Dr. Petrolove or How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Oil Part 3: BP: Destined for an Oil Disaster

Back on May 27, 2010, the Wall Street Journal reported on a number of decisions made by BP before the disaster that should have served as red flags but for whatever reason weren't. These include:

1) cutting short a safety procedure designed to detect natural gas leaking into the oil
2) skipping a cement quality test
3) the BP manager overseeing final well tests admitted to investigators that he was on the rig to "learn about deep water,"
4) they swapped out heavy drilling "mud" and replaced it with lighter salt water

A day before that WSJ story posted, I wrote about AP reporting that cited a statement from Truitt Crawford, a roustabout for drilling rig owner Transocean Ltd. who told the Coast Guard "I overheard upper management talking saying that BP was taking shortcuts by displacing the well with saltwater instead of mud without sealing the well with cement plugs, this is why it blew out..."

So it wasn't like #4, above, wasn't known to be dangerous.

And, just today, the NYT reported on internal BP documents that seemed to point to early worries that the rig wasn't safe:

Internal documents from BP show that there were serious problems and safety concerns with the Deepwater Horizon rig far earlier than those the company described to Congress last week.

...

The documents show that in March, after several weeks of problems on the rig, BP was struggling with a loss of “well control.” And as far back as 11 months ago, it was concerned about the well casing and the blowout preventer.

On June 22, for example, BP engineers expressed concerns that the metal casing the company wanted to use might collapse under high pressure.

“This would certainly be a worst-case scenario,” Mark E. Hafle, a senior drilling engineer at BP, warned in an internal report. “However, I have seen it happen so know it can occur.”

The company went ahead with the casing, but only after getting special permission from BP colleagues because it violated the company’s safety policies and design standards.

Sure wish we had some regulation for this here oil company!! OH WAIT, we DO and it was ignored by all parties involved.

Posted via web from thepete's posterous