Archive for June, 2010

BP Oil Spill – News – Image Overview

Tuesday, June 22nd, 2010

Just the facts:

Oil in the Gulf, two months later – June 21 2010 – Oil spill photo gallery, disturbing shots, check it out. A picture is really worth a thousand words, and since they have a lot of them, I’ll save the words.

Gulf oil spill: BP accused of lying to Congress – June 20, 2010

BP has been accused by a senior US politician of lying to Congress to reduce its liabilities, after an internal company document showed that the oil giant’s own worst-case assessment of the size of the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico was 20 times its public estimate.

In the document, BP attempts to put a figure on the rate of oil spewing into the ocean. It notes that if the condition of the well bore deteriorates to the extent that crucial parts fall off, the rate could reach 100,000 barrels a day.

Deepwater Horizon worker claims oil rig leaking weeks before explosion – June 21 2010

An oil worker who survived the BP Deepwater Horizon explosion has claimed that the oil rig’s safety equipment was leaking several weeks before it exploded, triggering the huge spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Tyrone Benton says that he spotted a leak on the rig’s Blowout Preventer (BOP), the device that is meant to shut the well down if there is an accident. He told the BBC’s Panorama programme that both BP and Transocean, who owned the rig, were informed of the leak, and the faulty part – a control pod – was switched off rather than being repaired.

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Horizontal – Directional – drilling and cementing and casing – a short video

Monday, June 21st, 2010

Warning: technical / engineering information. Proceed only if you want to understand how this weird oil drilling stuff works. For the real basics, you can also read An Introduction to Drilling Offshore Oil Wells, a fairly simple overview of the entire drilling/exploration process.

Ok, by now you’ve probably read something about parts of oil well drilling in the media because of the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Blowout/Spill, but you are probably having trouble visualizing how the actual drilling of complex directional wells proceeds. Directional means the well bore angles in, like the current BP Gulf spill relief wells, ie, they go down vertically then angle and are redirected towards a target.

In the video below, the target is a narrow band of oil in a geological layer. It’s an animation that shows fairly clearly the steps involved in drilling a curved well. In the relief wells, the target is a roughly 16″ steel casing, 18,000 feet below sea level, and about 13,000 feet below the ocean floor.

Cool, no? In this video you see how the basic directional drill works, how casing is inserted after the horizontal drill is removed, how cement is pumped up around the casing to create a solid bond (what the CBL, cement bond log that BP decided not to do checks, ie, that the cement is fully filling the space between the drill hole and the casing pipe.

At the end you see how a drill pipe is placed horizontally in the oil deposit, with multiple holes for accessing the reservoir’s oil along a great distance. Short in the video, but can be a mile or more.

Engineering fine points and explanations of the technology on directional drilling below the fold.
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ABC Fly-over video of BP Oil Spill Area

Sunday, June 20th, 2010

This looks pretty much like a scene out of Dante’s Inferno, at best. Both the Deepwater Enterprise drill ship and the Q-4000 are shooting out flames of burning natural gas/oil+natural gas, not to mention some other pools of oil being burned at the surface.

You’ve read the stories, but take a look at this to get a real sense of what’s going on down there right now. The ABC video does a good job showing the intensity of activity in the area. Check out especially around 1:40 and 2:13 into the video for a shot of all the ships and flames.

So you understand what you’re seeing, there’s a few pools of oil being burned on the surface after being collected in containment booms. Then the long ship shooting out a relatively thin flame is the Deepwater Enterprise Drill ship, which is processing oil and flaming off the natural gas. Finally you see the squarish platform burning off a big round flame, that’s the Q-4000, which is just burning off oil/gas because it can’t do the separation/processing. Total being burned off, about 21,000 barrels per day. Leaving maybe 10,15 up to 40k barrels per day flowing into the gulf.

They are spraying water on the burning tubes to keep them from overheating, not because they are on fire 😉

Freaky stuff.

Anadarko liability in BP oil spill – Part II

Saturday, June 19th, 2010

Update on Anadarko liability in the BP Gulf Oil Spill (read part I of the Anadarko liability thread here). Things are speeding up significantly now that the full scope of the spill is being exposed. As the size increases, so too does the potential for liabilities so high that they could break most smaller companies.

