions, from what I gather. That probably fixed a lot of earlier errors.

The writer has one soapboxy-bit: 'We now live in an engineered world and we'd better accept it.' Achenbach also probably managed to have carnal knowledge of his thesaurus as he wrote this book.

If you're interested in the well intervention (and only the well intervention) this is a great book, but the definitive Deepwater Horizon book has yet to be written. I'm waiting on David Hammer to write it...

Also-
Grover sings "A Hole in the Bottom of the Sea"

Book Review: "Fire on the Horizon"

It's about 2 years since everyone was glued to their TV's watching ROV's try and plug a hole in the bottom of the sea. Since then, numerous books have been published chronicling the explosion and the spill. Here are just a few writups of the multitude of books:

9 Books - LA Times

Publishers have no shortage of books - NY Times

In Book Form - MoJo

Each book focuses on a slightly different aspect of the disaster. After reading a few reviews, I chose Fire On The Horizon: The Untold Story Of The Gulf Oil Disaster by John Konrad and Tom Schroder.

Konrad holds an Unlimited Master's licence and has worked for many years on oil rigs. In his off time, he started a Maritime site called GCaptain. It's actually how I first heard about the Deepwater Horizon fire (one of the reasons I picked the book; they beat everyone else to the punch).

The book gives excellent background to the leadup to the disaster. I particularly enjoyed the chapter on the rig's construction in a South Korean shipyard. The maritime background of Konrad helps out a lot. The book nails the maritime aspects of the disaster. Konrad also knew some of the members of the crew, since he worked for Transocean for a time and graduated CUNY Maritime at about the same time as some of the maritime crew.

The cultural aspects of life onboard a rig, while probably not telling 100% true stories, does convey the culture pretty well. They do a good job in humanizing the crew of the rig.

I have two big criticisms of the book. First, the book is overly kind to the boots on the ground. Normally, I'd agree, but I'm not quite sure in this case. I think there is some blame that deserves to say with the field team. The book also really lets Captain Kutcha off light (although I believe Konrad was friends with Ktucha, so there's one explanation). The other criticism is when they get to the complicated petroleum engineering of the actual well construction, it's just a poorly written summary of David Hammer's writing. They lean on the Picayune's writing without giving anything new nor do they even properly summarize it. It takes them more than half of the book to even get to the drilling operations. Pages 128-130 really needs some editing because it's clunky and if I didn't know exactly what they were trying to explain before I read a sentence, I'd be lost. That was pretty disappointing. I'll hunt for another book to compliment that part.* There's also very little coverage of the oil spill (the first half is background, then 1/3 is the actual Macondo well and fire, then the balance is aftermath, spill, widows, etc.).

There's also one thing that I knew about, but didn't realize. What did the Titanic and the Deepwater Horizon have in common? Not enough lifeboat space. A major problem with current lifeboat standards is IMO rules on dictate lifeboat design based off "50th-percentile" standards. In other words, the lifeboat design is only meant to accommodate the average member of the public (~160 lbs.), not the average rig hand. On a Gulf of Mexico rig, almost everyone weighs at least 180 lbs. and there's guaranteed to be at least a few 280-300 lbs workers. The Deepwater Horizon only tested its full lifeboat capacity once in Korea, and that was with 110-lb. Koreans. Once in the Gulf of Mexico, given the larger crew, the Deepwater Horizon couldn't actually conduct a full evacuation without resorting to the use of inflatable rafts. If you also had any seriously injured personnel on a stretcher, you'd lose another 6 seats per stretcher on top of that!

This isn't something new. I heard about this years ago. Here's an International Association of Drilling Contractors (IADC) notice from before the Deepwater Horizon incident:

Anthropomorphic compatibility. Most SOLAS-approved lifeboats have been approved on the basis of an assumed occupant mass of 75 kg (≈ 165 lb). The IMO has recently revised its requirements to increase the assumed occupant mass for lifeboats on most new installations to 82.5 kg (≈ 182 lb). IMO did not alter the associated seat width standard, which remains 430 mm (≈ 17 in), when increasing the assumed occupant mass to 82.5 kg. A so-called “Gulf of Mexico standard” is being used by some that assumes an occupant weight of 210 lbs (≈ 95 kg) with a corresponding seat width of 21 in (≈ 530 mm). This matter is also being addressed by coastal State authorities in the North Sea.

