Archive for April, 2010

Macondo Flow is stopped!!!!

Posted in accidents, well control incidents, tagged accidents, blowouts, Deepwater Horizon, drilling, ma, macondo, offshore oil, safety, well control on April 23, 2010| Leave a Comment »

Per the Coast Guard, there is no flow from the well as of this morning. (more to follow)

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Macondo Blowout – Day 4

Posted in accidents, well control incidents, tagged accidents, blowouts, Deepwater Horizon, drilling, Gulf of Mexico, macondo, offshore oil, safety, well control on April 23, 2010| Leave a Comment »

-Per the Houston Chronicle, the missing include 9 Transocean employees and 2 from the mud contractor M-I SWACO.

-According to AP and others, the fire was extinguished when the rig sank. I have seen no information on the condition or location of the riser, or the release point (depth) for the oil. This needs to be clarified.

-The worst-case pollution scenario is thus emerging. In addition to booms and skimmers, will the responders deploy fire boom and attempt to burn oil on the water surface? When and how will dispersants be used? Will new thickness sensors and aerial slick mapping technology be employed? This spill will be the ultimate challenge (and opportunity) for responders.

-Very few clues have been provided about what caused the blowout. At the first news conference, Transocean reported that production casing was being set, implying an influx during or just after cementing operations (a common contributing factor for well control incidents). A cement plug was to be set as a barrier in the well, which was to have been suspended (temporarily abandoned). No information has been provided on the flow path for the hydrocarbons, attempted use of BOPE, and other issues of great interest. The high flow rate would seem to imply a flow path directly up the production casing, but this is just speculation.

-According to Upstream, Transocean’s newest semisubmersible, the Development Driller III, will drill the relief well.

-I haven’t given up hope on actuating BOPE with the ROV. They should be able to function rams in that manner. No information has been provided on the problems that have been experienced with this operation.

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Macondo Blowout – Day 3 Summary

Posted in accidents, well control incidents, tagged accidents, blowouts, Deepwater Horizon, Gulf of Mexico, maconda, offshore oil, safety, well control on April 22, 2010| Leave a Comment »

-11 crew members are still missing. Chances of finding survivors are very slim.

-The inevitable happened – the Deepwater Horizon sank.

-In light of the rig sinking, I’m now using the prospect name – Macondo – for this incident.

-The Coast Guard reports (NBC news clip) that the well is not leaking at the seafloor and that all flow is through the riser. A high percentage of that oil is burning at the surface. This is the optimal scenario from a pollution standpoint, but how long will the riser hold up?

-Comment: The official website updates need to be improved. Most of us can’t attend the news conferences (or dial-in). There is no information about the ongoing attempts to actuate the BOPE with the ROV (what problems have emerged?, next steps?), relief well planning (rig identified? estimated spud date?), spill response equipment, trajectory analyses, and other important aspects of the response.

-Rating the evening news coverage:

NBC – Decent job; no major mistakes; good clip on the absence of seafloor leakage
ABC – About what you expect from network news; not entirely accurate, but in the ballpark
CBS – What event were they talking about? Who prepared the rig, well diagram?

Funnel Cloud?

More good pictures

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Deepwater Horizon – Update 10

Posted in accidents, well control incidents, tagged accidents, blowouts, Deepwater Horizon, drilling, offshore oil, safety, well control on April 22, 2010| Leave a Comment »

A NOAA report indicates the following (not good):

Rig is listing 15 degrees
Most of the oil is burning but there is a slick approximately 2 miles in length. Updated NOAA trajectory analyses suggest that the Northern GOM coast would be at risk, but that it would take more than three days for oil to threaten the shorelines. Weather and current forecast and could of course change.
Initial attempts to actuate BOPE with the ROV failed.
A strengthening of winds and seas is predicted by Friday evening. Such weather would put even greater stress of both the vessel and the riser.

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Hoping for Earth Day Miracles

Posted in accidents, well control incidents, tagged accidents, blowouts, Coast Guard, Deepwater Horizon, drilling, Ixtoc, Montara, offshore oil, safety, Santa Barbara, well control on April 22, 2010| 2 Comments »

This is the nightmare scenario that we supporters of offshore oil and gas development dreaded and worked so hard to prevent – workers missing, fire raging, and oil flowing. Santa Barbara, Ixtoc, and most recently Montara were horrible drilling blowouts, but no lives were lost. Barring an Earth Day miracle, or series of miracles, that will not be the case this time.

BP and Transocean are not rogue companies. BP had a near flawless safety and compliance record in US waters over the past 2 years. Transocean is a respected drilling contractor. The Deepwater Horizon is a modern mobile drilling unit, and was staffed with a skilled and competent crew. So what went wrong? Is the challenge of drilling deep beneath the earth from a floating facility in thousands of feet of water too great to achieve the level of perfection that is necessary and expected? I don’t think so, but we clearly have a lot of soul searching to do.

For now, the focus must be on the search for the missing workers and regaining control of the well. We can count on the Coast Guard, which is once again providing outstanding leadership during a crisis, to do everything possible to find the workers. With regard to the well, an ROV must successfully actuate a ram on a BOP stack located on the ocean floor. If that doesn’t work, we are in for a long siege.

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The listing DP rig is apparently being held on location solely by the marine riser.
It sounds like they were cementing (or had cemented) production casing at the time of the incident, and that the surface plug had not yet been set prior to temporarily abandoning the well. Flow could be inside the casing or in the annulus.
Apparently most of the oil is being released at the top of the riser (estimated rate of 300 bbl/hr) and being ignited. If the riser fails, oil will be released at the seafloor and the spill response will be much more challenging.
They will attempt to actuate the BOPE with an ROV. This implies that they either were unable to actuate BOPE prior to evacuating or that the actuation was unsuccessful (e.g. shear ram was unable to cut pipe in well bore).

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Deepwater Horizon – Update 7

Posted in accidents, well control incidents, tagged accidents, blowouts, Deepwater Horizon, drilling, offshore oil, safety, well control on April 21, 2010| Leave a Comment »

11 workers still not accounted for.

According to the latest US Coast Guard release:

Updated reports indicate that there were 126 people on board the MODU at the time of the explosion.

One-hundred-fifteen crewmembers have been accounted for. Of those accounted for:

Seventeen crewmembers were medevaced from the scene
Ninety-four crewmembers are being transferred to shore at Port Fourchon aboard the Damien Baxton, an offshore supply vessel. There are no major injuries reported for these members.
Four crewmembers have been transferred to another vessel

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