Time Out Greetings, Gent. For all of you , who don’t have a clue about oil and Gas Industry, take a peek at the Expro Well Testing Services,website, and you will be so amazed of this technology. A picture says a thousand words,“applause to all of you ,” now you may tune back to your scheduled program…<smile>
Hi Alf:
“I’ve worked with ROV’s for more years than I care to remember, I know how they work and how they set themselves up or align themsleves when doing any work.”
Would it be possible to orient the ROV so that the camera view we get would make a tilted object appear vertical? That would certainly make for a disoriented ROV operator but is it possible?
Its too bad we don’t have a guaranteed vertical object beside the BOP to use as a reference point.
[QUOTE=shahhrs;37125]I think confusion that reigns here for many days has to do with general question of culture? how does the company’s or for that matter our country’s culture manifest it self.
The record of BP before the current CEO is beyond doubt dismal in terms of safety. BP has acknowledged that they had major problems before 2007. Various investigations pointed this out and BP agreed to it, paid fines and agreed to make changes. So now we can review the performance since the new CEO, Tony Hayward took charge in 2007.
Leaving aside for a moment the Deepwater tragedy, BP’s record at US refinery indicates that the problem related to BP’s operation from 2007 to now, is significantly worse than their peers in the similar operation. That leaves with you a possibility that the problems pre 2007 at BP were so severe that with all the efforts Mr. Hayward put in since then, can not solve the problem. Only sheer incompetency or no change in culture are the two possible answers. So Alcor, you have to decide for yourself which of the these two possibilities you may find acceptable. Or are there any other possibilities. and what are the solutions?
Now about the Deepwater tragedy, surely TO, Halliburton or BOP maker or those who repaired BOP may have a hand in it. However the key factor to keep in mind is who has the power and who is aware of the power on this RIG and the operations on the RIG. I am quite sure that employees of any of these companies know that good relations with BP are important. This is where the BP’s culture comes in to play. A healthy safety conscious culture will create an environment where not only employees but the contractors will be empowered to speak up without feeling sense of jeopardy with respect to job or future relationship. The responsible TO manager on the RIG has to balance the safety question with his relationship with the BP manager on the RIG. The alleged heated dialog between TO and BP manager on the day of tragedy, the internal emails within BP about the centralizers and highly skewed statistics against BP in the US refineries compel you to conclude that most likely it is the culture within BP that is most likely the problem. This is not let TO and others off the hook but material responsiblity lies with BP. My point, Alcor is that root cause while very important from technical view point ( and must be completed quickly) does not address the cultural aspect for which you must connect other dots.
In my view, TO manager behaved like many of us in the similar situation while failing to be courageous enough to possibly spoil the relationship with a very powerful customer for possible safety issue that may or may not have resulted in tragedy…he could not have been as sure at that time. I am sure he feels he had acted otherwise as many of us would feel in his situation.
Now as for as MMS is concerned, the dialog on this forum and other places is delusional. We, in this country, have a raging dialog or shouting match going on for a while about the role of Government. This is after more than 20 years of experiments of reducing the size of government bureaucracy either by cutting their budgets and personnel or by taking authority away from them.
The debate…no…but shouting is reaching a very high decible now without any real agreement. Financial melt down with Credit Default Swaps in the range of many times higher than the world GDP. But we can not decide if we should regulate CDO. so it goes on and on.
Is MMS responsible? sure…but what have we, the citizens, our congressmen, senators or Governors etc, done to empower them to regulate?
And how about the culture in this industry in our country? The culture in the OIL and Gas Industry has been that the Government is a problem except when it comes to subsidy. So the question to ask is did they really want to empower the MMS to enforce the law? Did they influence for more or better regulation or less regulation? Did we see them as helpful or an obstacle?
I think this is a culture problem/failure on our part as citizens of this country. So let us do the root cause here also but culture issue is for us to address. And are we ready to be held responsible for this as we would BP to stand up for its culture abberation? Are we safety conscious enough to empower MMS? What behavior do we exhibit?