Every project I've worked on has used 220-240 lbs. as an average weight. A company I work for actually did a survey of their employees entitled "How Big is Bubba's Butt" that was the source of the higher figure. It's also common to leave room for one stretcher without compromising seating capacity. Also, davit-launched inflatable liferafts are unreasonably complicated to use in an emergency situation.

Every large Gulf of Mexico installation should be audited to ensure that they can actually conduct an evacuation in a realistic manner. Tests should be robust (a sign of a nice and rigorous test is failure, like this one). Not leaving enough margin for actual crew weight or overly complicated launching isn't sufficient.

_____________
* Debating between Bob Cavnar's book and Achenbach's book. Anyone read either?

USCG/MMS Final Report on the Loss of the Deepwater Horizon

Full Report here.

Direct link to PDF of main body of Report.

There's nothing big in the report that we haven't already seen somewhere thus far.

David Hammer's Wrieup. Hammer focuses on the difference between the Presidential Commission (no subpoena power, said it was a systemic problem) vs. the USCG/MMS (later USCG/BOEMRE) Report (which had subpoena power and focused on very specific errors they "laid at BP's feet").


As I read through the report, I found the most interesting part is where they go through the CFR's (Code of Federal Regulations; The LAW on how to do everything) and they systematically list the CFR's that were violated and why. They also go through the ones that need to clarified. CFR's tend to be written by lawyers (or at least engineers with lawyers looking over their shoulder) and tend to use notoriously impenetrable language. Clarification of CFR's is a great idea for a part of regulatory reform.

One of the post-Macondo regulatory changes was a shift from a prescriptive-regime (do X, Y, and Z and you're assumed to be safe) to putting the onus on the companies to prove they've managed risk on a systematic basis (the North Sea's regulations are along these lines). I personally don't have too much of an opinion as to which is "better" and BP looks like it would have screwed up either way.

Note that it was published the same day as the report about the BP Geophysicist testifying in a deposition that they "missed" a 2-foot gas zone hundreds of feet above the top of the cement plug. She "assumed" that it was passed to the rig for them to modify their P&A procedures. BP now claims that it was a water-bearing instead of gas-bearing zone.

Another thing to note is that the lead investigators are being held back, probably to preserve their testimony for the (imminent?) indictments of BP management (or at least quintuple fines under the "gross negligence" clause). Another recent development: BP puts in for their first post-Macondo drilling permit. BP's been a minority partner on a few wells, but this is the first one where they are the operating company (with their own company men on the rigs running the show). The Sunday Money section in the Times-Pic had more about the drilling push by BP.

Going forward, I see all but the largest independents squeezed out of the Gulf and deepwater drilling left to the majors (Shell, Exxon, etc.). This was a transition that was underway well before Macondo, but the post-Macondo world (insurance, regulation, increasing technical challenge) really accentuates. The other guys are discovering they really don't have the manpower to put together permits that can withstand post-Macondo scrutiny. Here's an erl industry exec that says BOEMRE isn't holding back permits for political reasons, they're just checking them very thoroughly. Here's gCaptain's reprinting of an excellent WSJ article about getting back to work in the Gulf.



And as a side note, the NTSB has released their report on the fatal California gas pipeline explosion. The keys were very old, substandard pipe. It was an intra-state pipeline, so there was never any requirement to hydrotest the pipe (an incredibly important safety procedure in ASME Pressure Vessel Code).

Deepwater Horizon Investigation Updates

There's been a multitude of investigations into the Deepwater Horizon / Macondo Blowout and I figure I'd summarize where we're at.

There's broad agreement between all the reports on the facts (with a few minor exceptions), but each one puts different emphasis on which actions were most important.

Transocean's Report came out not too long ago. Watch this video; it's excellent.

I liked most of Transocean's report. There were only a few howlers in there. Transocean endorses the maintenance as good practice (I'm personally not so sure; scheduled maintenance is perfect for turbines {things with well defined MTBF's}, but not great for something with weird failure modes like a BOP). They also say that the AMF/"Dead Man" fired successfully within an hour of the initial blowout (doubtful, but not impossible, according to the Det Norske Veritas report), but the blind shear rams failed to seal. The DNV report said the shear rams were closed days later by ROV intervention, which TO says 'closed the rams further.' Both agree the off-center drillstring was to blame for the failure to seal. The other big howler in TO's report is the treatment of fast rescue craft.

