Tag Archives: BP

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Demand for Oil Cos To Prove Disaster Preparedness

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In a likely move, investors are demanding improved disclosure of oil disaster response plans. In fact, 58 investors representing $2.5 trillion in assets came together recently to demand just that.

The group penned a letter to G. Steven Farris, chairman and CEO of Apache, a company that recently purchased $7 billion of oil and gas fields from BP. As the letter states:

“The April blowout at BP’s Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico, and the explosion and fire on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig that killed 11 workers, has led to one of the greatest environmentally-related destructions of shareholder value in history. The shareholder harm that has flowed from the BP spill has focused investor attention on governance, compliance and management systems needed to minimize risks associated with deepwater offshore oil and gas development worldwide.”

The 1-page letter (with 10 pages of questions and signatures) goes on — urging all companies, including Apache, involved in subsea deepwater drilling to be open and transparent with investors and stakeholders regarding the programs they have in place for managing risks. The questions submitted inquire into the amount of money spent on R&D with respect to safer offshore drilling technologies, contingency plans, lessons learned from BP Macondo and the well blowout, contractor selection and oversight and governance and management systems.

With pressure like this, it is hoped that the Exxon’s and BP’s of the world will be forced to answer tough questions regarding managing the extreme risk they encounter. Like every other public company, they must answer to the owners — the shareholders. Let’s hope they do . . . and do so truthfully.

By the Numbers: The Gulf Oil Spill

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Newsweek has created a great slideshow illuminating some staggering numbers about the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. I suggest you head over there and read it in full as they include insightful synopses/explanations of each, but these were the few figures I found the most interesting:

  • Time it would take the United States to use the oil spilled so far: 4 hours, 24 minutes
  • Number of response workers: 42,000-plus
  • Percent of the spill that’s natural gas: 70%
  • Cubic feet of natural gas set ablaze: 1 billion
  • Number of suggestions received with ideas to stop the spill: 112,000

Along with that last factoid, Newsweek also included the below video of Kevin Costner talking about his invention that can siphon polluted water from the Gulf, extract the oil from it and dump the clean water back into the sea. He came up with this “oil distiller” while filming Waterworld when he — for God knows what reason — partnered with his brother to create an actual, working version of a prop used in the film. Obviously, the device did not need to work in the movie. It’s Hollywood make-believe and we viewers would have just believed that the theoretical physics they discussed worked considering it is, ya know, a movie set in the distant future that featured a plot where the globe was entirely submersed by ocean and “dry land was a myth.” But, nope, Kevin needed realism within his work of fiction, so the brothers Costner fabricated a working model of this centrifuge-based “Ocean Therapy” technology.

And now, hopefully, we will all owe the man a big round of applause. After conducting a few tests, BP purchased 32 of the machines from Costner a few weeks ago and has already begun using them to aid the clean up efforts. The technology is not perfect (as you can learn about here), but it is helping — which means Kevin has almost certainly done more to help the Gulf of Mexico, marine life and affected coastal communities than you have.

Overall, it’s easily the best thing he has done since Thirteen Days.

7 Potential Disasters Worse than the BP Spill

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If forecasters were attempting to gauge the worst disasters that could happen, a major oil spill gushing for some 90-plus days into the Gulf of Mexico would probably have rated fairly high. By some estimates, this whole mess will cost BP around $60 billion. (Other, more conservative estimates have it costing closer to 1/10th that number.)

But while this might seem like the one of the worst things that possibly could happen on American soil, it isn’t. Forbes, in its latest issue, has a list of seven other incidents that could be even more catastrophic. Here’s a recap of their list.

nuclear plant

1. Nuclear Meltdown

Depending on the severity and location, a disaster at a major plant could wreak unfathomable carnage. Writes Forbes:

The industry has $19 billion set aside to pay for accidents. But what would a Chernobyl-type release of radioactive gases into the air do to death rates and the habitability of some large area? The Institute for Policy Studies says a spent-fuel fire could cost hundreds of billions of dollars.

