Oh yeah-while I’m at it- alcor, please envision I am poking yer eye with a stick in the hope of getting a response. I require my sons to memorize some of your posts. thank you for your eloquence and erudition.
The (big) landsharks are circling:
http://www.dailybusinessreview.com/PubArticleDBR.jsp?id=1202486585697&hbxlogin=1
Cheers,
Earl
Reference to St. Joe…
Seems as though St. Joe is capable of driving their stock price down without help from any oil service companies. 13 months before the blowout their stock price was a buck lower than after the blowout.
http://www.moneycentral.msn.com/investor/charts/chartdl.aspxsymbol=JOE&CP=0&PT=8
[QUOTE=“Infomania”]Reference to St. Joe…
Seems as though St. Joe is capable of driving their stock price down without help from any oil service companies. 13 months before the blowout their stock price was a buck lower than after the blowout.
[QUOTE=“Infomania”]Reference to St. Joe…
Seems as though St. Joe is capable of driving their stock price down without help from any oil service companies. 13 months before the blowout their stock price was a buck lower than after the blowout.
http://www.moneycentral.msn.com/investor/charts/chartdl.aspx?symbol=JOE&CP=0&PT=8
NOT REALLY!!! CHeck This OUT,Daw’lin!!,
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"Ultimately the question is, are the Gulf of Mexico and the operators on the Atlantis safe? [B]Federal Judge Rules BP Atlantis LawSuit Can Move Forward, Attorneys Announce [/B]
[B]A federal judge in Houston has denied a motion by BP to dismiss a whistle-blower lawsuit claiming on-going safety violations at BP’s Atlantis facility in the Gulf of Mexico and asking that it be shut down, according to attorneys in the case.Do they have accurate blueprints to work from or not?" – Kenneth Abbott
http://www.prweb.com/releases/2011/03/prweb5175164.htm[/B]
Houston, TX (PRWEB) March 17, 2011
A federal judge in Houston has denied a motion by BP to dismiss a whistle-blower lawsuit claiming ongoing safety violations at BP’s Atlantis facility in the Gulf of Mexico and asking that it be shut down, according to attorneys in the case.
U.S. District Judge Kenneth M. Hoyt issued the ruling March 15. The action allows the lawsuit to proceed to the discovery phase, the lawyers said.
“The ruling clears the way to get to the core of what we’re asking BP to do, which is comply with federal requirements that were in place when they started production and that are in place today. Ultimately the question is, are the Gulf of Mexico and the operators on the Atlantis safe? Do they have accurate blueprints to work from or not? “said Kenneth Abbott, of Houston, who brought the suit. Consumer safety group Food & Water Watch is also a plaintiff in the suit.
Abbott, a former BP subcontractor on Atlantis, claims subsea structures lack critical and required engineering documentation, which could create a disaster even worse than Deepwater Horizon. Among other things, he asks that the facility be shut down until BP can bring all engineering drawings, which are used to develop safety protocols and procedures, into compliance with federal regulations.
The government requires that companies have certified, compliant engineering documents in place as a condition of starting production, according to the law suit.
In his ruling, Judge Hoyt dismissed a key BP argument that it did not need federal regulatory approval to begin oil production on Atlantis because it already had been granted a drilling lease.
“BP’s right to extract oil and gas . . . is predicated upon its compliance with its leases’ contractual provisions.” the Judge wrote. “Applicable regulations demand that production equipment be designed by qualified engineers, meet specified engineering requirements, and include ’as built’ documentation upon which others can rely in, for example, times of disaster.”
Abbott filed his lawsuit against the U.S. Interior Department under the False Claims Act in May of 2008. The suit was refiled in April of 2009, with BP entities as the only defendants. The cause number is H-09-1193 in U.S. District Court, Southern District, Houston Division.
Attorneys for Abbott are ; Mikal Watts and Christopher Goodpastor, Watts Guerra Craft, San Antonio, TX; David Perry and Rene Haas, Perry & Haas, Corpus Christi, TX and Edward Mallett, Mallett & Saper, Houston, TX[QUOTE=Infomania;47573]BP’S ATLANTIS PLATFORM RULED IN COMPLIANCE
Allegations unfounded.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/03/04/AR2011030405101.html[/QUOTE]
[B]http://www.nola.com/news/gulf-oil-spill/index.ssf/2011/03/bp_officials_queried_in_federa.htmlBP officials queried in federal investigation into possibility of insider trading[/B]
[B]Published: Wednesday, March 16, 2011, [/B]
Federal investigators have visited the homes of several BPofficials in recent weeks to question them on what they knew about how much oil was spewing out of the company’s busted Gulf well last spring and how their findings may have differed from what the government and the public were being told at the time, sources say.
