Yeah, that’s sort of my point; more planes than oil rigs means a lower human error/plane ratio than oil rigs. Oil rigs have more human errors than planes when viewed in the context of operating hours.
I clicked this thread and, frankly, was surprised by the discussion.
I don’t know (or particularly) care whether the drilling ban was a technical or political decision. I certainly do not know whether the ban was technically appropriate; perhaps there’s 1 or 2 Dopers here who could give expert opinion to that, but it might be a tough decision even for an expert. One might hope that Obama’s expert consultants are top-notch, but I don’t know that either. It’s all but certain that Obama’s experts know far more on the topic than some federal judge, but even that’s not my point.
What stunned me about this news item is the utter arrogance of a federal judge to remove such a ban, especially a judge with his financial interests. Does anyone doubt for one second that this judge would not have overturned such a ruling by a Republican President?
I’d never heard of Martin Feldman, but as soon as I saw the news item I’d have given heavy odds that this corrupt farce of a judge was appointed by a Republican President.
There are actually three problems at work here.
One is the horrible decision making by humans as you mention.
The second is the failure of equipment. Equipment we have been led to believe is failsafe. I recall when this first occurred that the failure of a blowout preventer is an unheard of thing…they are supposedly highly reliable. Since then I have found that such failures are not unheard of, nowhere near failsafe (see my link earlier regarding the blind shear rams being reliant one one little valve) and, worse, no one has adequately tested these things in conditions a mile underwater (perhaps they are highly reliable on land but not even sure about that).
Third, if something does go wrong, we have learned the ability of the oil companies to respond to such a problem when it is a mile underwater is woefully inadequate. Their disaster recovery plans are a joke (save the Gulf walruses, call a dead guy).
So, it is more than two pilots making bad decisions. It would be two pilots making bad decisions then the plane utterly failing to operate as advertised and then the inability to put out the fires where the plane crashed and watch helplessly as the fires spread for 2+ months and endangering a whole ecosystem.
Big difference and solving the last two before resuming deepwater drilling would seem to be a good reason for a moratorium. Something having inspectors on the rig will not help.
Seems to me that we’ve got design flaws in deep water BOPs. If that’s the case, and it needs to be determined whether it is or not, then the things need to be redesigned before we deploy more of them.
Of course, the well must to be plugged before the BOP can be disconnected and raised to the surface for detailed examination. That’ll take months, and a proper examination of the device will likely also take months. Then someone has to figure out how to build a BOP that works, etc, etc.
I suppose the work could be sped up by contracting out to a company willing to cut corners, but that’s a bad idea.
If you’ll read the Congressional invitation to Hayward to answer questions before the committee you’ll see that actually a great deal is known already about the events that led up to the accident. It also details a number of practices that are both available and that are currently employed by other oil companies to address and mitigate the exact events that precipitated the gas kick, escape and blowout. I think these are the best practices that a revised Minerals Management, or whichever governmental concern is to write the new regs, needs to concentrate on. These are the regulations that should help prevent a repeat occurence from ever becoming more than a statistical possibility.
What’s not known yet is why the BOP did not function as desired. Why did it not deploy when, as survivors report, it was remotely activated and why did it still not function when the controls were directly activated by ROVs after the disaster. To concentrate on and wait for the reason(s) behind one manufacturer’s BOP failure before revising the procedures for the entire drilling process for every deepwater oil prospector is to completely miss the point. It’s a revision of practices and standards throught the drilling and completion process that needs to be addressed and those needs are fairly well understood. Don’t hold everything up waiting on dissection of an after the fact, last minute technical failure by one manufacturer that can be addressed properly later when it too has been evaluated and understood.
Yes, I’d wholly agree that new technology and feasable plans need to be developed to deal with the possibility of deepwater blowouts. But the rareity of the event due to the fact sensible precautions and technologies exist gives us the flexibility to craft them in a deliberate, proactive way instead of as a hurried, stopgap bandage.
A ‘technical failure’ through which every drop of oil coming out of the wellhead has passed. Technically, the device was a ‘balls up disaster’, and we ought to learn how to make something that works reliably before dotting the seafloor with more shoddy engineering.
One of the things that would be held up by such a rational approach is a repeat of the current debacle.
How bad would it be if another BP well blew today? It could happen. Then we would be overwhelmed because all the resources are already committed. I can see why a moratorium might be a good idea.
Statistical probability (which I take you to mean a theoretical chance and by no means a foregone conclusion)? One manufacturer?