At the end of this rambling, I suggest that culture issues are just as important if not more so if we want to avoid the future tragedies…
PS: BP board should fire CEO and possibly itself to start a new culture. They all failed to fix the problem they knew for more than 5 years. Stockholders should ask for resignations.[/QUOTE]
You have excellent points to offer. BP, has problems, but I can assure you it isn’t worldwide. BP, inherited the problems which AMOCO and ARCO presented then with. I am sure they have regrets. Culture, is the hardest thing to change in a company. New culture means you have to believe it’s true, like a religion. We have enough problems in the world regarding religion, best summed up by my latest visit to Marco Island, Florida, where we saw 16 different churches all advocating the I’m better than Thou thing! It was bewildering. But, let’s not go there.
Culture change is the hardest thing anyone can go through. It changes all the rules you know, all the ways you have accepted as ‘gospel’, and the daily requirements to adhere to a new set of values.
I work for a drilling contractor, with approx 15 rigs worldwide. We had a death on a rig. The rig was shut down and consequently the company brought in outside agencies to re-direct our understanding of saftey and culture. That was an unbelievable year where we had to change all of our practices and customs. We are still to this day examining every step we take, in all operations. This entails procedures and SJA on a daily basis on jobs such as backloading slop to the boat or plugging drains on the rig because we are using OBM. There is no such thing as two level operations…it’s banned. But, we all accept this and operations are organised to ensure we meet the expectation of the new culture.
[QUOTE=alcor;37124][B]All blowouts are preventable. All blowouts from the past included.
[/B]It has nothing to do with whether the Operator did this or did that.
Drill crews, know that they are responsible for the well volumes and pressure control.
When this is absent, blowouts occur.
Ask any well control school if they disagree.
It doesn’t matter whether we’re drilling, completing, testing, or sitting on our butts we still have one thing to manage: Volumes and pressure.
If our BOP fails, then that’s another matter. Our Driller’s conduct and report back on the testing, including volumes required to close the BOP’s and volumes to open. Where leaks may develop, this is reported to the Operator. We, the drilling contractor have a very significant responsibility to all on the rig to ensure these tests are conducted correctly.
One aspect of any failure that’s detrimental to honesty surrounding testing is the fact that if failures occur the rig goes on downtime.
This down time may cover a number of days in the case of the DWH, about three days minimum, and that’s $1,500,000. Operators, need to change contracts to ensure that discrepancies are reported. The Operaor needs to take up this down time.[/QUOTE]
Bullshit. Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. Complete bullshit. I’m not even directly in your small sector of the field and I know that is bullshit
Regardless what a drilling contractor does, a blowout (or any well failure) is not preventable if the completion design is fatally flawed. Unless you are saying that all blowouts are preventable if the well is never drilled in the first place, and then, we finally find something to agree on. If a well’s casing design and construction is so flawed that it can’t handle reservoir pressure at the BOP, then regardless of what the drill crews do, it is doomed. In this case, by all available information, the casing design and well completion were just that fatally flawed.
Ask any well control school if they disagree.
To also use your words ‘one aspect of any failure that’s detrimental to honesty surrounding’ drilling is pretending that the lowest level of drill crew (and government) should either understand or have veto power over the well design created by their clients. Especially when their clients are the 'smartest guys" at the biggest multi-national, multi-billion dollar petroleum company in the world. What is TOI or the government expected to know that bp doesn’t?
Your entire premise is that everyone should assume bp is staffed by reckless morons who don’t know their job, or don’t care about anything. Hardly comforting. Hardly worth defending!
Your last sentence though really makes me laugh so bad my side hurts. Now you are really grasping at straws. Expecting a drilling company to take on the liability for downtime for their client’s poor design and fuckups? Are you freaking serious? Though I’m sure you have significant experience in the industy, you can’t possibly hold the job you say you do (independant drilling company staff) after saying something that freaking moronic. As I’ve said before, I don’t work in this particular aspect of the geologic/drilling business, but I am a geologist, I have worked in the engineering consulting field for decades, and I do own a drilling company. If I said something like what you just said, I might as well put a “please kick me, I love it” sign on my back. Then I would put in my application to flip burgers at McDonald’s.