Transocean praises the Fast Rescue Craft from the Bankston (used to pluck multiple casualties from the water), but TO never mentions that the Horizon was never fitted with a FRC mostly to save space and money. The regulations allowed them to get away with this because they designated one of their large, slow, unwieldy lifeboats as their rescue craft, despite the fact that they are incapable of performing an injured swimmer pickup. There are some drawbacks of FRC's, but for a vessel the size of the Horizon, in my opinion as an engineer, the omission constitutes a design blunder. Had the Damon Bankston not been on the scene, there would be more than 11 dead.

USCG/BOEMRE almost finished, but won't meet deadline

The National Academy of Engineering has a draft report out, but the final report is still being worked on.

The Chemical Safety Board has another investigation they're working on. Note that they've gotten very, very little cooperation from anyone offshore, because nobody wants the CSB to have purview over offshore. The CSB is a funny little organization. They've got no enforcement powers, their reports are generally not (directly) admissible as evidence in courts, but they're packed with some really brilliant PHD's and do wonderful reconstructions of events:

CSB Video of Texas City.

I love engineering disaster books. Love 'em. I picked up the book the CSB head put together about Texas City and was so disgusted with BP's management I couldn't finish it, that's how in-depth it was.

More notes:

✭ WHOI Examines the Plumes

✭ BP's Company Man excused from testifying for "medical reasons"

But medical records kept under seal....

All of these investigations reaching slightly different conclusions is a GOOD thing. It means we'll actually learn something and the 11 lives weren't lost for nothing.

Macondo-related Observations

I've been thinking over the whole Deepwater Horizon/Macondo/Moratorium mess and here are a few thoughts.

The Long-string vs. liner tieback issue made no difference in the blowout and the number of centralizers had very little effect, BUT the entire episode is very illustrative of BP's management. Time and time again, BP was putting things together at the last second with little oversight on the big picture.

BP's internal emails are the most illustrative of the anarchy that reigned in BP's organization:
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"One of BP‘s top cement experts also described ―the typical Halliburton
profile‖ as ―operationally competent and just good enough technically to get by." - Ref. (PDF)
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“Are you going to fire me?” - Ref.
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You seem to love being the victim. Everything is someone else’s fault. You criticize nearly everything we do on the rig but don’t seem to realize that you are responsible for every(thing) we do on the rig.

You seem to think that running is more important that well control.

... (Sims, the only BP engineer with a PE, to John Guide*, - Ref.
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Out of all those emails, though, this pair takes the cake:
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I believe there is a bladder effect on the mud below an annular preventer as we discussed. As we know the pressure differential was approximately 1400-1500 psi across an 18 ¾″ rubber annular preventer, 14.0 SOBM plus 16.0 ppg [pounds per gallon] Spacer in the riser, seawater and SOBM below the annular bladder. Due to a bladder effect, pressure can and will build below the annular bladder due to the differential pressure but cannot flow – the bladder prevents flow, but we see differrential pressure on the other side of the bladder.

Now consider this. The bladder effect is pushing 1400-1500 psi against all of the mud below, we have displaced to seawater from 8,367′ to just below the annular bladder where we expect to have a 2,350 psi negative pressure differential pressure due to a bladder effect we may only have a 850-950 psi negative pressure until we lighten the load in the riser.

When we displaced the riser to seawater, then we truly had a 2,350 psi differential and negative pressure. - Robert Kaluza, BP Night Company Man on the Deepwater Horizon who was on duty when the well blew, explaining the "bladder effect"
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Mike,

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Regards,

Pat - response by Patrick O'Bryan, Drilling VP for BP North America - Ref.
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When everyone was trying to get off the rig to safety, nobody had a knife to cut the painter line that connected the liferaft to the rig. The liferaft was tethered to a sinking ship, nobody could find the safety knife on the raft, and BP's "Strict No-Knife Policy" was the only corporate policy of BP's that actually worked. There have been stabbings offshore (there are some surly characters offshore), but the "Strict No-Knife Policy" is typical big company bullshit that needs to stop. Every time I've been offshore, I've had a knife on hand (Leatherman Wave).