Here is a study (PDF) done by MMS looking at deep water BOP failures. The shortest mean time to failure (MTTF) on that list is for the main control system (critical component) at 67 days. Note this is an average among all blowout preventers. Add in all the other things that can fail (some admittedly only once in 10+ years). Combined that does not spell out deep confidence in any preventer. Worse, in deepwater fixing the issues on a preventer are far more expensive so there is a lot of pressure to let some issues slide. IIRC the BP preventer had a main control system fail. They should have pulled it up and fixed it but there is a backup so they chose to just keep going with that one. Operating safely is not aligned with profit pressures.
History is rife with examples of things that are supposed to be safe that turned out not to be as safe as we thought (Titanic being the prime example). Shit happens.
The issue here is exacerbated by the damage a failure can cause. How often is a blowout of this magnitude deemed ok? To be sure we accept some risks. Planes could be made with ejection seats for everyone but that would make flying absurdly expansive so we accept that on occasion a few hundred people will die in one. Automobiles could be made as strong as tanks but again the cost versus the benefit is not deemed worthwhile. Nuclear power plants on the otherhand are built with a huge amount of redundancy and over-engineering at extreme cost because one going bad could cause staggering damage (see Chernobyl). It is a balancing act.
Here we have profound damage on a massive scale. I do not think it is unreasonable to expect the oil companies to provide extra measures when working in deepwater. Provide the assurances, backed up by evidence, that an accident is very unlikely and if one happens they can get it under control in a reasonable timeframe. To date that does not exist.
Having them halt deepwater drilling does not seem unreasonable till those assurances can be met. If it takes two years then so be it. There are lots and lots of drilling platforms in shallower water where they are able to operate with reasonable safety assurances. Missing the deepwater stuff I do not think is critical to the US or the world in the short term. As more easily accessed oil gets more scarce hopefully the deepwater drilling issues will have been resolved and they can go for it then.
Can some of the more legal eagle types please comment on the judge’s rationale, because from what I seem to be reading is that his rationale was very weak.
That was just about what happened in 1953, when the first jet airliner (the deHavilland Comet 1), broke up and crashed for unknown reasons. (de Havilland Comet - Wikipedia) All Comets were grounded, which meant all jet airliners were grounded since the Comet was the only design in service at the time. When the engineers couldn’t come up with a reason for the crash, Comets were put back into service and had two more inflight failures, killing around 75 people. The entire fleet was permanently grounded, which was a Good Idea because serious engineering flaws, that didn’t appear until after several hundred or thousand hours of flight, were eventually uncovered.
I am not convinced that discovering some thousands of hours after the fact that most or all deepwater wells will fail is a Good Idea, especially since firms like BP haven’t shown anything like the concern for uncovering possible catastrophic failures, or fixing the problems that may occur, that the British aircraft industry considered vital.
No, I think he was on reasonably solid ground.
This is not my area of law, mind you, but the rule for judicial review of an agency determination is:
The court notes that “The [Interior Secretary’s] Report makes no effort to explicitly justify the moratorium: it does not discuss any irreparable harm that would warrant a suspension of operations, it does not explain how long it would take to implement the recommended safety measures …”
The court goes on to explain:
So the judge’s point seems to be that the Interior Department did not lay out, in the record, the basis for its apparent belief that immediate and irreperable harm is likely to result from more drilling. The judge doesn’t say there isn’t any such harm, just that the Department’s record leading up to issuing its order doesn’t support those conclusions at all.
Just to add some numbers to the discussion, Goldman Sachs believes a 12 month moratorium would reduce daily production by 200,000 barrels from 2011 through 2015. They believe that if a moratorium was permanent, daily deepwater production would be cut in half by about 850,000 barrels a day by 2015. They did not discuss what effect a six month moratorium would have.
Just to add another wrinkle here, if that 850,000 barrel a day reduction occurred, that would deprive the government with over $4 billion in royalty payments per year. That does not include any taxes just simply their royalty payment as the lessor. It was calculated as 850,000 bbls * 365 days * (1/6th MMS royalty) * 80 oil = $4,136,666,667.
Interesting that you should say this. Interior Secretary Salazar actually misrepresented what the experts stated in his report.
So while Salazar said that their panel of experts supported the moratorium, that is actually not the case, and the experts themselves are saying that a moratorium is not correct.
The difference between a rig and a platform is simple, one is for drilling and the other is for producing. The platforms are producing wells that have already been drilled. The production from the platforms is an ever decreasing number without additional wells being drilled.
The rigs represent 100% of the drilling activity. The platforms basically represent 100% of the current production. You drill a new well, then you install a production platform to produce the well. If you aren’t drilling wells, you won’t have any new production. There will not be any new oil discovered by the platforms; they will produce, at an ever declining rate, the reserves that have already been discovered.
