found this in the archives, of this thread<sure miss the cm1.> QUOTE=Corky;33137]Interesting this came up. I was asking a friend who is a cement engineer for schlumberger & has been on that side for the last 20-odd years some of the same questions just the other day. I think all 3 of the major cement companies now offer ZoneSeal or the equivalent in a slurry which they inject with nitrogen gas to obtain certain properties (cheap & fast setting mostly, but in my understanding it has a much lower strength). Anyway, what came back from my cementing buddy was:
[I][I][I]"From the cementing side, they really screwed the pooch on decision making. Failure of the primary abandonment plugs is one thing & is a fairly common occurrence, but to just continue with the ops like the issue would work itself out is crazy. The plug they set to abandon the well which was the nitrogen foam cement (Halli calls it “Zone Seal”) was a complete departure from industry standards. That type of cement slurry is used only as a filler cement around conductors and surface casings. It is cheap and has a low weight to avoid fracturing weak formations. It would be crazy to try to abandon a well with that especially when you know that the primary plugs have failed and gas is in play which was obvious from a glance at the last 2 hrs of well data. They should have gone with some sort of gas-tight slurry and at a density that offered enough strength to withstand some serious pressure from below. The only advantage with the Zone Seal is the quick setting time which reduces the WOC time. It seems BP put the budget in the driver’s seat on that one and it ended up costing 11 people their lives.
It will be interesting to see what all the fallout produces. Our industry has had a run of good luck for years so short cuts have become frighteningly commonplace. If you test the BOP and choke manifold and find leaks, they book you for non productive time, which only promotes the habit of being less than thorough when testing equipment. Punishing good workmanship needs to stop because in the long run it leads to catastrophes like this one. Maybe something good will come from all this and we can get back to best practices".
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Hope that helps some. Seems like all the info that is slowly coming out certainly supports a scenario where there were several mitigating factors which all combined to cause another industry-changing incident. Seems to me I remember reading something re BP requesting & being granted a variance on the well plan, but I think that just dealt with displacing with SW prior to setting the final plug rather than anything to do with using a different slurry. Anyone know exactly what the variance actually applied to?[/QUOTE]