View full sizeBP PLC, via The Associated PressOil surging into the Gulf of Mexico from the Deepwater Horizon well is seen in this video image captured June 13.
BP’s consistently low flow-rate estimates grabbed headlines and infuriated federal officials last April and May as response teams tried to get a handle on the massive oil leak a mile below the Gulf of Mexico. President Barack Obama said the company wasn’t “fully forthcoming” about the size of the spill, and congressional investigators uncovered documents showing that BP, while telling the public that a relatively minor 1,000-5,000 barrels were escaping each day, actually knew that as much as 14,000 barrels could have been coming out every 24 hours.
Government scientists eventually determined the flow reached as high as 62,000 barrels a day.
The amount of oil had an immediate impact on efforts to contain the spill and still factors heavily into how much BP and other responsible parties can be fined for polluting the Gulf.
But the difference between what BP officials knew about flow rate and what they were telling others has sparked the interest of Justice Department Criminal Division investigators, according to the sources. Giving false statements to a federal agency is a five-year felony.
[B]Non-public information[/B]
Two sources familiar with the Justice Department’s investigation say the feds have been trying to determine whether BP officials used their knowledge of non-public information about the spill to engage in illegal insider trading.
BP itself has acknowledged for months in public securities filings that the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission are "investigating securities matters arising in relation to the incident."
There are no public records indicating that BP executives took advantage of inside information to beat the stock market, where BP shares lost more than half their value in the six weeks after the April 28 disclosure that BP’s initial estimate of a 1,000-barrel-a-day spill was wrong. But major BP investors allege in a civil case in Houston that the company low-balled the spill’s effects to artificially buttress the stock price.
The interest in possible manipulation of BP’s stock price after the April 20 spill may be part of a major change last week in the way that Justice is running its criminal and civil probe of the incident.
James Cole, recently named the No. 2 man in President Obama’s Justice Department, has put the department’s Criminal Division in charge of the oil spill investigation. That took the lead prosecution role away from the Environment Division, signaling that prosecutors are taking a serious look at possible crimes beyond what caused the spill itself.
BP declined to comment and Justice and the SEC declined to confirm or deny that such an investigation exists.
[B]Investors’ class-action lawsuits[/B]
Separate class-action lawsuits in federal court in Houston by some of BP’s largest investors allege that BP leaders manipulated stock prices after the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded, but they do not accuse the insiders of taking advantage with their own stock trades.
The states of New York and Ohio have taken the lead in that case because of the large investments in BP stock made by their public employee pension funds. They claimed in a complaint last month that BP officials made a series of public statements in April and May 2010 that low-balled the amount of oil gushing from the well, which in turn artificially propped up the company’s plummeting stock price.
They also allege that before the April 20 incident, BP leaders made false statements to investors overstating the safety of the company’s operations. The New Orleans Employees’ Retirement System and the Louisiana Municipal Police Employees’ Retirement System lead what’s called a shareholder derivative lawsuit against 17 BP insiders. Mark Lebovitch, an attorney representing the plaintiffs in that case, said the Louisiana police pension fund held around 400,000 shares of BP stock at the time of the spill.
The New York and Ohio suit cites comments by former BP Chief Executive Tony Hayward and Chief Operating Officer Doug Suttles touting their confidence in various attempts to shut off the well. The investors allege those officials should have known that devices like the containment dome and the smaller “top hat” were unlikely to succeed in unprecedented water depths.
“As a result, when the truth was revealed, BP’s stock price plunged in value, causing Plaintiffs and the Class to lose as much as 40% of their investments,” the complaint says.
[B]From $60 to below $30[/B]
BP stock was trading at more than $60 a share on the New York Stock Exchange on April 20 when the well blew. The price remained pretty stable through April 28, when the public first learned that early BP estimates of the flow rate were far too low.
The government eventually estimated the spill rate was 60 times larger than BP initially said. Congress unearthed BP documents showing that the firm knew in April that the spill could be 14 times larger than it was disclosing publicly.