Simply put, it doesn’t take 10 years to bring a new field on line. It could, or it could take very little time. For a well being drilled like the Macondo well (this current BP leak), there is existing infrastructure in the area (Mississippi Canyon), so if there hadn’t have been the problem they would have completed the well, installed the platform, and installed a pipeline that connects to an existing major pipeline. It would not have taken that long to get the field on production. If the new field is in a completely new area of the Gulf with no infrastructure, then it could take ten years for the entire process, although keep in mind that much of that process would take place prior to beginning the drilling.
There is not a lot of detail in the Goldman cite.
Curious how they do their math.
The moratorium applied to exploratory wells as you agreed earlier. So, not currently in production. If they are delayed 12 months and then resume how does that decrease oil production for four years? Seems to me it just shifts the whole calculation of oil production forward one year. Heck, add on 6 months for the oil companies to get back out there and ramp up exploration to where it is now. As it is I already cited the government has not halted all drilling. They just wanted a delay on the deepwater stuff.
Also, how is it that 33 wells in deepwater not producing account for half of total Gulf production which has 3800+ platforms banging along? So the platforms see slower production over time but that is remarkable. Less than 1% of the wells produce 50% of the total output?
The oil is not going anywhere. Whatever the government loses in royalties for one year they get the following year. Again, shift the whole balance sheet forward one year. We’ll need the oil next year as much as we need it this year.
I am not an expert but looks like funny math to me (or rather balance sheet trickery).
The unheard of failure was the result of ignoring multiple mechanical problems that canceled out redundancy. On-site inspectors can eliminate that scenario.
Stack 2 BOP’s together for additional redundancy for the short term and then redesign a new one for stupid. I think the shear rams should be capable of cutting through a drill joint for starters. I also think they should be attached to risers with a quick release coupling that will take the stress off a collapsed riser.
You are having a big problem with this exploratory drilling versus current producing concept. Your thinking of it completely backwards. Temporarily shutting in a currently producing well for a period of time and then bringing it back on line in the future should not affect future production (assuming it comes back on line okay). Not drilling a well will affect future production.
You lose an entire year of drilling with a 12 month moratorium. Sure it is shifted forward, but everything is shifted forward. It’s not like you can just drill twice as many wells in year two to make up for it. If you were going to drill 10 wells a year for 5 years and instead you skip the first year then you only drill 40 wells after 5 years.
Finally, very little oil production comes from new shallow water drilling. Most of the shallow water drilling yields gas. Most of the oil comes from the deep water.
I’ve stayed away from commenting on your 3,800 number, but you are thinking about this entirely wrong. First, your 3,800 number is going to include not only oil but gas. It is also going to include some very old very marginal producing properties and very likely some non-producing properties. Further, the scale of the reservoirs is going to be very different. These new deepwater reservoirs are much larger than a huge percentage of those that are being producing from your 3,800 platforms.
You are also acting like the 33 drilling rigs are equivalent to a platform. These rigs will move from one drilling site to the next. They will drill far more than 33 wells over that period of time. The rig drills a well then they install a platform and then the rig moves on and drills another well (in reality there may be more than one well per platform but we’re talking general idea here).
Further, you are not taking into account how fast these wells deplete. The advantage to an offshore well versus an onshore well is that they come on at a very high rate of production and then decline steeply. This is an advantage because it allows for a faster payout of the original drilling costs. This however causes a problem where you need to constantly drill wells in order to just maintain production. This isn’t like Appalachia where you drill a well and it basically produces a near constant rate for the next 100 years. After a few years the well is done.
Sure the oil isn’t going anywhere, but you are first forgetting the time value of money. Second, you are acting like we can make up for it by drilling twice as many wells after the moratorium is lifted; that isn’t feasible. Third, it doesn’t shift the balance sheet forward a year; it shifts the cash flow. The balance sheet will be done permanent harm. There isn’t any accounting trickery here; this is basic cash flow stuff.
It ties up capital (loans) for a year and it puts people out of work.
As we are finding out, there are worse things.
What’s with the drilling twice as many wells bit?
There is a finite amount of oil down there. We drill it today or we can drill it tomorrow for extraction. In the end you have X-amount of barrels of oil available. We need the oil today. We will need it tomorrow (and by all accounts the world will have an even bigger appetite for it in the future than it does today). Someone is employed today or someone is employed tomorrow. In the end it will all be dug out and then that is it. Why dig it out twice as fast now?
As for balance sheets being hurt I am not sympathetic. The oil companies make staggering profits. They have refused to put R&D money into safety and response measures despite mining in extremely harsh environments miles under the ocean (they sure had the money for that tech). Given the stunning damage being done and continuing to be done I will not lose sleep if their balance sheet takes a ding. Despite all this BP is still operating at a profit.