or, Take On What You Can Do and Leave The Rest

On 20 April 2010, the Deepwater Horizon drilling unit exploded in the Gulf of Mexico. The subsequent oil spill seriously impacted the environment. Commentators suggested that green project management could have prevented the disaster, made it easier to repair, or allowed key parties to communicate better.

The semi-submersible mobile offshore drilling unit was owned and operated by Transocean, under contract to BP.Eleven people died in the accident.

With a failed blowout preventer (BOP) on the seabed more than 1 000 metres below the surface, the oil well continued to blow gas and oil into the ocean for weeks, until it was successfully capped and an intercept well was in place.

In order to appreciate the difficulty that was facing the drillers, quite apart from the need to clean up the mess, it is necessary to understand what the problem was all about.

James Greener, a financial analyst who is also a physicist with experience on drilling platforms off the South African Cape coast, describes what happened:

“Drillers employ a bit on the end of a pipe (called the ‘drill string’). Cuttings generated by the bit are lifted from the hole by pumping drilling fluid (mud) down the pipe. Return flow is up the ‘annulus’ between the pipe and the rock wall.

At the surface, cuttings are sieved from the mud, which is then reused. The total volume of mud in the system is a guide to the ‘quality’ of the hole.

A hole that is caving in or ‘washing out’ requires more mud than that expected for a perfect hole.

Mud’s other functions include lubrication, and the provision of a hydrostatic column that provides a down-hole pressure greater than the pressure in any reservoir encountered by the hole. Density of the mud is carefully monitored to ensure this happens.

Sometimes there is a nasty surprise, and the first sign is that the mud flow from the annulus is greater than the flow being injected down the drill string. This means fluids are entering the hole from rock somewhere down below.

If left alone, the situation accelerates until the mud in the annulus is flushed out and replaced by an uncontrolled oil/gas flow.

They are in trouble!

Blowout preventers are designed to deal with this sign of trouble.

The actual well head is a doughnut-shaped slab of concrete and steel, placed before drilling. The BOP is bolted to the well head. Its simplest form is a length of (vertical) pipe through which the drill string must pass before starting to drill.

The BOP supports a set of horizontal sliding rams that can be closed around the drill pipe and so seal off the annulus. Returning mud flow is now shut off and no longer flows freely out of the top of the BOP and off to the mud system. Instead, the flow of returning mud is allowed to flow only through a valve-controlled manifold that forms part of the BOP and is situated below the ‘pipe rams’.

The next step is to mix up denser mud and carefully circulate that into the system to regain ‘control’ of the well. Then the rams are released, and drilling continues.

There are other rams on the BOP stack, some of which are supposed to close the well completely and others that can cut (!) the drill pipe. They are very cleverly designed but, of course, must work flawlessly to be of any use. Hydrostatic control is the vital part.

In offshore drilling, the wellhead and BOP sit on the sea floor and a very large ‘riser pipe’ runs from the top of the BOP to above the sea surface and up almost to the drill floor where it is kept in tension by a fancy system that compensates for the rise and fall of the drilling platform.

The BOP and other wellhead functions are remotely operated by hydraulics. Other long pipes provide connection to the various manifolds that need to be used when performing a controlled mud circulation via the BOP.

The Deepwater Horizon blowout began when there was no drill string assembled and down the well! This is really bad, as there was no way of circulating denser mud down-hole.

Then, when the oil and gas reached the surface, it ignited and burnt the rig – destroying the tensioning system.

The rise pipe buckled and collapsed onto the sea floor, where it ruptured near the place it was attached to the BOP. There was now no way of getting any pipe INTO the well.

The BOP rams and valves appear to have failed to work fully. Their control system was gone, along with the drilling rig...”

The uncaptured oil and gas swiftly repositioned itself on another part of our planet. Most of it was gas, which entered the atmosphere.

To think that BP might have anticipated this occurring, is facile.

Rich Maltzman and Dave Shirley (Energy Forecast magazine, February 2011) assert that “taken collectively and holistically, an intense focus on green thinking would have had a tremendously positive impact on the disaster.”

Perhaps. What happened after the disaster was anything but collective and holistic. The United States president Barack Obama beat up on BP, and US congressmen shouted down and humiliated the chief executive officer of BP, Tony Hayward.

All the while, BP was trying to control the well, clear up the mess and mourn their dead.

A former president of Shell Oil Robert Hofmeister has described the almost unbelievable bureaucratic maze to which oil-drilling companies are subjected before they are permitted to drill. The system is driven by politics and partisanship, not rational control.

Oil companies can pay billions of US dollars over tens of years to the US government for leases for exploration rights, only to have their applications to drill blocked by another government department.

Interference results in extremely high costs of production, so that companies that operate in the US have far lower profits than those which drill in environmentally unregulated countries such as Saudi Arabia and Angola, which belong to the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries cartel, and which control the ultimate global oil price.

The end result is that all oil products in the world are more expensive to the ultimate users: the people like us who use it for land transport, cooking, heating and flying.

Maltzman and Shirley suggest that an oil company’s project charter templates include a section on environmental concerns. This is a good thing. But for them to say that putting such concerns in the charter would have allowed BP to carry out mitigations such as promptly purchasing “ocean therapy” boats is, at worst, cynical and at best opportunistic.

Maltzman and Shirley mention a BOP failure accident that occurred in 1979, asserting that this proves the system was not “fail safe”.

If, for more than 40 years, no such similar accidents have occurred, this would suggest to me low risk.

During that same period, large numbers of commercial aircraft have crashed, their wreckage causing varying impacts on human life and the environment. Would Maltzman and Shirley dare to suggest that clean-up crews be positioned at points all over the globe where such aviation accidents may occur?

Every US authority, from the Navy, Justice Department, Coast Guard and Department of the Environment, through to local police departments, got in to the Gulf of Mexico clean-up act – often taking contradictory actions.

What the whole exercise really showed was a lack of overall national co-ordination, at a far higher level than that of the oil drillers. One can but wonder, if BP had failed to stop the flow, how the US Navy would have handled it.

Everything humans do is a risk. The intelligent handling of risk makes progress possible. Sometimes, not accepting a fairly high level of risk may result in one exposing one’s efforts to a future catastrophe.

But whose task is it to handle this risk?

It seems as though our present handling of energy production and its risks and alternatives are exposing us to potential future catastrophe. Supplies of energy could become inadequate for demand. Even exorbitantly high prices may not ensure their supply.

I submit that national effort and the regulatory regime is the level at which project managers should focus.

In Megaprojects and Risk, Bent Flyvbjerg proposed the type of planning and decision-making that could be used to improve the regulatory regime for very large projects.

In basic terms, these involve:

• Transparency

• Performance specification

• Explicit regulation

• Risk capital

Energy production certainly involves large projects.

Project managers should not be scrabbling around, putting on patches and making unproductive obstructions to what are truly global megaprojects.

They should aim higher and plan on strategic outcomes, at a level where outcomes, efforts, risks and comparatives
are considered.

As Pogo the Possum said: “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”

Ronald Smith, PCPM

References

Greener, James 2010: Tidemarks newsletter. Durban – personal communication with author

Hofmeister, John, 2010: “Why We Hate the Oil Companies”. Palgrave Macmillan,
New York

Maltzman, Rich; Shirley, Dave: Feb 2011 “Don’t Kill the World” article in “Energy Forecast” – Cape Media, Rondebosch

Flyvbjerg, Bent; Bruzelius, Nils; Rothengatter, Werner: 2003 Mega Projects and Risk. Cambridge University Press

Kelly, Walt. 1970 : “Pogo the Possum” poster for Earth Day. Post Hall Syndicate