As various attempts to close the well failed, BP’s stock price fell below $30 a share in late June.
Jason Leviton, co-lead counsel for the plaintiffs in the securities case in Houston, said he has no evidence of any BP directors or executives engaging in illegal insider trading. BP is the largest foreign stock issuer in the U.S., and the SEC does not require foreign issuers to disclose stock transactions by directors and top managers.
BP does report transactions by its directors and executives to the British government, but none of those reflected stock dumps in the days before the bottom fell out. In fact it was during that period that top BP executives, including Hayward, made several prescheduled purchases of BP stock. An investment firm owned by BP board chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg bought 175,000 shares on the London Stock Exchange on April 28, just as the stock began to crash.
The first major sale of stock after the spill came from the company’s human resources director, Sally Bott, who sold 22,282 shares on the New York Stock Exchange for almost $850,000 on July 27, but that was after the well was capped and the stock price had already hit rock bottom
[B] [I]GREAT COMMENTARY BY [/I] LOREN STEFFY 11 rig victims were forgotteN Jason Anderson, Dale Burkeen, Donald Clark, Stephen Curtis, Gordon Jones, Roy Wyatt Kemp, Karl Kleppinger, Blair Manuel, Dewey Revette, Shane Roshto and Adam Weise.,They are the 11 workers who died when the Deepwater Horizon burned and sank in the Gulf of Mexico last year .[/B]
[B]Their names need to be stated, to be remembered, because they were clearly forgotten as the industry gathered for the CERAWeek conference in Houston this week A panel of service company executives on Tuesday mentioned the deaths only in passing, noting that the number of workers killed in last April’s accident was far less than those killed in coal mines [/B]
[B]Not just ‘one issue’ [/B]Then there was the industry rationale, voiced on this occasion by Joe Dunbar, a business unit leader for Parker Hannifin, which makes subsea well equipment. It’s a common refrain: No one has more incentive to run a safe operation than the company that’s paying $1 million a day to drill the well.
Dunbar added another favorite industry defense:
"We’ve had one issue like this in 60 years."
Which means what? The White Star Line could make much the same claim. The offshore energy industry can’t afford mistakes of the magnitude it experienced last year. Regardless of what happened before 2010, Macondo is a part of the industry’s history now, a prominent black mark that overshadows the past.
At times, the panel of professionals threatened to devolve into a water-cooler gripe session, yet disturbingly absent was any notion that anything needed to change, as if the 11 bodies entombed in the wreckage of the Deepwater Horizon were somehow irrelevant. http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/business/deepwaterhorizon/7467078.html [B][U]THIS ARTICLE MADE ME FEEL SICK,.; YET THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS, WHEN NO ONE HAS THE COURAGE TO SAY THE “RIGHT THING”. LETS BRING ON THE LAWSUITS,AND JAIL TIME, BECAUSE THAT IS THE ONLY WAY WE WILL HAVE A SAFER WORK ENVIROMENT FOR OUR HUSBANDS, FATHERS, AND FRIENDS IN THE O&G INDUSTRY.[/U][/B]
Drill pipe prevented BOP from shutting well, design flaw in blind shear rams alleged:
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2011/03/23/us/AP-US-Gulf-Oil-Spill-Investigation.html?_r=1&ref=news
Cheers,
Earl
Full DNV report (2 vols) is available for download at:
Quoted from the DNV Report:
The primary cause of failure was identified as the BSRs failing to fully close and seal due to a portion of drill pipe trapped between the blocks.
Contributing causes to the primary cause included:
• The BSRs were not able to move the entire pipe cross section into the shearing surfaces of the blades.
• Drill pipe in process of shearing was deformed outside the shearing blade surfaces.
• The drill pipe elastically buckled within the wellbore due to forces induced on the
drill pipe during loss of well control.
• The position of the tool joint at or below the closed Upper Annular prevented upward
movement of the drill pipe.
• The Upper VBRs were closed and sealed on the drill pipe.
• The flow of well fluids was uncontrolled from downhole of the Upper VBRs.
Washington Post summary of the BOP report:
This quote says it all about the industry/regulator “safety culture”:
“Blowout preventer is a misnomer,” said an engineer who assisted in the probe and who asked for anonymity because he was not authorized to speak for the investigation. “People have been thinking of this as a fail-safe device, and it’s more of an operating device.”
In other words, being able to open the well up again took precedence over absolutely positively shutting it down in an emergency.
