New Setback in Attempt to Contain Gulf Oil Spill/For BP, a History of Spills and Safety Lapses

New Setback in Attempt to Contain Gulf Oil Spill
By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: May 8, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/09/us/09rig.html?th&emc=th


ROBERT, La. — The latest effort to contain the oil spill that has poured millions of gallons of crude into the Gulf of Mexico encountered a setback 5,000 feet underwater, officials said Saturday, meaning oil will continue gushing into the ocean for at least several more days, and possibly months.
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Workers on Friday night maneuvered a containment dome — essentially a 98-ton steel box with an opening at the top — over the worst of two remaining leaks on the seabed to funnel the oil through a pipe to the surface, where it would be collected by a drill ship. With efforts to stop the leak by sealing the well at its source having proved unsuccessful, the dome was considered the most immediate way to limit the leak’s damage until the well is permanently closed.

But response crews discovered that the dome’s opening was becoming clogged with gas hydrates — crystal structures that form when gas and water mix and are found in the low temperature and high pressure at the ocean floor, officials said Saturday at a news conference here.

“I wouldn’t say it has failed yet,” said Doug Suttles, the operating officer for exploration and production for BP, the company that was leasing the oil rig when it exploded April 20. “What I would say is what we attempted to do last night didn’t work.”

The hydrates accumulated into a kind of slush that clogged the opening through which the oil was to be funneled to the surface.

That is only one of the problems presented by the hydrates, Mr. Suttles said. Since hydrates are lighter than water, a large accumulation threatened to increase the buoyancy of the dome and lift it out of place.

Unclogging the dome is not difficult. It can be done by lifting the dome to shallower waters, Mr. Suttles said.

For now, the dome has been moved 650 feet on the seafloor, where it will stay while officials spend “the next two or three days” deciding how to proceed, Mr. Suttles said. Every day is critical, considering 5,000 barrels of oil are pouring into the gulf daily, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration estimates. Other experts say the flow is much greater, perhaps by an order of magnitude.

Last week, remotely controlled robots placed a specially designed valve over the end of a leaking drill pipe on the seafloor and stop oil from escaping at that point, though it did not change the overall amount flowing out.

The slick, which has already come ashore on the Chandeleur Islands off southeast Louisiana, is projected to curl west in the next three days, threatening not only the Mississippi River Delta but also miles of Louisiana coastline to the west of the river.

If the containment dome approach is not successful, other strategies will be explored. But the most dependable solution remains the digging of a nearby relief well, which would allow crews to plug the gushing cavity with heavy liquid.

Mr. Suttles said the drilling of such a well was already at 9,000 feet and proceeding ahead of plan. However, it is still months away from being in a position to stop the leak by intercepting the original well and pumping it full of concrete or other heavy liquid.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration was evaluating proposals for assistance in cleaning up the gulf from the United Nations and the European Union, as well as 14 individual countries, including Sweden, according to the State Department.

Michael Mohr, Sweden’s homeland security liaison at the embassy in Washington, said Saturday that officials in Stockholm were prepared to offer up to three skimming vessels able to collect about 50 tons of oil per hour from the sea and hold about 1,000 tons at a time. The ships could take several weeks to arrive from the Scandinavian peninsula, Mr. Mohr said. “We’re on standby,” he said.

Officials had emphasized for days the difficulty of successfully employing the containment dome. While domes have been used on leaks, they have never been used at such a depth, officials said. BP had anticipated the presence of hydrates, because the oil is mixing with seawater. Hydrates can form when methane bubbling out of the oil comes in contact with water, producing a cage of water molecules surrounding methane molecules.

To prevent that, officials had planned to circulate warm water around the pipe that connected the dome to the ship on the surface. But they had not expected hydrates to accumulate so quickly and at such high concentrations, effectively closing off the dome before the pipe was even attached. “The issue is how to keep them from forming again,” Mr. Suttles said.

BP is weighing several options, he said, including lowering the dome with the pipe attached or pumping methanol into the dome, which would prevent the formation of hydrates by acting as a sort of antifreeze.

