Would Like To Thank The Oil Industry For Doing Such Great Work

[tonyr]

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/NaturalHa...ew.php?id=43768

[Guest Sundancefisher]

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/NaturalHa...ew.php?id=43768

 

Yes...an accident is an accident. I am sure they did not intend to kill 11 people and have dozens of kids without fathers. I am sure BP is not laughing. I also am pretty sure that the entire oil industry is not a working interest owner in that well also.

 

Very unfortunate.

 

Did you know the most toxic substance carried on our roadways today is? It is coca cola syrup.

[LynnF]

Hey Tony,

 

When you're ready to give up your car, the heat in your house and the meals on your table, let the oil industry know and they'll quit drilling and ergo stop having these unfortunate accidents.

 

Let's see who can come up with something unique and not repetitive to say to an old argument and future thread that is going to end in a closure by the mods....I got nothing right now

[reevesr1]

Even I can withstand such a poorly presented troll.

 

And I would be willing to bet I'm the only one around here who has fished that area several times. The Breton Island Chain is one of the finest fisheries anywhere I have ever been, even after 50 yrs or so of offshore drilling.

[Castuserraticus]

Did you know the original method of finding oil was natural surface seeps? This is true in the Gulf and all over the world.

[Guest Sundancefisher]

Even I can withstand such a poorly presented troll.

 

And I would be willing to bet I'm the only one around here who has fished that area several times. The Breton Island Chain is one of the finest fisheries anywhere I have ever been, even after 50 yrs or so of offshore drilling.

 

Just stop it Rick! I hate the fact that you keep bringing up fishing in the gulf. When are we going to get a group together and go fishing down there

 

Did they loose a bunch of fish in the cold like Florida did? We need Dorado, tuna, snook, tarpon, redfish and speckled trout.

 

God I love that warm water fishing...

[jksnijders]

 

 

 

They certainly planned to have a blowout, sink a 600 million dollar platform to the bottom (overtop of their subsea controls I'm sure) kill 11, seriously injure many more, and now have the wild well to control, (where its really easy to see what's going on with it..) as well as the cleanup. Might I add the 500 thousand a day to drill the well to that point, (which they may actually end up ruining with the kill operation..) and who knows what other costs to yet be determined. But unless you ride a bike everywhere and burn wood to heat your house you're part of the problem, not the solution. Tragic environmentally for sure, as is the crew loss, but if you think wells like that are drilled in a haphazard fashion, put down the Elmer's...

[CTownTBoyz]

Perhaps people would be a little more understanding of these types of accidents if the industries in question were a little more prepared for these incidents. We were told for several days now that there was no leaking as a result of this accident (by the US Coast Guard in fact), and this recent report states '42,000 gallons per day' have been leaking.

 

The environment, families, and American tax payers will pick up the bill (metaphorically and literally speaking) for a lot of the damage.

 

People’s contempt for the oil industry is not unfounded. The Exxon Valdez, The Piper Alpha disaster, and more closer to home the recent claim by Syncrude that they are not responsible for their neglect of maintaining equipment at their tailing ponds (if they'd admit they made a mistake and paid the fine I would think people in general would have much more respect for Syncrude). Or statements such as Caustuserraticus "Did you know the original method of finding oil was natural surface seeps? This is true in the Gulf and all over the world.".......you're not actually comparing a human disaster / spill of this magnitude to the discovery of oil in the Gulf are you?

 

The oil industry could do some things to improve their image and safety but more often than not they wait for things to happen (then fix the problem....sometimes). For instance, there has been recommendations by several outside parties that oil tankers be double-hulled so if they run aground they reduce the risk of spillage; this hasn't happened....too expensive for the wealthiest industry in the world?

 

I don't think anyone can deny that changes have to be made for the health and safety of all living entities. Changes are being made no doubt, but to suggest enough is being done is pure rubbish.