While nuclear energy very may well be a good option in a country (rhetorically) trying to slow climate change and wean itself off of foreign oil, the possibility of a meltdown can be sobering — even when you realize that it has thus far been very effective and safe in some parts of the world for the past several decades.

gasland

2. Liquefied Natural Gas Explosion

With supertankers out there carrying some 100,000 tons of liquid methane, the explosive potential of a single ship is equivalent to the blast that would occur if two billion sticks of dynamite went off. The last major tanker explosion killed 128 people in Cleveland in 1944. The next one? Well, it would likely be much, much worse.

And anyone who has seen the controversial — and terrifying — documentary Gasland knows that there may be other, more subtle risks involved in natural gas extraction that deserve the attention of regulators and the industry.

Bhopal Union Carbide

3. Chemical Plant Explosion

The Bhopal disaster was the worst industrial accident in history. Recently — and very controversially — seven involved officials were sentenced to two years in prison and fined $2,000 for negligence more than 25 years after the 1984 Union Carbide leak of poisonous gases (mostly methyl isocyanate) that killed some 15,000 people directly (and up to 23,000 by some estimates) while also leaving another 500,000 with injuries and ailments related to exposure. Human rights groups, victims and Bhopal locals were outraged at the leniency given, particularly since proper clean-up efforts were never conducted and that the $470 million settlement paid by Union Carbide in 1989 now looks laughable by any standard.

If something like that were to occur today, it’s almost impossible to predict how much such a politically charged incident with so many casualties would end up costing. But Forbes lists a hypothetical plant explosion in Houston that kills 600 people as totaling $20 billion, according to Risk Management Solutions.

hoover dam

4. Dam Failure

I have never done any research into a major dam failure, but it sure doesn’t sound good at all.

One of the worst scenarios would be a cascading series of failures in the Columbia River Basin of the Pacific Northwest, where the dams start in Canada, pass the Department of Energy’s Hanford Reservation, with its 50 million gallons of plutonium-laced waste, and include the 6.8-gigawatt Grand Coulee Dam, the largest hydroelectric plant in the U.S. The odds of such a catastrophe are extremely low, but the costs would quickly exceed the $85 billion tab for cleaning up Hanford.

Hopefully, someone is looking into lowering the threat for all “one-third of the 80,000” U.S. dams that FEMA claims pose at least a “high” risk.

long island express 1938

5. Category 5 Hurricane Hits New York

A few years ago, I wrote an in-depth feature article for Risk Management about the hurricane potential for New York. Honestly, I’m not really sure a cat 5 hitting NYC is even close to likely over, say, the next 100 years or so, even if ocean sea-surface temperatures continue to rise to alarming extents. But a category 3 storm hitting the area is not only likely — it’s inevitable.

In 1938, the “Long Island Express” raced up the Atlantic coast at a breakneck pace, inundating Long Island, Connecticut and, particularly, Providence, Rhode Island, with floodwaters and storm surge that, while devastating even back then when the areas were sparsely developed, would lead to well over a $100 billion in losses today. The loss of life in this densely populated, frightening unprepared region could be even worse.

Here’s an excerpt from the piece I wrote about “The Northeast Unthinkable”:

Given its geography, population density and general affluence, New York’s Long Island in particular faces a tremendous risk. When the Long Island Express hit in 1938, it was eastern Suffolk County that endured the greatest winds, storm surge and flooding, resulting in approximately 50 deaths. According to 1940 census data, the population at the time was just under 200,000. Today, nearly 1.5 million people live in Suffolk. And another 1.34 million reside in the neighboring Nassau County compared to the roughly 400,000 there in 1938.

“What really drives significant catastrophe losses is a major event hitting a major metropolitan area,” says Clark. “Otherwise, you can have a lot of activity, but you’re not going to have a lot of losses. It’s those chance occurrences where you have major events hit Galveston, Houston, New Orleans, Tampa, Miami, the Mid-Atlantic or the Northeast—those are the real areas where you’re going to get the mega-catastrophes.”