With options narrowing, BP officials are considering solutions that would entail more risk than the containment dome. One would be to place a new blowout preventer — a stack of valves designed to shut off a well — on top of the one that now sits on the seabed and is not working.

The other option is what Mr. Suttles called a “junk shot,” which he likened to stopping up a toilet. The procedure would involve reconfiguring the blowout preventer and injecting heavy material like rubber into it, then pumping heavy drilling mud down into the well to overcome the pressure of the oil from below. That might stop the leak.

But the mud would have to be pumped through new pipes from the surface, as existing pipes that might have been used for such an operation collapsed along with the riser when the drilling rig sank April 22.

As with all the work being performed at the seabed, the preparations would have to be done by robotic vehicles in extremely challenging conditions. At a depth of 5,000 feet, the pressure is about 2,300 pounds per square inch, or more than 150 times atmospheric pressure.

Both procedures could make the problem much worse by opening the leak further. On Monday, a senior BP official told members of Congress that the well could conceivably spill as much as 60,000 barrels of oil a day, more than 10 times the estimate of the current flow.

With no quick end in sight for the oil leak, officials were scrambling to minimize its impact on land. Response crews conducted five controlled burns on Friday, skimmed thousands of barrels of oil-water mix and continued to drop chemical dispersants on the slick.

BP has been corralling booms from around the world, including Brazil, Spain, China and Britain, and pushing manufacturers to make more, with a goal of accumulating 3.5 million feet, or roughly 600 miles, of boom.

Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana said Saturday that state and local officials were in discussions with BP and the Coast Guard to use dredged material to build up barrier islands off the coast of southern Louisiana to protect fragile wetlands.

The cause of the explosion on the oil rig, the Deepwater Horizon, was still under investigation. The Minerals Management Service and the Coast Guard, the two federal agencies conducting the investigation, announced Saturday that they would hold public hearings in New Orleans on Tuesday and Wednesday.


Henry Fountain contributed reporting from New York, and Ashley Southall from Washington.



For BP, a History of Spills and Safety Lapses
By JAD MOUAWAD
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: May 8, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/09/business/09bp.html?hp


After BP’s Texas City, Tex., refinery blew up in 2005, killing 15 workers, the company vowed to address the safety shortfalls that caused the blast.

In 2007, when Tony Hayward took over as chief executive, BP settled a series of criminal charges, including some related to Texas City, and agreed to pay $370 million in fines. “Our operations failed to meet our own standards and the requirements of the law,” the company said then, pledging to improve its “risk management.”

Despite those repeated promises to reform, BP continues to lag other oil companies when it comes to safety, according to federal officials and industry analysts. Many problems still afflict its operations in Texas and Alaska, they say. Regulators are investigating a whistle-blower’s allegations of safety violations at the Atlantis, one of BP’s newest offshore drilling platforms in the Gulf of Mexico.

Now BP is in the spotlight because of the April 20 explosion of the Deepwater Horizon, which killed 11 people and continues to spew oil into the ocean. It is too early to say what caused the explosion. Other companies were also involved, including Transocean, which owned and operated the drilling rig, and Halliburton, which had worked on the well a day before the explosion.

BP, based in London, has repeatedly asserted that Transocean was solely responsible for the accident.

However, lawmakers plan to question BP executives about their overall commitment to safety at Congressional hearings this week on the Gulf incident.

“It is a corporate problem,” said Representative Bart Stupak, Democrat of Michigan, who has been particularly critical of BP’s operations in Alaska and will lead the House committee hearing, on Wednesday. “Their mentality is to get in the foxhole and batten down the hatch. It just seems there is this pattern.”

The oil industry is inherently more dangerous than many other industries, and oil companies, including BP, strive to reduce accidents and improve safety.

But BP, the nation’s biggest oil and gas producer, has a worse health, environment and safety record than many other major oil companies, according to Yulia Reuter, the head of the energy research team at RiskMetrics, a consulting group that assigns scores to companies based on their performance in various categories, including safety.

The industry standard for safety, analysts say, is set by Exxon Mobil, which displays an obsessive attention to detail, monitors the smallest spill and imposes scripted procedures on managers.