Another thing that's disgusted me: according to the testimony of multiple individuals, the USCG-certified Master on the Horizon told other crewmembers to leave an injured man behind on the rig before he jumped into the waters alone. No way to put it nicely; that was pretty shitty on his part and I have a feeling the Coasties will string his ass up for it.

Fortunately, a few things DID actually work. There were a few individuals who really stuck their neck out, for example, the Chief Mate (who kept one of the lifeboats on the rig until it was full to capacity, despite howling protests of those already inside) and the Chief Electrician (who, along with others, rescued the injured man mentioned above and kept his liferaft from drifting into the fire).

The US-flagged M/V Damon Bankston crew really are heroes. The more and more I read about the incident, the more I'm convinced that if it weren't for their quick response, there would be more than 11 dead. The Damon Bankston also had one INCREDIBLY important tool the Deepwater Horizon lacked: a fast rescue craft. The Deepwater Horizon tagged one of their large, slow, ungainly 75-man lifeboats as their "rescue craft" (in case of man overboard, etc.). The Damon Bankston had a dedicated, quick-launching, high performance (several hundred horsepower in a tiny craft) FRC that was also capable of rescuing incapacitated swimmers in rough waters** (a capability the Deepwater Horizon lacked). Every offshore platform I've ever been on has had a FRC (and all were constructed before the Deepwater Horizon). Now, there are some differences in a platform and a DP-rig, but still, the Horizon SHOULD have been designed with a FRC, in my professional opinion.

The US Coast Guard also blasted the flag-state of the Marshall Islands for lax enforcement of standards (which also turned out to have a few holes in them). The "flags of convenience" (nicknamed "Flags of Corporate Convenience") concept has never really set well with me. What I also don't like is there's been a push to drop Panama, who has slightly increased their regulatory requirements, for countries with even less regulation. I'm especially appalled by the idea of landlocked countries (like Mongolia) regulating merchant ships. The Russians and the Chinese lately seem to like Bolivia and Mongolia for some of their merchant ships. It just doesn't seem right to have a Marshall Islands-flagged ship sitting in US waters, when the ship was had never operated outside US waters and would NEVER operate in Marshall Islands territory. Note there's a USCG-led QUALSHIP initiative to up the standards on Flags of Convenience, but I'm not sure how effective it has been. Why not just use US-flagged drilling vessels (or at least require 30% or so of them be US-flagged)? I can name at least 1 modern US-flagged deepwater drilling rig in operation.

The qualifications of the DNV experts called in to investigate the BOP vs. the qualifications of BP's experts called in to knock the DNV BOP report was interesting. The DNV experts had an incredibly impressive resume. One of the leaders had a PhD in Materials Science and Engineering from Vandy and the other leader worked on the King's Cross Investigation. The King's Cross fire was a fairly standard trash fire that suddenly and unexpectedly flashed over and killed 31 people. The ins and outs of why was new to science (the Trench Effect, related to the Coandă effect) and it was even written up in my Fluid Dynamics textbook in college. It was literally an investigation so thorough it rewrote the textbooks. BP on the other hand put up one guy who had 'a year or two of engineering school before dropping out and working on rigs for 30+ years.' The expert was also a longtime contractor, not an actual BP employee. BP's expert completely flubbed basic materials science questions (that any senior in engineering could answer) to the point where the board stopped asking him questions. The BP expert wasn't a moron and he did have some interesting points about the DNV report, but nothing that undermined the DNV report in any significant way.

The damage thus far from the Moratorium has been greatly exaggerated, but I'll still be waiting to see what happens a few years down the line. A lot of these big deepwater projects have years-long lead times. Also, note that not every permit was actually drilled in the past and there always been a flow and ebb tide with drilling. Somedays, the rig count is high and rig dayrates are on the rise. Sometimes, everyone packs up and heads somewhere else or stacks the rigs in storage. I will say that the biggest benefit of US offshore oil isn't necessarily the jobs or the tax revenue (although those are important), but the effect on the Balance of Payments. Petroleum purchases are a HUGE portion of the US trade deficit and a big drag on the dollar (on the same level as the budget deficit?). Petroleum purchases are so huge, you often see disclaimers like 'non-petroleum trade deficit' in the fine print of charts in the WSJ, etc.