Alcor
Five years a long time to change the culture. If you can not then you are not competent and must resign. BP has failed. While I agree that past culture is a prolbem but five years is a long time. So no excuses…the management has to take responsibility and go or get fired. Can not blame the past for ever.
[QUOTE=CPTdrillersails;37133]Bullshit. Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. Complete bullshit. I’m not even directly in your small sector of the field and I know that is bullshit
Regardless what a drilling contractor does, a blowout (or any well failure) is not preventable if the completion design is fatally flawed. Unless you are saying that all blowouts are preventable if the well is never drilled in the first place, and then, we finally find something to agree on. If a well’s casing design and construction is so flawed that it can’t handle reservoir pressure at the BOP, then regardless of what the drill crews do, it is doomed. In this case, by all available information, the casing design and well completion were just that fatally flawed.
Ask any well control school if they disagree.
To also use your words ‘one aspect of any failure that’s detrimental to honesty surrounding’ drilling is pretending that the lowest level of drill crew (and government) should either understand or have veto power over the well design created by their clients. Especially when their clients are the 'smartest guys" at the biggest multi-national, multi-billion dollar petroleum company in the world. What is TOI or the government expected to know that bp doesn’t?
Your entire premise is that everyone should assume bp is staffed by reckless morons who don’t know their job, or don’t care about anything. Hardly comforting. Hardly worth defending!
Your last sentence though really makes me laugh so bad my side hurts. Now you are really grasping at straws. Expecting a drilling company to take on the liability for downtime for their client’s poor design and fuckups? Are you freaking serious? Though I’m sure you have significant experience in the industy, you can’t possibly hold the job you say you do (independant drilling company staff) after saying something that freaking moronic. As I’ve said before, I don’t work in this particular aspect of the geologic/drilling business, but I am a geologist, I have worked in the engineering consulting field for decades, and I do own a drilling company. If I said something like what you just said, I might as well put a “please kick me, I love it” sign on my back. Then I would put in my application to flip burgers at McDonald’s.[/QUOTE]
All well control schools will tell you that all blowouts are preventable. It’s a very simple statement. Operators and drilling contractors have to anticipate the highest pressures that the well can throw at them. And act accordingly. I repeat, all blowouts are preventable.
[QUOTE=dsmith;37129]Hi Alf:
Would it be possible to orient the ROV so that the camera view we get would make a tilted object appear vertical? That would certainly make for a disoriented ROV operator but is it possible?
Its too bad we don’t have a guaranteed vertical object beside the BOP to use as a reference point.[/QUOTE]
yes it is possible to be off from vertical/horizontal… I incorrectly call it pilot error… but in fact everyone who does it will get slightly different results.
When an ROV is working or moving it needs some kind of reference to vertical/horizontal. The pilot’s only view to the outside world is via cameras. These cameras need a reference point. ideally something fixed to the seabed.
In addition, the pilot needs to know where his ROV is relative to what he’s looking at, hence the quick camera movements up/down/left/right to verify the camera view relative to fixed vertical/horizontal points on the ROV.
Normally, there would be a [B]minimum[/B] of 4x bullseyes used: 1 on the 36" wellhead, 1 on the main frame of the BOP, 1 on the LMRP and 1 on the flex joint. These are installed from day 1 so to speak and monitored regularly with the ROV. Changes in readings are easy to see.
The ROV should be flying pretty close to horizontal although currents and other things can affect it.
[QUOTE=CPTdrillersails;37133]Bullshit. Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. Complete bullshit. I’m not even directly in your small sector of the field and I know that is bullshit
Regardless what a drilling contractor does, a blowout (or any well failure) is not preventable if the completion design is fatally flawed. Unless you are saying that all blowouts are preventable if the well is never drilled in the first place, and then, we finally find something to agree on. If a well’s casing design and construction is so flawed that it can’t handle reservoir pressure at the BOP, then regardless of what the drill crews do, it is doomed. In this case, by all available information, the casing design and well completion were just that fatally flawed.
Ask any well control school if they disagree.