Earl
Rachael Maddow asks interesting questions referenced to new policies
for BOP used in offshore drilling.
http://msnbcmob.rd.llnwd.net/video/mobile/n_maddow_trmsoil_110325.mov?n=26548304
(I am not a Rachael Maddow fan whatsoever. I am posting this so we can get a better perception how this appears to the general public)
-_____________________
My experience us as follows:
The truth is BOP’s, Christmas trees and various other pressure control devices do function properly most of the time when properly maintained and implemented.
Otherwise you would be seeing blowouts by the thousands worldwide as various
phases of drilling, completion, production, well maintenance, wireline and coiled tubing operations and recompletions are
implemented on a daily basis under conditions where the wells are flowing at several thousand PSI.
Not saying improvements are not needed on this area. But to imply that all pressure control is ineffective is ludicrous.
Earl wrote:
In other words, being able to open the well up again took precedence over absolutely positively shutting it down in an emergency.
Earl
Mr. Earl…
I don’t quite understand your comment above. Can you help me understand your post.
Hypocrisy of Shell CEO Peter Voser on BP Gulf of Mexico disaster – Royal Dutch Shell plc .com
[QUOTE=Infomania;48174]Earl wrote:
In other words, being able to open the well up again took precedence over absolutely positively shutting it down in an emergency.
Earl
Mr. Earl…
I don’t quite understand your comment above. Can you help me understand your post.[/QUOTE]
Sure. Sorry for being so cryptic.
Many, many years ago, when I was a young engineering manager at Honeywell, I was assigned to lead the development of software in a gizmo that was designed go boom. So I was sent to a class given by the Ordinance Division. The instructor gave a short lesson that I’ve characterized ever since as “the fuzing problem.” It went something like this:
"If you tell me the ordinance absolutely positively must go off when you want it to, I can handle that.
If you tell me the ordinance absolutely positively must not go off when you don’t want it to, I can handle that as well.
If you tell me you want both, then we have to talk."
Everything I read and see leads me to believe that the industry/regulator culture sees the BOP as a device to shut a well down temporarily in a way that enabled it to be opened up when the problem was fixed. Hence the engineer’s term “operating device.” If it was truly a fail-safe device, the culture would a) would have done a failure effects analysis on the BSR that would have uncovered the fact that the thing can’t handle a buckled pipe and b) tolerate premature activations of the BSR as a “absolutely positively has to work” doctrine. I haven’t been able to find any statistics on how many times BSRs are deployed worldwide per year, but my guess is the number is pretty small. No analysis, not much operational experience, not a lot of concern. Classic setup for a Black Swan event.
Cheers,
Earl
Thank you for your response Mr. Earl. I don’t exactly believe your instructor. I have crimped many (hundreds if not thousands) blasting caps to primer cord attached to a variety of shaped jet charges installed in perforating guns, packer setting tools and chemical cutters. 99.5% + the results are as desired.
I was not aware that Honeywell never had a failure of any type in their operations with explosive devices. That is a truly commendable record.
Sorry, I was talking about weapons systems, not civilian use of explosives. The point is, you have to choose at the design stage which undesirable outcome you can tolerate, a misfire or a premature detonation. Depends on the system, and how far away from it you are when it arms. All the stuff we built, to the best of my knowledge, chose misfire. The Soviets did things differently. Anyhow, we’re getting off topic so I’ll apologize for that and quit the boom-bang stories.
To get back to the BOP, the DNV team concluded that, whatever the initiating sequence, the Upper Annular and Upper VBR (the reversible “operating device” part of the BOP) were closed first, trapping the drill pipe, which then buckled. When the Blind Shear Ram (the irreversible “fail safe” part) then activated, it just clipped the edge of the pipe and did not do the cut/crimp as its design intended. What I got from this is that if the culture was one of safety first/cost second, the Blind Shear Ram would have been initiated immediately, even though the consequences would have been more severe in terms of time and money needed to reestablish the well.
Cheers,
Earl
Thanks Earl,
I am wondering, if the VBR and Hydril were closed successfully, then, why did the floorhands indicate that when they initially ran up to the rig floor the well was flowing out of the riser, something they had never seen before and had not trained to circumvent. They were only trained to stop a blowout from within the drill string.
I don’t recall the employee names, just recall reading their account of the situation just before the fecal matter hit the fan.