There's a quote in one of my favorite engineering disasters books, Inviting Disaster by Chiles. It goes something like 'operating on the cutting edge of technology is privilege conveyed on high-tech industries and those industries must protect and nourish that trust if they expect to stay in business and not have their franchise closed after too many failures dumped in societies lap.'*** That's a lesson the offshore industry must heed, or face the consequences. More costly errors and near misses cannot continue.

______________
* The de facto leader on the Macondo well. Some video of John Guide testifying here.

** Note that the waters were completely calm the night of the blowout, but the Damon Bankston did have to fish out incapacitated swimmers, a capability the Deepwater Horizon's lifeboats would have been unable to perform alone.

*** It's near the end of the book. I loaned out my copy right now, so I can't nail it word for word at the moment, but I'm sure that's the gist of it.

Lawyers try to make a fool out of an engineer, get Pi on face

Today brought the return of the USCG/BOEMRE Hearings on the loss of the Deepwater Horizon. For an example of what they're going for, check out the Ocean Ranger Report or the Cullen Report [PDF] from the Piper Alpha disaster. Unfortunately, this BOEMRE/USCG investigation, instead of being a technical probing of a failure has become a legal sparing match. I want to focus on one little incident from today's testimony.

Throughout the whole inquiry, the lawyers for the various parties have totally flubbed even minor technical details. There's one BP lawyer in particular who looks like he's never had a single math course beyond Prob Stat 101 that was required for his undergrad degree. Today, there was an exchange between the lead project manager and lead investigator for the DNV BOP report and several of the lawyers. The Times-Pic reported about various "uncertainties" about the massive DNV Report (Volume 1, PDF). I've gone through both volumes and the report stands up pretty strong. There might be a little detail here and there that could be better, but nothing compared to the concerns these lawyers are broaching.

The lawyers then began attacking the credibility of the lead project manager. They asked him if, before the Deepwater Horizon incident, if the lead project manager had ever seen a BOP firsthand. The lead project manager replied no, and the lawyers seized on this as evidence of "government incompetence." What shocked me most of all is the "Times-Picayune Staff" decided to feature this drivel as their "comment of the day" including the claim that Det Norske Veritas, which certifies various marine equipment (including BOP's), knows nothing about BOP's:

To hire an engineering firm that has never "seen or heard of" a BOP to conduct a forenic [sic] investigation on this equipment is rediculous. [sic]

Commenter "edjn50," from Folsom, LA, is obviously a product of Louisiana's woefully underfunded education system.

Do a little Googling and you'll learn that Neil Thompson, the project manager, has extensive experience in several fields and a PhD in Materials Science and Engineering from Vanderbilt. The lead PM and investigator are just the head of a large team, which includes experts in Finite Element Analysis and BOP's.

We'll see how well the DNV report holds up, but these lawyers are obviously trying to do whatever they can to limit their company's legal exposure. The worst incident of the day came from that same idiot BP lawyer who questioned Dr. Thompson on what elastic deformation was. The idiot BP lawyer claimed that "nobody in the oil industry has ever heard of elastic deformation." Fucking dunce! I'm in the oil biz and I learned about it in my sophomore-level Materials Science course. It's on page 117 of my textbook. I can only sympathize with that poor engineer trying to teach bloody English majors mechanical engineering while under oath. Flummoxing your opponent with your total ignorance might be an effective legal strategy, but is no way to run an investigation of an engineering disaster.

Idealized Plastic and Elastic Deformation regions in metals, from Wikipedia

UPDATE- Also, one more thing worthy of interest: Chron article about new BP emails. Note Sims was the only BP engineer who actually had a P.E.

UPDATE 2- Godfrey [Annoying BP lawyer] suggested that nobody in the industry had ever seen such "elastic buckling" of a drill pipe before. But Thompson said it's a commonly understood concept of physics. Note that drill string is called a string precisely because of the elastic nature of the elongated sections when joined together. They hang like a string from the derrick. The elasticity is what allows for directional drilling, for example.

UPDATE 3- Rigzone weighs in on the "unqualified opinion." More english-major foot-in-mouth.

Also: more Gulf of Mexico concerns. Petrobras, which had an interesting kablewey 10 years ago, has some problems on the first FPSO in the Gulf. Note that I've been concerned in the past at how it would handle a hurricane.