To also use your words ‘one aspect of any failure that’s detrimental to honesty surrounding’ drilling is pretending that the lowest level of drill crew (and government) should either understand or have veto power over the well design created by their clients. Especially when their clients are the 'smartest guys" at the biggest multi-national, multi-billion dollar petroleum company in the world. What is TOI or the government expected to know that bp doesn’t?
Your entire premise is that everyone should assume bp is staffed by reckless morons who don’t know their job, or don’t care about anything. Hardly comforting. Hardly worth defending!
Your last sentence though really makes me laugh so bad my side hurts. Now you are really grasping at straws. Expecting a drilling company to take on the liability for downtime for their client’s poor design and fuckups? Are you freaking serious? Though I’m sure you have significant experience in the industy, you can’t possibly hold the job you say you do (independant drilling company staff) after saying something that freaking moronic. As I’ve said before, I don’t work in this particular aspect of the geologic/drilling business, but I am a geologist, I have worked in the engineering consulting field for decades, and I do own a drilling company. If I said something like what you just said, I might as well put a “please kick me, I love it” sign on my back. Then I would put in my application to flip burgers at McDonald’s.[/QUOTE]
If you don’t accept that all blowouts are preventable then why are we drilling deepwater GOM? Why take the risk if you believe we can’t control all wells?
The only moronic statement made is yours. My feeling is that all blowouts are preventable. And I don’t intend telling you how to achieve this. But, I suspect when you consider what you’ve written the idea that we drill with the hope of not having a blowout is a completely absurd idea!!! Duh!!!
[QUOTE=OldHondoHand;37105]Just clicked your link and got this message:
[B]"SORRY - YOUR IP ADDRESS HAS BEEN BANNED -
Thank you for not stalking![/B]
If you need help you can email bans@godlikeproductions.com
we sometimes have to ban entire ISP Providers because of attacks on this website…
If you have been inadvertently caught up in one of these bans please accept our apologies email us and we will try to clear it up for you"
Hey John! Your site has been banned from them! Hah![/QUOTE]
Don’t bother, you’re definitely not missing anything. I haven’t seen anything at godlikeproductions.com that isn’t WAY over the top conspiracy theory “stuff”.
Eugene island is a submerged geological feature like an underwater mountain 80 miles off the coast of Louisiana. The landscape is littered with deep fissures and faults which gush large amounts of oil and gas. A platform named Eugene Island 330 was producing 15,000 barrels of oil in the early 1970’s. By the late 80’s, the flow has reduced to 4,000 barrels a day. Then suddenly a mysterious thing happened. Production at Eugene Island 330 suddenly jumped back to 13,000 barrels a day. The reserve was refilled just like that. It is estimated the reserves went from 60 million barrels to 400 million barrels in a few days time. Something very strange is happening under the Gulf of Mexico.
What happened at Eugene Island supports the growing theory that oil is renewable from deep Earth processes. But don’t let the general population know this. This aids to explain why the Middle East oil feilds seem to be inexhaustable.
I agree, with you, on that alvis…reallly "over the top…
[QUOTE=alcor;37138]If you don’t accept that all blowouts are preventable then why are we drilling deepwater GOM? Why take the risk if you believe we can’t control all wells?
The only moronic statement made is yours. My feeling is that all blowouts are preventable. And I don’t intend telling you how to achieve this. But, I suspect when you consider what you’ve written the idea that we drill with the hope of not having a blowout is a completely absurd idea!!! Duh!!![/QUOTE]
How about this: All blowouts are preventable, so long as you don’t rely on BP’s engineering and greedy managers to cut costs and safe drilling and well control practices?
[QUOTE=peakoilerrrr;37110][c] BOP ram re-configuration thus altered control-panel operation[/QUOTE]
BP said that it took them a day to figure out one of the controls on the control panel was miswired to the SSTV (test ram). Which is why the ram they were trying to activate wouldn’t activate. Early on in this catastrophe, I had read where they were looking to see if the deadman switch could have been wired to the SSTV. Have they said whether this was or was not the case? If the bop control panel was mistakenly wired to the SSTV, could any of the safeties topside been wired to the SSTV and not have activated when they were commanded to?