[trailhead]

This is about the oldest and deadest horse that has ever been beat. It comes down to someone screwed up on the rig, no one plans to have a catastrophe. If you are reading this thread you are a contributor to the whole, and to make broad based statements and generalized finger pointing is very hypocritical. Whenever the price of gasoline goes up everyone complains, one of the reasons for the increase in the price of oil is the fact that it costs more to produce a barrel now, in discounted dollars, than it did 40 years ago. One of the biggest reasons for the this, is the increased environmental cost of operation. If every tanker that shipped oil was double hulled the cost would be borne by the consumer, you and me. If you want to see some really wild tailings pond go visit an open pit mine, coal, copper, gold, there's some toxicity for you to see. What it all comes down to is the fact that oil & gas is a really easy target for the environuts, it's everywhere and rich and bad and big and dirty and evil and.....I've said enough.

[jonn]

This is about the oldest and deadest horse that has ever been beat. It comes down to someone screwed up on the rig, no one plans to have a catastrophe. If you are reading this thread you are a contributor to the whole, and to make broad based statements and generalized finger pointing is very hypocritical. Whenever the price of gasoline goes up everyone complains, one of the reasons for the increase in the price of oil is the fact that it costs more to produce a barrel now, in discounted dollars, than it did 40 years ago. One of the biggest reasons for the this, is the increased environmental cost of operation. If every tanker that shipped oil was double hulled the cost would be borne by the consumer, you and me. If you want to see some really wild tailings pond go visit an open pit mine, coal, copper, gold, there's some toxicity for you to see. What it all comes down to is the fact that oil & gas is a really easy target for the environuts, it's everywhere and rich and bad and big and dirty and evil and.....I've said enough.

 

I couldn't have said it better myself! Besides, if you actually worked in the field, you would know that the oilfield has made leaps and bounds over the last decade towards safety for both the workers and the environment! Things don't happen over night and it takes a long time to beat the mentality out of an industry that has been around for more than a century.

[reevesr1]

Piper Alpha was in 1986, Valdez in 1988 (I think). So we are getting close to 25 yrs for Piper Alpha, and over 20 for Valez. There have been incidents between then, but those are the last biggies.

 

In between, I have no way to estimate how many wells have been drilled, worked over, and abandoned. And how many billions of gallons of oil have been transported between then and now. So the overall safety record is a bit better than the masses are led to believe.

 

One of my jobs in Houston was Risk Analysis, reduction and mitigation techniques. We do this on equipment, processes, procedures, safety, you name it. Lots of brainpower goes in to trying to figure out ways to minimize risk in all ops. But one of the things you learn is no matter how well you plan and design for safe operations, there is always residual risk. Something you didn't (and never from lack of trying) plan for, or did plan for, put plans in place to avoid and it happened anyway. So you find out why, learn from it and use what you learned to stop it from happening again. We are getting better at it, but as hard as we may try, risk will never be eliminated.

 

As to planning for cleanup on something like this. That's a great idea (and I say that with no sarcasm at all). But how? There have been literally thousands of wells drilled in the GOM without issue. So do we keep a fleet of almost completely unused equipment ready to clean up a spill always ready to go? How? Who pays? (oh, the consumer in the end). Who is in charge. Do we keep a rig always ready to drill a relief well? Who does that? These rigs are 1/2 a BILLION dollars apiece. Who maintains it? It is, unfortunately, economically unfeasible, as unpalatable as that may seem.

 

This reminds me of people wondering why New Orleans did not keep a fleet of buses (and drivers!) ready to evacuate everyone in case of a hurricane. Fantastic idea, but utterly impossible to implement. Harsh, but true.

 

The sad thing is people died in this. But in my career (spanning 20 yrs) less and less people are dying in my industry. We are constantly improving. We do it because it makes good business sense, sometimes because we are made to. But whether people want to believe it or not, we also do it because we want our people to go home every day.

[jack]

I think the facetious "thanking the industry" is just that, facetious. However, one cannot deny that the oil industry has, over the past several years, established more and more high risk drilling sites in order to supply the unflagging demand for higher priced domestic oil. Deep sea drilling is high risk and the deeper that drilling goes the more risky it gets.