Already hitting the media now Bloomberg, Anadarko Says BP Should Pay After Being Reckless :

June 19 (Bloomberg) — Anadarko Petroleum Corp., the Texas oil company that owns 25 percent of the damaged well pouring crude into the Gulf of Mexico, said BP Plc, the project’s operator, should pay the costs from the spill because it acted recklessly and unsafely at the drilling site.

BP didn’t monitor or react to warning signs as the Macondo well was drilled, Chief Executive Officer Jim Hackett said yesterday in a statement. BP is responsible for damages under such conditions, Anadarko said.

“BP’s behavior and actions likely represent gross negligence or willful misconduct and thus affect the obligations of the parties under the operating agreement,” Hackett said in the statement.

This discussion re Anadarko just occurred on theOilDrum.com’s daily discussion thread, and it’s well worth reading if you want to get further understanding of the legal games that are about to get started in earnest. The comments also explain the significance of Anaradko’s public statement if you’re not clear on what’s actually going on. (Read only subthread).

ROCKMAN on June 19, 2010 – 1:15pm Permalink | Subthread | Comments top

FOR ALL

Given the recent headlines re: Anadarko a quick primer on offshore drilling partnerships. Anadarko owns 25% of the well with a Japanese company owning 10%. BP owns the balance. BP’s partners may have been in the deal from the original lease sale or bought in later. Between the lease bonus and seismic/overhead costs the partnership could have been $50 -$100 million in the red before the first well was spudded.

THE JOA
Such drilling partnerships are governed by a very sophisticated and court tested contract: the joint operating agreement. These can be well over 100 pages long with enough detailed legalize to choke a football stadium full of attorneys. Covers virtually all possible scenarios of what might happen while drilling a well. Obligations, authorities, mandates, restrictions, etc. More later on one of THE critical aspects as to who pays for the accident.

THE AFE
When the operator (in this case BP) proposes to drill a well they prepare a rather detailed cost estimate for the project. This Authorization For Expenditure is another legal document like the JOA. The partners can sign the AFE or not. Don’t sign it and the JOA covers very specific penalties for not doing so. The AFE process follows hundreds of hours of joint meetings between the partners to work out the details. And there are always tech disagreement. And with very few exceptions the operator wins these debates. At most all the partners can do is not participate and be penalized as per the JOA.

ANADARKO: BP’S WORSE NIGHTMARE
Since I don’t have access to the history I can only speculate on the details. But to some degree these generalities are correct. BP has been criticized for making various tech decisions on the well design. Anadarko may have a long and well documented paper trail showing they had disagreed with every choice BP has made. Or to some lesser number of choices. But to whatever degree the documentation wasn’t casual. It’s done by every partners in every joint venture as a negotiation tool. By signing the AFE the partners agree to pay their share of the ultimate actual cost. But it often doesn’t go just like that. The operator (Company A)plans to do the X Procedure. Partner B strongly disagrees and says doing X is risky and could waste money/lose the well/cause a blow out. But the operator almost always wins these debates and drills the well and does X. And surprise…it was a mistake to do X and it runs the well costs up $16 million. When the well is finished the operator mails out the bill to the partners. Company’s B share (25%) is $4 million. But B sends a note back to A and says we need to chat. They get together and B hands them the documentation of how they strong disagreed with doing X so let’s just deduct our $4 million (or some lesser amount)share of that “mistake” from the final bill. This is a very common situation in all joint ventures. That’s why I’m certain Anadarko had a well documented list of potential “ammo” long before the blow out occurred. They might have had their own personnel onboard for short periods of time to document such potential screw ups. As a consultant I’ve been sent out tasked with that exact job. It is exactly as it sounds: a very serious “gotcha” game.
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The Daily Show – 8 Presidents Say Get off Oil

Friday, June 18th, 2010

You know, history is becoming tragic. Jon Stewart really nails this one. Especially depressing is the last bit where he shows Nixon as the one who did more of what is now called ‘the liberal agenda’ than we would like to think. When modernity makes Nixon look good, you know things are getting bad in this country.

From the show:

“America is an unstoppable oil-dependency breaking machine – unfortunately, the machine runs on oil”
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