Second pipe may have crippled BP well's defenses
is common to the industry at large? What amount of government oversight can increase the safety of deep-water drilling, and at what cost?
Tankersley writes that drilling experts and advocates, environmentalists and government officials agree so far on one point: No amount of regulation can absolutely preclude another drilling accident.
Some changes, though, could not wait: Interior Secretary Ken Salazar has dismantled and begun to reassemble the agency charged with drilling oversight after finding it had too cozy a relationship with the oil industry and had ceded too much safety responsibility to the drillers.
Many drilling experts say there is already ample evidence of errors designing and drilling the well beneath the Deepwater Horizon — and of officials on the rig “cutting corners” to finish a job that was expensively behind schedule. Those could be addressed, and could be penalized with civil and criminal charges, without shutting down part of the industry.
The accident “absolutely was preventable,” said Eric N. Smith, associate director of the Tulane Energy Institute. The rig, he added, lacked “a regulatory presence onboard that said, ‘I don’t care how late it is, you do it right or you go home.’”
The experts suggest that the most glaring mistake was a faulty cementing job in the well that was unable to handle the high-pressure oil and gas flow (“Faulty cement plug may have caused oil rig explosion,” 26 May 2010 HSNW).
The government could prevent similar errors by hiring experienced engineers, stationing them on drilling rigs and empowering them to shut down any operation that failed to meet established safety standards, Smith said.
Administration officials acknowledge that the federal government has not provided nearly enough money or inspectors for that level of oversight. Salazar called past and present funding levels for inspectors “woefully inadequate” and said that “you need to have the horsepower to be able to have the inspection” of deep-water drilling rigs.
“There clearly needs to be identified what, if anything, went wrong with the fail-safe system,” said Gene Beck, an assistant professor of petroleum engineering at Texas A&M University. “We need to understand, did something happen with the [blowout preventers] that we didn’t understand? Did they fail to function, in any way, shape or form, within their design parameters?”
Regulators could recommend additional backup systems, such as a second blowout preventer or a relief well drilled in conjunction with the initial well.
The other key to minimizing the risks of a similar blowout is economic. Tankersley quotes Beck to say that requiring a concurrent relief well with every project could drain any profit from drilling. Smith, along with a chorus of public officials on the Gulf Coast, warns that Salazar’s six-month moratorium could drive the exploration industry out of the gulf permanently.
Chu said scientists won’t solve the mystery of the Deepwater Horizon — and absorb its lessons — until they exhume the blowout preventer from the seafloor and break it down.
Still, economists are beginning to tally the costs of possible reforms. A Washington-based think tank, Resources for the Future, released an analysis suggesting that if the United States brought deep-water safety regulations up to the stricter standards of nations such as Norway, the cost of a typical drilling project would rise about 10% to 20%.