 

With respect, comparing historical spills with current deep sea operations on the Gulf is like comparing the automobile accident rate between 1910 and 2010. There is no comparison. The explosion and fire was caused by a massive pressure surge from a well 1900 metres below the surface, the result is a leak, that is so far, unstoppable, 11 presumed deaths and a billion dollar pile of junk on the bottom. This, just when the industry had finally recovered to pre-Katrina production levels.

 

Current plans are to drill in even deeper water, thereby exponentially increasing the risk of massive, uncontrollable leaks. Taking advances in technology into account, this is not real good news for the Gulf.

 

Why is industry funding such risk? Demand. Dependence on oil and because the price of that oil makes the risk worthwhile, period. The current, ever-increasing spill is 3 miles from the Louisiana coast and the proposal now is to burn it off, which can be between 55% and 95% successful. Except, of course, that it takes hydrocarbons off the water and puts them in the air. Mitigation in terms of slowing or stopping the leak is weeks or months away.

 

This event does not make the future of the Gulf look very bright. The fact of the matter is, they are developing production there because it's the only "domestic source" left and that, now obvious, high risk production will continue. Because the demand and price is there.

j

 

[reevesr1]

Current plans are to drill in even deeper water, thereby exponentially increasing the risk of massive, uncontrollable leaks. Taking advances in technology into account, this is not real good news for the Gulf.

 

Been drilling ultradeep for several years now (I started building tools for 5000+ foot water depth in 1998). To think one incident (the first major one I think) is going to change this trend is likely knee jerk. It may impact it in the very short term (and partly because one of the ships to do this is now gone), but in the long term these are some of the last big oilfields left. They will get drilled, economics will demand it. Like any big incident, changes to industry practice will come based on what the final findings of this incident are.

 

But Jack, to say the risk has increased "exponentially" is misleading. They don't exponentially increase the chances, or we would have had many more of these in the last 10 yrs or so.

 

[jack]

Hopefully, you are right, but as drilling distances increase, so does risk. With the increase in the number of deep sea wells in the Gulf, the risk is even higher. Will "technology" improve the risk? The next 5 years will probably tell us.

Is thinking "Ohhh crap, what are we getting ourselves into?" after this, admittedly, one of a kind incident, so far, a "knee-jerk reaction", or is it simply questioning our future dependency on oil and the lengths to which we go to to secure a domestic supply, in an objective manner ?

j

[bigbowtrout]

Hey Rick,

 

From what I hear they were in the middle of cementing the hole when it came back up. Do they have the blow out valves in place during cementing or is that something they do at the end of that process? And if they are in place could the pressure be so great that it could blow out the blow out valve?

 

 

[reevesr1]

Hopefully, you are right, but as drilling distances increase, so does risk. With the increase in the number of deep sea wells in the Gulf, the risk is even higher. Will "technology" improve the risk? The next 5 years will probably tell us.

Is thinking "Ohhh crap, what are we getting ourselves into?" after this, admittedly, one of a kind incident, so far, a "knee-jerk reaction", or is it simply questioning our future dependency on oil and the lengths to which we go to to secure a domestic supply, in an objective manner ?

j

 

Well, we are already 10 yrs or so into ultradeep water exploration/developments, all over the world, with this incident being the first. So the safety record was very good to this point. Nobody talks about that, only how bad this incident is. Of course technology lessens the risk, though as I said, can never take it to 0. And while it is certainly valid to question future dependency on oil, the other harsh reality is there is nothing currently to replace it.

 

My only real issue was your hyperbolic use of the term exponential (a little math humor there). Exponential means that the risk would be increasing in an increasing manner, which is certainly not true. I'm not sure the risk is actually higher for a deepwater well than it is for a land well, but the consequences of an incident are obviously much (though not exponentially) greater due to the difficulty in remediation.