Culture, is the hardest thing to change in a company. New culture means you have to believe it’s true, like a religion…But, let’s not go there.
Good idea. Let’s stay right here, on the culture issue:
Some of the employees, speaking anonymously, said BP follows an “operate to failure” attitude.
Kovac said that means BP Alaska avoids spending money on “upkeep” and instead runs the equipment until it breaks down.
A top BP Prudhoe Bay official, who has grown “disillusioned” with the company’s management style over the past year, agreed. “Someone was clearly not paying attention to the flow,” said the official, who also requested anonymity because he feared retaliation for discussing internal matters. “The temperature dropped and the line froze. This shouldn’t have happened. I equate this with a lack of operating discipline and place the blame squarely on leadership.”
In January, an employee at Lisburne sent an e-mail to BP officials in Alaska saying the facility was “operating in [an] unsafe condition.” The employee, whose name was redacted, listed more than a dozen pieces of crucial production equipment that he said were not working or were out of service during the time of the spill, thus “leaving no back up to running equipment and equipment out of service which should be on-line as per the system requirements to run the plant.”
“With minimum manning in maintenance and operations we are basically running a broken plant with too few people to address the problems in a timely and safe manner,” the employee said.
“Operations can not rely on Management to provide them with a safe and reliable plant to work in. The management of our maintenance at [Lisburne Production Center] simply is not working to maintain a safe operation. This gap in maintenance management causes problems that increase the overall risk of plant integrity and personnel safety.”
Jeanne Pascal, the former debarment counsel at the EPA’s Seattle office who worked on BP cases for a decade, said in addition to the louvers at Lisburne, the turbines at the facility have not been working properly for about 10 years.
Culture change is the hardest thing anyone can go through. It changes all the rules you know, all the ways you have accepted as ‘gospel’, and the daily requirements to adhere to a new set of values.
Exceptional point. Let’s discuss this, and see how these events might directly relate to the changing, or encouragment, of a “culture”:
A) Two BP management officials, who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss internal matters, said budget cuts were largely the reason equipment was not upgraded or repaired, and indicated that much of it has yet to be addressed. BP’s Alaska budget for 2010 is $1 billion, compared with $1.1 billion in 2009 and $1.3 billion in 2008.
Moreover, according to two BP Alaska officials, projects related to “safety and integrity” have been cut by 30 percent this year and BP’s senior managers receive bonuses for not using funds from BP’s designated maintenance budget, a company wide policy implemented by Hayward. Documents show that Hayward also implemented a cost-cutting directive following the oil spills in 2006 in Prudhoe Bay.
B) Halliburton, the contractor hired by BP to cement the well, warned BP that the well could have a “SEVERE gas flow problem” if BP lowered the final string of casing with only six centrali zers instead of the 21 recommended by Halliburton. BP rejected Halliburton’s advice to use additional centralizers. In an e-mail on April 16, a BP official involved in the decision explained: " it will take 10 hours to install them . … . I do not like this." Later that day, another official recognized the risks of proceeding with insufficient centralizers but commented: “who cares, it’s done, end of story, will probably be fine.”
C) A top BP Prudhoe Bay official, who has grown “disillusioned” with the company’s management style over the past year, agreed. “Someone was clearly not paying attention to the flow,” said the official, who also requested anonymity because he feared retaliation for discussing internal matters. “The temperature dropped and the line froze. This shouldn’t have happened. I equate this with a lack of operating discipline and place the blame squarely on leadership.”
You have excellent points to offer. BP, has problems, but I can assure you it isn’t worldwide. BP, inherited the problems which AMOCO and ARCO presented then with.
Was Hayward (and his management team) the head of the entire company not also the head of worldwide ops? Was he an inherited fossil from Amoco, or Arco…can’t remember which, do you?
Career: Tony joined BP in 1982 and began his career as a rig geologist in the North Sea. Following a series of technical and commercial roles in Europe, Asia and South America, he returned to London in 1997 as member of the Upstream Executive Committee. He became Group Treasurer in 2000, Chief Executive for BP’s upstream activities and member of the Main Board of BP in 2003. In May 2007, Tony was appointed Group Chief Executive of BP p.l.c.
