BP is about to fire up, literally, a new system for siphoning oil from the gushing Macondo well a mile deep in the Gulf of Mexico.
Starting as early as Monday, a system called the Q4000 direct connect could capture up to 10,000 barrels a day, essentially by reversing plumbing used in an earlier, unsuccessful attempt to stop the flow by pumping drilling mud into the well. Instead, those pipes will take oil from the well to the Q4000, a multipurpose vessel on the surface.
The Q4000 will use Schlumberger's EverGreen burner to flare off the siphoned oil, since the platform cannot process or store it. BP says it will use compressed air to make sure it burns cleanly.
Other collection efforts in progress or planned:
• A cap over the well that started capturing oil June 4 is now sending 15,000 barrels a day from the well through a pipe to the Discoverer Enterprise drillship. The drillship Discoverer Clear Leader soon will reinforce that effort and boost the collection.
• What BP calls a “long-term containment option,” to be put in place by July 1, would send oil to two tankers now en route from the North Sea that can take on up to 50,000 barrels a day. That plan, which would replace the two drillships and the Q4000, also involves modifying the existing setup to allow for quick disconnection and reconnection if a hurricane were to threaten.
It's not clear how much the systems will collect of the 20,000 to 40,000 barrels coming out of the Macondo well, according to the latest estimates.
That flow won't stop until BP intercepts and plugs the Macondo through relief wells being drilled now — a complicated process that will take at least until sometime in August.
Did we really have to wait four months for BP’s internal investigation into the Deepwater Horizon disaster? Released this morning, it’s pretty much what we’ve come to expect — a healthy dose of finger pointing that implicates just about everyone except BP. Even when BP does accept blame, it falls on the decision makers on the rig, workers far down in the chain of command.
If all of this sounds familiar, it should. Today’s Bly Report follows a template established by the Mogford Report, issued a few months after the March 2005 explosion at BP’s Texas City refinery that killed 15 people. That report, too, placed blame far down the management chain, laying it at the feet of contract workers and mid-level managers.
Neither report addresses the root causes of the disasters they were supposed to investigate. Neither addresses the broader issues that dictate bigger decisions — such as well design — that were at the forefront of recent investigative hearings by the U.S. Coast Guard and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement.
The Bly report found, not surprisingly, that well design wasn’t a factor. BP’s decision to use a “long string” instead of the safer and more expensive method favored by other companies didn’t matter, the report found.
It comes to that conclusion after determining that hydrocarbons flowed up from the bottom of the well casing. For that to happen, two barriers inside the casing had to fail. The first was the “shoe track” at the bottom of the casing, and the second is the float collar. One drilling expert who had not yet read the report in detail said in more than 40 years of offshore work, he’s never seen nor heard of both barriers failing simultaneously.
The report said investigators came to that conclusion based on “available evidence,” computer modeling and pressure calculations. “Therefore, the shoe track cement and the float collar must have failed to prevent this ingress,” it says. But the report doesn’t establish why it must have failed. Nor does it determine how the float collar failed.
Basically, the report seems to be using one assumption to prove another. That doesn’t offer much in the way of understanding what happened, but then, that really isn’t the point. BP’s internal investigation, as in the Texas City case, is designed to lay the foundation for its legal defense and offer some encouragement to its suffering shareholders. Given the market’s reaction, it seems to have succeeded.
As for the real cause of what happened and the changes that BP needs to make, we can expect a more objective assessment from the Coast Guard-BOEMRE investigation and a second probe being conducted by the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board.