 

 

 

[jack]

With the past year being a very low incidence rate of hurricanes(theoretically attributed to El Nino) and the increase in the number of "ultra-deep" production, I would submit that whether my expressed comments are hyperbole or not is yet to be determined.

j

[jonn]

Hey Rick,

 

From what I hear they were in the middle of cementing the hole when it came back up. Do they have the blow out valves in place during cementing or is that something they do at the end of that process? And if they are in place could the pressure be so great that it could blow out the blow out valve?

 

You drill with a set of B.O.P.'S (blow out preventer's) in place. The issue with cement jobs is that after you've pumped the cement you pump a sealed plug right behind it, which set's in whats called a float. The issue with the getting gas to surface during a cement job is once the plug is dropped you have no real well control. Because once the plug hits the float you no longer have a bottoms up circulation. You could go through your choke set up and try to surface kill the well, but the harsh reality of this is it rarely works. The real problem with cement jobs is that you have to thin back your mud in order to do one. If the drilling fluid viscosity is to high then the cement will channel through the mud, giving you a bunk cement job. So during the processes of thinning back your mud you lose it's weight caring properties, allowing the formation gases to enter the well bore!

 

As far as off shore drilling being more dangerous than land rigs, it's just not true. Land rigs are way more western due to the fact that there is less people monitoring them. The reality is a blow out is dangerous no matter where it is!

[reevesr1]

With the past year being a very low incidence rate of hurricanes(theoretically attributed to El Nino) and the increase in the number of "ultra-deep" production, I would submit that whether my expressed comments are hyperbole or not is yet to be determined.

j

 

I'm pretty sure most (if not all) of these are subsea tie-ins (multiple wells tied in on the seabed), which greatly reduces exposure to hurricanes. It isn't that rough at 5000 ft.

[reevesr1]

Chris,

BOPs are at the seabed on these wells. And they would have been in place. I defer to angryjohn about cementing ops. Not my forte.

 

But I will comment on what John said about land rigs vs. offshore rigs. It would be difficult to convey the difference in planning for a deepwater drilling job vs a land job. The planning for this well would have started years in advance. Mock-ups, full system integration tests of every system being run, detailed procedures for everything, risk assessments, failure mode analysis, walk throughs, monstrous quaility control plans, etc. etc. In a land operation, one engineer might have 10 rigs. Offshore? One rig might have 100 engineers involved in the planning alone when all the different services are taken into account. Just my small piece had several engineers working on it. And an exponential (to continue a theme) number of technicians!

 

We received a tender once to build a piece of gear for an offshore rig. The tender was 900 pages long.

[TerryH]

Excellent and informative discussion -- thank you to those of you with expertise in the area.

 

Re the word "exponential," it is probably the most misused word next to "sustainable." Anyway, based on the proper mathematical definition of the term, if the risk was growing exponentially, the rate of growth in risk would be proportional to the current level of risk (remember your first year calculus?). This is clearly not the case with regard to the current topic, whether land or offshore drilling. Terry

[jksnijders]

Things can go south in a big hurry, as this vid shows.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[trailhead]

That's a pretty cool video, though not a blow-out, they're taking a "kick" which basically is like plunging a toilet, only in reverse. The formation fluid gets vacuumed into the wellbore, which temporarily causes the formation pressure to overcome the hydrostatic pressure. So the well burps up. I saw a derrickhand get burned doing a trip like the one in the video. Don't smoke on the monkeyboard. I was on a rig that blewout, I wasn't too afraid, though I passed a lot of guys that were. They managed to put out the fire and everyone was okay.

[jack]

I'm pretty sure most (if not all) of these are subsea tie-ins (multiple wells tied in on the seabed), which greatly reduces exposure to hurricanes. It isn't that rough at 5000 ft.

 

I was referring to the actively operating rigs in the path of hurricanes. I know they're "on top".

j

 

[Ricinus]

The trouble with oil spills is that while they may be few and far between, they have huge environmental consequences. As it is impossible to make the drilling risk-free, should we allow it in environmentally sensitive areas or in areas where errors would have dire consequences?

 

Regards Mike