Ruthless cost-cutting leads to corner-cutting leads to disaster. TP has the latest on the cause of the BP oil disaster:
Today, the chief executives of the five big oil companies “” including BP’s Tony Hayward “” are going to testify before the House Energy and Commerce Committee. According to an e-mail released by that Committee yesterday, a BP drilling engineer warned that the Deepwater Horizon oil rig was a “nightmare well” that had caused the company problems in the past. The e-mail came just six days before the well exploded:
More than five weeks before the disaster, the Deepwater rig was hit by several sudden pulsations of gas called “kicks” and a pipe had become stuck in the well. In fact, the well had to be shut down because of “one intense kick of natural gas.” The blowout preventer was discovered to be leaking fluid three separate times. “As early as June 2009, BP engineers had expressed concerns in internal documents about using certain casings for the well because they violated the company’s safety and design guidelines.”
This is a Think Progress repost.
Related Posts:
- The three causes of BP’s Titanic oil disaster: Recklessness, Arrogance, and Hubris
- Stupak stunner: Oil well’s blowout preventer had leaks, dead battery, design flaws, “How can a device that has 260 failure modes be considered fail-safe?”
Previous in TP Climate Progress
Language Intelligence: Lessons on persuasion from Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln, and Lady Gaga
We know from numerous other pieces of evidence that BP failed in multiple ways – both technical failures and managerial failures – in the days and weeks before the blowout. The three links in the second paragraph of this post legitimately highlight a number of such failures.
The email being highlighted in this post, however, adds nothing. The writer starts by noting that they might change the type of liner to be used during an upcoming operation, and that both the original and the proposed liners satisfy the assumption of a ‘trapped annular’. The engineer notes that he is making a judgment of the satisfaction of that assumption, and is asking for corroboration or criticism of that judgment. In the next sentence he notes the urgency of the need for feedback. Finally, he expresses frustration with how much extra work this well has entailed, and how chaotic their work environment has become because of the extra work and urgency.
Is the word ‘nightmare’ especially catchy for quoting in a news article or blog? How many times have you heard someone describe a chaotic situation (e.g. an infant who’s difficult to settle, breaking camp during a rainstorm, or an all-night editing session to meeting an inflexible deadline) as a ‘nightmare’?
Is there more evidence related to this particular email that would make it more relevant? If so, you don’t reference it.
Having said all that, 99% of the posts on Climate Progress are excellent — thanks for the great blog. I particularly appreciate that you cover both sides of the debate — climate change might turn out to be extremely problematic and disruptive, or it might be truly catastrophic.
Thanks,
Craig P.
Matthew Daly’s AP article conflates the rig and the well. This is incorrect. The memo calls the well, not the rig, a nightmare.
They were behind schedule and under pressure to get the well in. I think that is what this email refers to. This pressure to finish, I think, directly led to the explosion, rig collapse, well blowout, the death of 11 people and untold environmental destruction.
It’s useful information helping to confirm the emerging picture of a headstrong corporation over-ruling their apparently more knowledgeable and apparently more responsible contractor(s).
Unregulated capitalism has a few problems, which are becoming more and more apparent.
Unregulated capitalism can’t do most things except at the very lowest possible price, for example. The result is that things are done cheaper and faster in a bigger and bigger hurry until the system simply breaks down. Capitalism is also very good at undercutting and evading regulations, bribing regulators, and innovating around regulations.
BP is in a mature industry, and was apparently very expert at lean management and cost cutting, since they became the largest oil producer in the U.S.. In mature industries, I think the only way to cut costs is to cut corners, since there is no rapid development of technology to rapidly improve productivity.
Our energy corporations cannot provide us energy at other than the lowest possible cost. Since fossil fuels represent stored concentrated solar energy, stored as chemical potential energy, and since solar energy is a diffuse energy source, concentrated fossil energy tends to be cheaper than diffuse, directly harvested solar energy.
So, the inability of unregulated capitalism to provide goods and services at other than the lowest possible cost is killing the biosphere, IMO, through global warming. Even though the total heat burden imposed on the biosphere by the CO2 produced by burning a ton of fossil fuels can be tens of thousands of times the heat of combustion of the fossil fuel, unregulated capitalism cannot stop burning the stuff. And the wealth of the our huge corporations (if ExxonMobil was a country, it would be the fifth or sixth largest carbon emitting country on earth) are now preventing the public from engaging in the necessary regulation.
Perhaps the answer is to make capitalism responsible for the true social and environmental cost of the goods and services that they provide, through the entire lifetime of their products, and into the future. Such a system would result in the immediate nationalization of the energy corporations, and the seizure of the wealth of the major stockholders, to help undo a small part of the damage to the climate that they have done.
Anyway, it’s good information, and it’s useful to know the mindset of the engineers working on the Deep Water Horizon. Too bad they weren’t listened to.