UPDATE 4- Transcripts posted. One of the investigators worked on the King's Cross investigation. Very impressive. BP's rebuttal witness, despite some 40 years of BOP operational experience, flubbed some basic materials science questions. Not very impressive.

Alvin's last journey

To the area around the final resting place of the Deepwater Horizon...

National Academy of Engineering Preliminary Report on the loss of the Deepwater Horizon

NAE Report (PDF)

Excellent report. I don't have as much time as I'd like to go through it in detail, unfortunately.

A couple quick notes:
* I like how it emphasizes the importance of the delicate fracture gradient to the cementing operation. Any idiot could throw cement down a hole, but with this setup, too much cement (too heavy) would fracture the formation, lose the cement, and not seal the hole. Too little cement, no seal in the hole, boom (what happened). Hitting it right on the nose was what a well engineered cementing plan was supposed to do.
* Personnel shifting around so much is a sign that a company doesn't take something seriously. I watched the engineers testify on CSPAN back in August and I'll say that there was at least 1 engineer who looked like he knew what he was doing (also, the only one who had a P.E.). Unfortunately, he was only on the job for about 2 weeks before the well blew. Whoops.
* Training. OTJ isn't going to cut it anymore for personnel running half-billion dollar assets, drilling $100 million wells, with tens of billions of dollars in consequences for mistakes.


Update: Gullfaks C Report Finished by Statoil. Blowout averted by "sheer luck". After overbalanced drilling caused a poorly-constructed casing to crack, the well lost mud, losing control. Cuttings plugging the production screen was the only thing that stopped another blowout.

Transocean Safety Rap

Story and video here. Filmed on the Deepwater Horizon in 2009.

"They're all dead"

H/T AZ.

Great Macondo Blowout reporting from an unlikely source...

... A video game show:

Video Game - E3 2010 - AOTS Exclusive

Beats some of the stuff the big guys have done.

Yet more studying...

Yet more studying...
Originally uploaded by Noladishu

I've done lots of trips to Rue for coffee and studying.

Well, I've put in my application to LAPELS to take the P.E. Exam in October. I'm still awaiting word that the application is 100% complete. They go through the forms with a fine-tooth comb. They give you an extra month after the initial due date to make sure the application is complete.

Next, I'll have to register with NCEES. That's the national board that proctors the actual exam. They have a $150 fee. One thing I just realized is there has been a rule change. Now, when you register in July, you have to pick which subset for the afternoon you want to do on the exam in October. Sort of nuts, if you ask me. It used to be that you could mix and match problems based off what you felt confident or at least you could flip through the books and see what the problems looked like first. Not anymore.

As a MechE, I have 3 choices for the afternoon section:
HVAC
Machine Design
Thermofluids

Machine Design is probably the "easiest", but as I've worked problems, I've found it's entirely too easy to make mistakes on those types of problems. The P.E. Exam is now 100% multiple choice with no credit for just missing a sign or something like that.

HVAC is surprisingly quick. I like that I can get an answer (right or wrong) in a reasonable amount of time for just about any question.

Thermofluids is the closest to what I do at work. It's probably what I'm going to take on the exam, primarily because of my familiarity with it. The disadvantage is that there can be some extremely complicated 15-state thermodynamics problems and even the easiest heat transfer problems take forever to do.

I have to pick what I do in October in July.

-------------
More P.E. news:
Professional engineers provide the needed link between industry and public welfare
NCEES response to the Deepwater Horizon incident. Note that Mark Hafle, BP's engineer that designed the well, is not a P.E.

Tony Hayward Goes Before Congress Tomorrow

Good luck. You're going to need it.

Don't forget to come prepared.

Congress' letter to Tony Hayward. Well worth a read for all the details.

A couple more things to check out:

David Hammer has another fantastic article in today's Times-Pic. He's been a master of presenting the facts in an accurate, understandable way. I can't tell you how frustrated I get when I see some talking head on TV talking about how the well was in water that's "5,000 cubic feet deep" {facepalm}. Just about every article Hammer has cranked out has been great.

GQ Magazine: Boom. Checking in on a few of the lives effected by the explosion, including checking up on the families of the 11. Worth a read, especially the end.

Also, keep reading The Oil Drum for the most accurate, objective reporting on the spill.

How to fix the Gusher

Hire MacGyver:

And yes, I watched every single episode of MacGyver multiple times growing up...