According to a study by AIR, there is some $4.4 trillion worth of commercial exposure and $3.4 trillion in residential property from New Jersey to Maine. And with almost a million households in Long Island alone, this 1,200-square-mile strip of land accounts for over $1 trillion in combined commercial and residential exposure.

It is with this boom in population and wealth in mind that Roger Pielke, Jr., director of the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research at Colorado State University, set out to formulate new projections for the scale of destruction a replay of the Great New England Hurricane would cause now.

In today’s dollars, the 1938 storm caused over $4 billion in insured losses alone. But this adjusted figure only accounts for the elevated currency values and ignores 68 years of regional growth in population, infrastructure, industry and commercial enterprise. “You can’t adjust for the damages that never occurred,” says Pielke.

As someone who lives in New York, this — even more so than terrorism — is the possible disaster that disturbs me the most, in part, because I believe there is actually some sort of official developed to react to the next terrorist attack. I doubt there is any comprehensive, inter-county plan at all that will be effective in the days leading up to an following the category 3 hurricane that will someday hit.

sydney opera house

6. Ferry Capsizing

This one honestly sounds less plausible as a “worse than BP disaster” for the United States than it does elsewhere, but here’s what Forbes wrote:

Ferryboats and riverboats are extremely stable because of their wide, flat design, but they also often travel in dangerous waterways with lots of passengers. As many as 4,300 passengers and crew died after the Philippine ferry MV Dona Paz collided with a tanker, caught fire and sank in 1987.

I suppose that could happen anywhere, but it seems less likely than the others listed in the developed world — especially when compared to this last, but certainly not least, one…

volcano

7. Supervolcano

Forbes quotes a Lloyd’s report that volcanoes pose an $85 billion risk “including disruption and air travel” and includes Mount Vesuvius in Italy and Mount Rainier outside of Seattle as two of the scariest locations for a major eruption.

$85 billion sure is a lot of money, but anyone who has seen the History Channel’s “Mega Disasters” episode on what will happen when the Yellowstone Caldera blows probably has worse fears on their minds. Were this thing to erupt, the only adjusters and insurers left to tally the total will likely be roaches and reptiles.

You’ve been warned.

When the Fail-Safe Fails

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The New York Times today published the best, most comprehensive, most anger-inducing piece I have seen detailing the collective risk management failings that led to the Gulf oil spill. Clocking in at around 6,500 words, this thing is a doozy. But it is a report that everyone who wants to understand how this disaster really came to be needs to read.

The article focuses mainly on the failure of “blowout preventer,” a device attached to every well drilled in order to, you guessed it, prevent blowouts. While immensely complex and huge — it’s five stories tall and weighs hundreds of thousands of pounds — its purpose is to provide a shut-off method in case something goes wrong with the well.

Even more specifically, we get a wonderful lesson into the ultimate fail-safe: the “blind shear ram.” There are many components within the blowout preventer that must operate properly to shut off a well, but the blind shear ram is the final device that ultimately seals the thing. If it fails, the whole thing fails.

And all evidence is pointing to the fact that, on the Deepwater Horizon, it failed.

The process to activate the blind shear ram and seal the pipe is complex, but according to this article, the risks associated with that complexity were well known by all the players in the drilling industry. And on the Deepwater rig, no one did all that much to mitigate that risk. In contrast, in other instances, other companies and other rigs adopted redundancy as a way to ensure that a well shut-off would not be compromised.

