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By Kathrine Schmidt

HOUMA — Oilfield executives Monday assured members of Congress that new equipment to bring deepwater blowouts under control is ready and capable of subduing a Macondo-like disaster in days or weeks instead of the three months that BP’s rogue well spewed last summer.

But members of the U.S. House of Representatives Natural Resources Committee peppered officials from the Exxon-led Marine Well Containment Co. and the Houston-based Helix Corp. about just how quickly the equipment could be brought to bear and where the U.S. stands on offshore safety.

“If there were another event tomorrow, how quickly could the well be capped?” Chairman Doc Hastings, a Republican congressman from Washington, told Marty Massey, CEO of the Marine Well Containment Company and Owen Kratz, CEO of Helix.

Hastings asked the companies to continue to explain the systems to the public and inspire confidence in their capabilities.

Kratz said the Helix system could get a runaway deepwater well under control in as little as four days if the well’s integrity is stable and 10-17 days if there are problems with the casing, as happened with BP’s Macondo well.

The containment company, which now has 10 members and will represent about $1 billion in investment, has its interim system prepared, made up of a “capping stack” that can shut the well or funnel oil to the surface. The system can handle 60,000 barrels of fluid per day at depths of up to 8,000 feet. The final version will be able to handle 100,000 barrels per day at up to 10,000-foot depths, the company says.

Committee members also tried to determine how the U.S. containment capacity compares to standards in Brazil, the North Sea and Africa and whether it would be necessary to pass laws relating to containment requirements.

Original Article

The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday on the aging oil and gas production infrastructure off the Louisiana coast and how it could cause more of a problem for the state than deepwater drilling fiascos like the BP oil rig explosion and spill.

The offshore industry in Louisiana dates back to the 1940s and many wells and platforms are decades old.

Of the 81 accidents on these facilities reported to the federal government in the past three years, the Journal’s analysis shows that in more than one-quarter of the cases the incident was related to the age of the structure.

The story is accompanied by an interactive map showing the growth of the industry over the decades as well as the location of the wells by the major companies.

Original Article

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The accident record should be considered as a warning of future disasters in light of the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster, said Anne Rolfes, founder of the New Orleans-based Bucket Brigade.

“What we’re finding in refineries’ own data is that they’re having 10 accidents a week,” she said. “That’s a big red flag to us. We don’t want to have another situation like BP, where we have to stand up and say, ‘We told you so.’”

Doing a better job of addressing the causes of those accidents, by instituting better planning for serious weather events and better maintenance programs for aging piping and equipment, could result in major investments in Louisiana by the refineries’ parent companies that would also add jobs, they say.

Rolfes said the report, “Common Ground II: Why Cooperation to Reduce Accidents at Louisiana Refineries is Needed Now,” is the second in an attempt to counter what she said has been a “knee-jerk response from government and industry that any source of attention to this problem will be bad for the economy.”

Chris John, executive director of the Louisiana Mid-Continent Oil and Gas Association, which represents many of the refinery companies, did not respond to a request for a comment on the report. Instead, he cited his organization’s refusal to meet with federal Environmental Protection Agency, Bucket Brigade and other environmental groups following release of the organization’s first Common Ground report in February because that report contained numerous errors, and because of concerns about ongoing litigation against individual refineries and potential anti-trust litigation against the industry.

In his letter to EPA officials, John pointed out that the industry was under great pressure from the federal government and state governments to get its refineries running after hurricanes, when many of the releases occurred.

Officials with the state Department of Environmental Quality raised questions about some of the numbers in the report, and defended the accident responses of both the department and the refineries.

For instance, companies are required to routinely update reports to the state that outline what might be a worst-case accident, said Kermit Wittenburg, technical advisor for the department’s air permitting program.

“They have to come up with scenarios and look for engineering techniques in order to minimize or eliminate as many as possible,” he said. “The regulations also say that, hey, if something happens, you need to go back and rethink your plans and set up different situations and methodologies, based on your experience.”

chalmette_refining.jpgView full sizeMatthew Hinton, The Times-Picayune archiveChalmette Refining was photographed Sept. 6.