My feeling is that all blowouts are preventable.
You may be right. All we need to do is excise the offal from the tippy-top of the skim. Long-term jail terms for the management and BOD, financial ruin for the shareholders, bondholders, etc., might do a world of good in helping to nudge that “cultural change” along.
“The prospect of being hung in the morning concentrates the mind wonderfully.”
- Samuel Johnson
[QUOTE=dell;37119]CALLING COMPANY MAN 1!
Concerning Port Fourchon and vicinity (as you wanted checked…): http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/06/17/AR2010061705729.html?hpid=artslot
and see this from the reporter’s blog: http://mrdanzak.com/2010/06/18/the-last-of-leeville/[/QUOTE]
Thank you for the Leeville articles. I too kept seeing the sign for Leeville as I drove down to Grand Isle. And on one trip, I decided to go there. I walked around a bit and found it a little weird that I didn’t see anyone. No kids. No people talking, nothing. I took some pictures and some pictures of the shore line there and of some of the marsh and then left. This explains why I didn’t see anyone. It was actually the only shore line that I found that I could get to that wasn’t being guarded.
Edit: the only thing I did see was a Bud Light truck making a deliver to a bar there. I guess this would be Pappy’s Place!
Alvis, were birds flying? Was there an odar?,Mosquito? I teared up, after looking at the article dell showed us.
[QUOTE=CPTdrillersails;37133]* * * Your entire premise is that everyone should assume bp is staffed by reckless morons who don’t know their job, or don’t care about anything. * * * I am a geologist, I have worked in the engineering consulting field for decades, and I do own a drilling company. * * * [/QUOTE]
Two ripostes: The first sentence above, in retrospect, would indeed have been a prudent working assumption. Perhaps everyone else [B][I]was[/I][/B] culpable–for not making that their working assumption.
Concerning the second sentence quoted above, having lived in MN, home of no extractable energy except those peat bogs, I had wondered about the, ahem, contrast between your stated location and your clear knowledge and expertise.
[QUOTE=alcor;37136]All well control schools will tell you that all blowouts are preventable. It’s a very simple statement. Operators and drilling contractors have to anticipate the highest pressures that the well can throw at them. And act accordingly. I repeat, all blowouts are preventable.[/QUOTE]
So, it is your contention that all blowouts are preventable, even with well design and construction that is FUBAR?
My experience is fairly far afield, but my industry has nearly the same ‘safety maxim’–and, truth to tell, it is complete pablum.
[QUOTE=OldHondoHand;37059]I don’t know the Rig Mechanic, but it seems he lives a coupla hours down the road. I wonder if looked him up he might talk to me? Nahhhh, he’s all lawyered up, I’m sure. But I do remember him saying when he heard the Cats begin to race, he kept wondering why the overspeeds weren’t kicking in.
I still think this is a real critical issue in that I believe them exploding was the initial cause of ignition for the gas that kicked. Of course, by then there was so much gas it had migrated into the non-classified parts of the Rig and ignition was all but guaranteed from numerous sources, not to mention simple friction and/or static electricty from the flow. But I sure would like to know that we can build rigs and systems where the crew could buy enough time to get off the floor and over the sides before she blows. A big kick ought not become a death sentence.[/QUOTE]
hey guys- dont lose the importance in this issue, diesel air intakes need to be investigated.
[QUOTE=New Orleans Lady;37145]Alvis, were birds flying? Was there an odar?,Mosquito? I teared up, after looking at the article dell showed us.[/QUOTE]
I saw a lot of egrets when I was there. But only saw a couple of brown pelicans. There was definitely an oil odor at the Fourchon public boat dock and Port in the morning around 11:00 yesterday. They had the road to the beach blocked and I couldn’t go there. When I came back in the afternoon, the smell had gone. You could see a bit of sheen on the beach shoreline at Grand Isle. We couldn’t get onto the beach but could look at it from above on the pier. I didn’t see or feel any mosquitoes during the day; and wasn’t there at dusk/night.
Alvis, how did you feel after wittnessing the aftermath of the explosion