Before drilling a well, for example, it runs elaborate computer models to test beforehand what the drillers might encounter. The company trains contractors to recognize risky behavior and asks employees for suggestions on how to improve safety. It says it has cut time lost to safety incidents by 12 percent each year since 2000.

Analysts credit that focus, in part, to the aftermath of the 1989 Exxon Valdez grounding, which spilled 11 million gallons of crude oil into Prince William Sound in Alaska.

“Whatever you think of them, Exxon is now the safest oil company there is,” said Amy Myers Jaffe, an energy expert at Rice University.

In an interview last week, Mr. Hayward, BP’s chief executive, conceded that the company had problems when he took over three years ago. But he said he had instituted broad changes to improve safety, including setting up a common management system with precise safety rules and training for all facilities.

“You can’t change an organization of 100,000 people overnight, but we have made extraordinary strides in three years,” Mr. Hayward said.

Ms. Reuter agrees that the company has made improvements during that time, resulting in fewer spills and injuries.

Yet some government officials say that they are troubled by the continuation of hazardous practices at BP’s refineries and Alaskan oil operations despite warnings from regulators.

For example, last year the Occupational Safety and Health Administration found more than 700 violations at the Texas City refinery — many concerning faulty valves, which are critical for safety given the high temperatures and pressures. The agency fined BP a record $87.4 million, which was more than four times the previous record fine, also to BP, for the 2005 explosion.

Another refinery, in Toledo, Ohio, was fined $3 million two months ago for “willful” safety violations, including the use of valves similar to those that contributed to the Texas City blast.

“BP has systemic safety and health problems,” said Jordan Barab, the assistant secretary of labor for OSHA. “They need to take their intentions and apply them much more effectively on the ground, where the hazards actually lie.”

BP said it was in full compliance and had contested the OSHA findings at Texas City and Toledo. Since the 2005 blast in Texas, BP has invested $1 billion to improve the refinery, it said.

Problems also remain in Alaska. In January, leaders of the House Energy and Commerce Committee sent BP a letter highlighting “serious safety and production incidents” over the last two years in Prudhoe Bay, the nation’s largest oil field.

In October 2009, gas at the field’s central processing plant leaked because of a stuck valve. BP operators were unaware of the leak because a pilot flame was not lit and security cameras were not pointed in the right direction, the committee said.

As for its Atlantis offshore platform, BP said it had found no evidence to support a whistle-blower’s allegations that it was operating without all the right paperwork. A spokesman for the company said, “Platform personnel have access to the information they need for the safe operation of the facility.”

The identity of the whistle-blower, and the exact nature of the person’s evidence, have not been made public. The federal Minerals Management Service is conducting the investigation.

Some analysts say the safety problems indicate that BP has not yet reined in the culture of risk that prevailed under Mr. Hayward’s predecessor, John Browne, who transformed BP from a sleepy British oil producer into one of the world’s top explorers through the acquisitions of Amoco and Atlantic Richfield.

Mr. Browne set aggressive profit goals, and BP managers drastically cut costs to meet their quarterly targets. After the 2005 explosion in Texas City, investigators found that routine maintenance that might have averted the accident had been delayed because of pressure to reduce expenses.

In 2007, an independent review panel appointed by BP and led by James A. Baker III, the former secretary of state, painted a scathing portrait of cultural failure at BP, finding that the company put profits before safety.

Mr. Browne, through a representative, declined to comment for this article.

One person brought in to address BP’s lapses was Robert A. Malone, the chairman of BP America from 2006 to 2009.

“What I saw were breakdowns in a culture of safety,” said Mr. Malone. “But to say there was something systemic — I couldn’t see that.”

Until the Deepwater Horizon accident, BP had not been involved in a fatal accident in the Gulf of Mexico. But between 1996 and 2009, according to the Minerals Management Service, BP-operated platforms spilled a total of about 7,000 barrels of oil — 14 percent of the amount spilled in the Gulf by any company. In that period, BP accounted for 15 percent of the oil production in the Gulf.

Now, the government says, nearly that much oil is pouring out every day from the current spill.


Clifford Krauss, Julie Werdigier, Andrew W. Lehren and Griffin Palmer contributed reporting.