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Page added on April 20, 2015
Oil Rigs’ Biggest Risk: Human Error
In a third-floor room of an office building here, a cluster of equipment mounted with dials, wheels and screens mimics the controls of a deep-water oil rig so workers can practice reacting to dangerous situations.
BP PLC set up the drilling simulator at its campus two years ago and designed a program that not only trains workers to respond to nightmare scenarios but also tests how they perform under stress. During drills, BP says, a behavioral psychologist takes notes.
The company has made a special study of preventing disasters—it controlled operations aboard the Deepwater Horizon rig when it exploded in 2010, five years ago Monday, killing 11 and unleashing the worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history. Oil companies and the government have since overhauled their approach to offshore drilling; regulators are still rolling out new rules, including a proposal last week that includes new standards for equipment to seal off oil wells. After the Deepwater Horizon’s blowout preventer failed, it took 87 days to stanch the oil flow.
But government and industry officials continue to wrestle with a problem investigators say was at the heart of the 2010 Gulf oil spill: human error.
The mistakes that led to the disaster began months before the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded, investigators found, but poor decisions by BP and its contractors sealed the rig’s fate—and their own. On the evening of April 20, 2010, crew members misinterpreted a crucial test and realized too late that a dangerous gas bubble was rising through the well. The gas blasted out of the well and ignited on the rig floor, setting it ablaze.
“The crew could have prevented the blowout—or at least significantly reduced its impact—if they had reacted in a timely and appropriate manner,” according to the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling.
ENLARGE BP has stepped up training with its simulator in Houston. And government and industry have created a system that is supposed to improve the quality of decisions made on offshore drilling facilities. But the new regulatory system has yet to show measurable improvements in safety practices, regulators acknowledge.
“It’s safer, but I would also say there’s more work to be done,” says Brian Salerno, director of the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, which was formed by the Department of Interior after the Deepwater Horizon accident. In particular, he says that the safety program is based on industry standards that need updating so that, for example, they address unlikely but potentially catastrophic accidents like the one in 2010.
The bureau’s program, known as Safety and Environmental Management Systems, adopts a range of practices in a rule written by the American Petroleum Institute, which sets standards for the industry and serves as its powerful lobbying arm.
Under the program, companies must ensure their contractors have written safety protocols, train employees to inspect and maintain equipment, and have procedures for swapping out personnel and responding to changing conditions, among other mandates.
In 2013, offshore drillers in the U.S. were required to begin filing audits of their safety programs. Last August, a government review of the audits found that many consisted of checklists on whether companies complied with the requirements, without elaborating on how the program was being implemented. Regulators also cited reports of companies performing multiple audits to avoid having to disclose any failings.
“There was a lack of evidence that the effectiveness of the various programs was routinely measured or assessed,” the government found.
Starting in June, the plans must undergo independent audits from examiners approved by an industry group called the Center for Offshore Safety, which is part of the American Petroleum Institute. The government says it plans to review the center’s protocols and observe audits carried out by the teams it certifies.
By some measures, offshore drilling has become safer. Only one worker died offshore last year, the lowest number of fatalities since before the Deepwater Horizon explosion. There hasn’t been another major spill.
Since the lifting of a moratorium in late 2010, the pace of offshore drilling has picked up, with regulators granting 49 permits last year for new deep-water wells.
BP remains active in the Gulf but has sold off operations globally to pay for spill-related costs that have reached $43.5 billion. The London-based company, which pleaded guilty to criminal charges in 2012, has initiated a series of reforms to win back the confidence of the public, governments and industry partners. For example, from its Houston offices it now monitors drilling in the Gulf in real-time, a practice regulators want to require for all offshore drillers.
And the company has also developed its own simulator course, Applied Deepwater Well Control, from which more than 400 people have matriculated. At least some members of every crew working for BP in the Gulf’s deep waters take this training, including contractors.
The safety bureau, spun out of a predecessor agency in an effort to focus its efforts on drilling risks, has nearly doubled the number of inspectors in the Gulf of Mexico since 2010.
Still, current and former regulators worry about the potential for complacency as the memory of Deepwater Horizon fades, along with the impact of lower oil prices. At around $56 a barrel, U.S. crude prices are about a third lower than in 2010.
“History teaches us that when cuts are made in any industry, the first things to go are safety and training—always, every industry,” says Michael Bromwich, who oversaw the regulatory overhaul after the disaster before stepping down as head of the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement in 2011 in 2011.
Charlie Williams, who runs the Center for Offshore Safety, says that companies aren’t going to cut corners in safety. “Instead of doing things cheaper and faster, they just decide what they’re not going to do,” he says. “They just do less projects.”
BP echoes that industry sentiment on safety. “For those who were here during the spill, they know that the company survived a near-death experience,” says Geoff Morrell, BP’s senior vice president for communications and external affairs. “This never escapes you.”
7 Comments on "Oil Rigs’ Biggest Risk: Human Error"
rockman on Mon, 20th Apr 2015 6:56 am
In many ways a good piece but let me expand on THE critical factor they skirt: conflict of interest.
