Our New Book on Why the BP Blowout Occurred and What We Can Learn from It
Posted September 21, 2010 in Moving Beyond Oil, Reviving the World's Oceans
Over the weekend, crews finally succeeded in plugging BP’s blown-out oil well once and for all. Workers pumped mud and cement through the newly secured relief well and finally sealed this disastrous wound in the ocean floor for good.
As we come to the close of the Macondo well—even as its fallout will continue to haunt the Gulf of Mexico for years to come—we are wise to examine how we got here.
What happened on the Deepwater Horizon to create this catastrophe? What drove its engineers to cut corners and make bad design decisions? And how did our nation arrive at a point where recklessness in pursuit of oil is condoned and rewarded?
I explore these questions in a new book, In Deep Water: The Anatomy of a Disaster, the Fate of the Gulf, and How to End our Oil Addiction.
I wrote the book, along with my NRDC colleague Bob Deans, because we believe the country has paid a high price for the mistakes that led to this disaster, and we must learn the lessons that have come at such a grievous cost.
The simple fact is most of us have little or no idea what is required to provide the oil we depend upon to power our cars, airplanes, and trucks with cheap and dependable fuel.
But increasingly, our need for oil—and the enormous profits that come from supplying it—has driven energy companies to push the limits of what’s safe and reliable and to take extraordinary and ever-increasing risks, often without an operative Plan B.
Many oil companies have come to play fast and loose with environmental and public health safeguards. But in the case of the Macondo well, BP seems to have made a number of especially poor decisions that resulted in an epic disaster and the need to plug a relief well five months later.
Instead of choosing the safest—and most common—method of securing the Deepwater Horizon rig to the bottom of the Macondo well, BP decided to save $7 million by going with the cheaper option. Instead of ensuring its pipe was properly placed by using the recommended 21 centralizers, BP decided it didn’t want to hold up operations and would make do with only the 6 centralizers onboard the rig. And instead of performing a standard safety test to make sure the cement collar it used to fill gaps in the well was tight, BP chose to save $128,000 by sending the test crew home before they had done their examination.
The Macondo well blew out eleven hours later.
For too long, we have turned a blind eye to the risks energy companies are taking in order to feed our addiction to oil. But the BP blowout has ripped the blinders off.
It has shined a spotlight on the dark underbelly of what our addiction entails—drilling up to six miles below the water’s surface, cutting corners to pad profits, corrupting government agencies tasked with overseeing the industry.
There are only two rational responses to this state of affairs: reduce the risk and reduce the need for the activity.
In our book, we show how America can make offshore drilling safer by investing in the safeguards we need, the institutions required to enforce those safeguards, and the professionals we can count on to protect our safety, health, and environment.
We also show how America ingenuity can break our addiction to oil and begin moving this country to safer, cleaner, more sustainable sources of power and fuel. Oil is a precious an extraordinarily precious resource. We should be using it as efficiently as we possibly can, not wasting it by burning it in outdated engines and old technologies.
These are some of the lessons we can learn from the brief, torturous life of BP’s Macondo well.
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Comments
Jim Bullis, Miastrada Company — Sep 23 2010 01:45 PM
Can you imagine how excited an engineer might be to read what 'lawyers, lobbyists, scientists and media people think about why the BP disaster occurred?
As I recall, NRDC scarcely notied the problem until I started hammering on this blog to get you to call up your friends in Washington to get some appropriate level of action going.
I think the evidence of five months of gushing of both oil and dispersant clearly shows that no such action came about.
The response seems to have been five months of conjectural explanations of what was going on at a sixth grade science level while 'scientists' stood aside to let BP bungle along.
It is not that scientists are unable to learn quickly, but when a disaster strikes, I have to say, it is time to call in people that understand the applied science basics of the industrial world. And by the way, corporate management is usually not a good source for solving problems either.
Jim Bullis, Miastrada Company — Sep 23 2010 02:16 PM
While I might disparage NRDC in regard to engineering expertise, it still is an organization that serves a valuable purpose.
In this respect the aid of NRDC could be very important in relation to the forest issue. I share an article written elsewhere on the rain forest preservation subject:
Preserving the rain forests is undoubtedly a good idea, but it always makes me wonder about good things that other people need to do.
And perhaps we also might wonder why the rainforests are good for the global climate, but an expansion of the Northern Boreal Forests will not also be good, where the likelihood that global warming itself will cause such an expansion of the Northern growing region is not given much credence. But not to wait for natural developments, given that we need to fuel our developed world now with the stuff that got us here, perhaps we should get to work on this ourselves.
Let's first look at how not to solve the problem. The EPA is showing its planning work where the impact of their approach to controlling CO2 is made clear with their conclusion that 'carbon' capture is estimated to cost up to $95 per ton of CO2. Given that this translates to 12/44 ton of elemental carbon, or about 6/11 ton of Powder River Basin coal we can expect the present cost of using a ton of that coal to go from $12 spot price plus $8 for transportation totalling $20 now to a new figure including added 'capture' costs only, that would be a total of around $200 per ton of coal used.
For those of us who look for mitigation in ways that look possible and even beneficial in our economic ecosystem, perhaps some consideration might be given to a proposition not much discussed as of yet. The IPCC seems to generally endorse things of this sort, but there has not been anything discussed of a scale that could get the job done.
I particularly react to the ill founded plans emerging from the EPA to require CO2 (they think it is carbon) to be captured from power plant stacks and pounded into holes in the ground. Thus motivated, the following seems interesting:
Barely noticed, if at all, the Chinese showed intention of significant action against CO2 emissions in their forestation plan. We in the USA could take a hint about how to actually accomplish something without wrecking our fundamental industrial base.
President Hu said, “— we will energetically increase forest carbon — we will endeavor to increase forest coverage by 40 million hectares (2.5 acres) and forest stock volume by 1.3 billion cubic meters by 2020 from 2005 levels.” This was reported by Joe Romm at his ‘climateprogress’ web site. See – http://climateprogress.org/2009/09/23/are-chinese-emissions-pledges-a-ga...
This part of the speech went un-noticed on the particular Joe Romm discussion. However, it seems to contain the critical answer regarding ‘carbon’ capture and sequestration. For us to do it here in the USA it could turn out to costing less than nothing, and IT COULD ACTUALLY ACCOMPLISH THE FULL SCALE TASK.
A clue about how China might accomplish might be seen in the water policy behind their construction of the world’s largest dam.
In the USA we could establish on barren desert lands, standing forests with massive ‘forest stock volume’ which would capture CO2 from coal on a roughly ton of forest stock for a ton of coal basis. (Powder River Basin coal is the reference here.) I point out, we are talking about standing forest. It would only require water and a little good sense.
Good sense is necessary to negotiate North American water distribution that would bring excess water from the far North, yes Canada, down through the USA and Mexico. Yes, Canada would get a share of the productive benefits of this new water arrangement, and it goes far beyond forest establishment.
Of course Canada would get credit toward their green pledges, and to sweeten the deal, we could tell the EPA to leave off haranguing them about their oil sands CO2 emissions.
And certainly there would be a need for due consideration for the balance of the things in the Arctic region; shifting water away from Hudsons Bay would mean less heat would be carried there by north flowing rivers, and more salinity would develop in those waters. The net effect would no doubt be unresolvable, so perhaps the water would better come from watersheds that open to more open ocean regions.
After we get our North American house in order, perhaps we might then get busy minding the business of the countries that preside over the rain forests.