These kinds of weaknesses were understood inside the oil industry, documents and interviews show. And given the critical importance of the blind shear ram, offshore drillers began adding a layer of redundancy by equipping their blowout preventers with two blind shear rams.
By 2001, when Transocean, now the world’s largest offshore drilling contractor, acquired the Deepwater Horizon, it had already begun equipping its new rigs with blowout preventers that could easily accommodate two blind shear rams.
Today, Transocean says 11 of its 14 rigs in the gulf have two blind shear rams. The company said the three rigs that do not were built before the Deepwater Horizon.
Likewise, every rig currently under contract with BP, which had been renting the Deepwater Horizon, comes with blowout preventers equipped with two blind shear rams, according to BP. While no guarantee against disaster, drilling experts said, two blind shear rams give an extra measure of reliability, especially if one shear ram hits on a joint connecting two drill pipes.
“It’s kind of like a parachute — it’s nice to have a backup,” said Dan Albers, a drilling engineer who is part of an independent investigation of the disaster.

Weaknesses were understood inside the oil industry, documents and interviews show. And given the critical importance of the blind shear ram, offshore drillers began adding a layer of redundancy by equipping their blowout preventers with two blind shear rams.

By 2001, when Transocean, now the world’s largest offshore drilling contractor, acquired the Deepwater Horizon, it had already begun equipping its new rigs with blowout preventers that could easily accommodate two blind shear rams.

Today, Transocean says 11 of its 14 rigs in the gulf have two blind shear rams. The company said the three rigs that do not were built before the Deepwater Horizon.

Likewise, every rig currently under contract with BP, which had been renting the Deepwater Horizon, comes with blowout preventers equipped with two blind shear rams, according to BP. While no guarantee against disaster, drilling experts said, two blind shear rams give an extra measure of reliability, especially if one shear ram hits on a joint connecting two drill pipes.

“It’s kind of like a parachute — it’s nice to have a backup,” said Dan Albers, a drilling engineer who is part of an independent investigation of the disaster.

In short, there were known issues with the ultimate, industry-standard fail-safe measure to prevent this type of spill. And in many cases — even most of those cases involving rigs constructed by Transocean and operated by BP — those issues were recognized and managed. But on the Deepwater Horizon, the most common method of managing that risk (redundancy) was not implemented.

Read into that whatever you like.

In fairness to BP and Transocean (something that’s hard to even try to provide anymore if I’m being honest), there is much, much, much, much, much more to all this. For example, the federal offshore drilling regulatory agency, the Minerals Management Service, knew all about these very same risks and never adequately ensured that any company do anything about them.

The federal agency charged with regulating offshore drilling, the Minerals Management Service, repeatedly declined to act on advice from its own experts on how it could minimize the risk of a blind shear ram failure…Even in one significant instance where the Minerals Management Service did act, it appears to have neglected to enforce a rule that required oil companies to submit proof that their blind shear rams would in fact work.

There is also ton of evidence that blowout preventers and blind shear rams — inherently — aren’t that great at stopping a well on an industrywide basis.

Using the world’s most authoritative database of oil rig accidents, a Norwegian company, Det Norske Veritas, focused on some 15,000 wells drilled off North America and in the North Sea from 1980 to 2006. It found 11 cases where crews on deepwater rigs had lost control of their wells and then activated blowout preventers to prevent a spill. In only six of those cases were the wells brought under control, leading the researchers to conclude that in actual practice, blowout preventers used by deepwater rigs had a “failure” rate of 45 percent.

Plus, there’s this:

More than three decades ago, the failure of a shear ram was partly to blame for one of the largest oil spills on record, a blowout at the Ixtoc 1 well off the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico. Descriptions of the accident at the time detailed problems both with the shear ram’s ability to cut through thick pipe and with a burst line carrying hydraulic fluids to the blowout preventer.

In 1990, a blind shear ram could not snuff out a major blowout on a rig off Texas. It cut the pipe, but investigators found that the sealing mechanism was damaged. And in 1997, a blind shear ram was unable to slice through a thick joint connecting two sections of drill pipe during a blowout of a deep oil and gas well off the Louisiana coast.

Honestly, I could excerpt this whole article. It details so many instances where so many industry players did so little to solve the so very well known risks of drilling.

So infuriating.

So … really, you should just go read it in full. Additionally, here is the accompanying Times video that helps explain what exactly a blind shear ram is and how it works — in theory, of course.