“On the evening of April 20, 2010, crew members misinterpreted a crucial test and realized too late that a dangerous gas bubble was rising through the well.” That isn’t exactly true. Some on board actually felt very strongly the “critical test” may have failed. Let me set the scene so everyone one can clearly grasp the true conflict. In the TV room (where all group safety meetings are held) that cement test was discussed. One of those who disagreed that the test was valid was rebuked by a senior drilling hand…a hand whose job evaluation was weighted heavily on how much cost over runs his ops incurred. The response from the other hand: “Well, I suppose that’s why we have blowout preventers”. Some may recall that statement from the trial. It was not a casual point being made: it was an official (why it was said in front of the meeting and not behind closed doors) “F*ck you…I’m not going to take the blame and will burn your ass if the situation goes south”. I’ve seen fist fights nearly breakout over such statements. I was once had my consulting contract terminated for making the same statement.
Forget all the chatter about the cause being the cement failure. Cement fails all the time on wells. It’s so common the keep the equipment used to fix bad cmt jobs on the rig 24/365.
This is where the story gets much worse. The well would not have blowout even with a cmt failure if the well had not been put into an “underbalanced condition”. All wells encounter high reservoir pressures when drilling. That’s one of the reasons they use weighted drilling mud. The weight (and thus the pressure) of the column of that mud will exceed the pressure of the reservoir and thus keep them from flowing into the well bore. And this is where we move from human error to a very poor COMPANY APPROVED procedure: some of the weighted drilling mud was replaced with much lighter water. As a result the pressure of the column of fluid in the well bore was less than the reservoir pressure. Even then had the cmt failed the well would not have blown out if the fluid column weighed enough. In my 40 years not once have I seen any well at this stage of drilling be put into an unbalanced condition. I’ll skip the details of why they did it but bottom line it was to save money. Again back to the conflict of interest.
And now the story gets unbelievably worse. If some hands thought it was dangerous why didn’t they closely “monitor the well for flow”?
This will sound ridiculous but how do you monitor for flow: you’ll normally be pumping the mud down the drill pipe with it flowing back up on the outside of the pipe back to the mud tanks. And how do you check for flow to tell if oil/NG/salt water is flowing into the bottom of the well bore: you turn the pups off and watch to see if the mud is still flowing out of the well. IOW a 10 yo child could do the job. Of course they didn’t have a 10 you kid checking for flow: they had experienced hands with sophisticated monitoring equipment on board.
And that’s what so difficult to accept. For the well to blowout the entire 12,000’ column of drill mud was pushed out of the well back into the mud tanks. And no one was watching. But someone didn’t notice but didn’t interpret the situation correctly. A boat captain was having drill mud offloaded from the rig to his storage tanks. He radioed the rig telling them to stop pumping because his tanks were almost full. The rig told him that couldn’t be right because they had not pumped that much mud. The excess mud was that pushed out of the well ahead of the rising oil/NG. And still, with the initial concern about the cmt and the wellbeing underbalanced, no one put 2 and 2 together.
But having been there I know why the well wasn’t being monitored properly: they were in the shutdown phase. It tends to be a mad scramble for the hands to rig down equipment, secure excess materials, finish reports and, most important, arrange for their trip back to shore. There were several hands whose specific responsibilities included check the well for flow. They obviously didn’t do their job. Had they noticed the well unloading mud they would have shut it in and very likely prevented the blowout. Or at worse sent the oil/NG to the flare stack to be burned off. An unsettling event but it’s exactly why they have diverters and flare stacks.
And yes: the BOP failed. Well, dah. BOP failure is not that uncommon. It’s a complicated piece of equipment that can be subjected to tremendous stress. Those of us who work on rigs just smile when someone says “BOP’s are the last line of defense”. We all know that in reality BOP’s are the worse line of defense. If you have to activate a BOP you’ve already screwed up big time somehow.
wildbourgman on Mon, 20th Apr 2015 9:05 am
The Dept. of the Interior, BSEE inspectors and regulators and any other regulating body have no clue how to fix the problems we have in the Gulf of Mexico. We have the exact same problems we had before on some projects and a better mouse trap or another piece of paperwork doesn’t fix anything.
We have some really bad and/or inexperienced people in areas of supervision, if anything the experience and competence level is much worse than ever.
Davy on Mon, 20th Apr 2015 9:06 am
Rock, great story and well explained
rockman on Mon, 20th Apr 2015 10:37 am
Wildman – As far as matters getting better: I’ve yet to find any specific new rule that forbids an operator from ever temporarily abandoning an offshore well in an underbalanced condition just as BP did. That would seem like an obvious change in regs to both od us. Have you?
This weekend I perforated a well. I pulled about 600′ of fluid off of it first to put it in an underbalanced condition by 600 psi. I always shoot underbalanced. But I also had a 10,000 psi wellhead on it and was prepared to handle it flowing. If I ever intentionally put a well into an underbalanced condition (except when completing) I would be fired on the spot. And yet that was an MANAGEMENT APPROVED procedure on the BP well. That doesn’t qualify as “human error” in my book. It’s reckless stupidity. And I don’t know if the feds still allow it. If a “dumb geologist’ understands this then you would think a govt engineer would…don’t you?
wildbourgman on Mon, 20th Apr 2015 6:21 pm
Rock, all I’m going to say is that I had a pretty good response going and then my reply deleted itself on this company laptop. So screw it!
rockman on Tue, 21st Apr 2015 9:20 am
Wildman – No problamo. I know that frustration all to well. I try to remember to do write my posts in Word first just in case I lose a post. But I have a pretty good idea of what you had to say. Unfortunately it won’t be too long before the next accident and we can beat on the subject again.
Apneaman on Tue, 21st Apr 2015 3:00 pm
This should make arctic drilling even more exciting.
………………………………
currents trigger methane release from arctic
http://www.reportingclimatescience.com/news-stories/article/currents-trigger-methane-release-from-arctic.html