The accident rate of 10 a week was based on information reported to the state Department of Environmental Quality from 2005 to 2009 by the refineries. ExxonMobil’s behemoth refinery in Baton Rouge reported 569 accidents for the five years, the most in the state and representing more than two accidents a week. Ranking second was the company’s Chalmette Refining Co. in St. Bernard Parish, with 419 accidents. A Citgo Corp. refinery in Lake Charles tallied 386 accidents, ranking it third.

The report concluded, however, that refinery accident data is being underreported, and surmised that the number of accidents is likely far higher than shown in the report.

The ExxonMobil Baton Rouge refinery, Chalmette Refining and the Citgo refinery also ranked first, second and third, respectively, in failing to list the cause of their accidents in their reports to state officials.

“In explaining the cause of an accident, the most common response given by Louisiana refineries was ‘No Information Given.’ Such imprecise reporting is not only evidence of a poorly run refinery, but also inhibits understanding of the cause and potential solutions of accidents,” the report said.

The second-biggest cause of accidents was equipment failures, followed by failures of piping or tubing.

The report cited Chalmette Refining as an example, with 11 percent of its accidents and its emissions into the air resulting from problems with piping or tubing.

“In 2009, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration cited Chalmette Refining for ignoring nine safety recommendations on piping,” the report said. “The OSHA investigators found that problems with pipes ‘were still not resolved six years later.’”

Following the death of Chalmette Refining employee Gregory Starkey on Oct. 6, the company reported that the pipe Starkey was working on had been temporarily clamped for two weeks: “Gas line … started leaking sour gas to the atmosphere through a previously installed clamp.”

The report blamed part of the problem on deferred maintenance and industry cost-cutting that has resulted in the layoff of older, more experienced workers.

The hiring of new, younger workers also has resulted in a workforce not willing to press management by taking “stop work” measures — where any employee believing there’s an unsafe condition can call for a plant shutdown — for fear of losing their jobs, said United Steelworkers staff representative John Link Jr.

“Just saying you have stop-work authority and actually having people that will step up and risk losing their job to stop that work, that’s something else,” he said.

Many of the accidents result in the rerouting of toxic and flammable material to flares, which burn it off, either during the accident itself or while restarting operations.

The report recommended that the industry implement changes that would minimize the amount of material shunted to flares by capturing and recycling gases. It said such practices already have been adopted in California’s Bay Area Quality Management District in San Francisco, by Lion Oil Co.’s El Dorado, Ark., refinery, and by Dow Chemical Co. in Freeport, Texas.

It also recommended a variety of measures to reduce weather-related accidents, including building backup power systems and revised guidelines on when and how to shut down facilities prior to hurricanes.

One of the biggest weather-related chemical releases occurred when Hurricane Gustav hit the ExxonMobil refinery in Baton Rouge, said Mariko Toyoji, a Bucket Brigade research assistant.

“They couldn’t decide whether to shut down or not, and that’s understandable, but they decided not to and a cooling tower blew down and almost 600,000 pounds of sulphur dioxide (was released),” Toyoji said. “Understandably, it’s a complicated situation because it’s a storm. But there’s no evidence that after that problem, they then went back and analyzed what we can do better.”

A spokesman for ExxonMobil said he was unable to address the report, but defended the company’s record.

“While I won’t speak directly about this report, I can say that ExxonMobil’s goal is to drive injuries, illnesses and operational incidents with environmental impact to zero,” said William Hinson, public affairs manager for Chalmette Refining.

“We take our compliance responsibilities seriously and we routinely report emissions to the EPA and the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality, as appropriate, in a consistent and timely manner and comply with all laws, regulations and permits,” he said.

The report also recommended upgrading emergency response measures to assure that neighbors adjacent to the plants are provided with the same information as first-responders.

Original Article

A task force of municipal, parish and state emergency responders, department heads and elected officials are formulating a plan of action should any other emergency situations happen in the wake of the Haynesville Shale development.

About 80 attended a four-hour meeting Tuesday, where responsibilities of each agency were outlined and goals were set. The group will reassemble in about three months for a table top exercise utilizing a real scenario to put their plans to the test.

Caddo Sheriff Steve Prator organized the group in response to problems that developed in late April when a natural gas well blowout in south Caddo Parish sent about 200 families from their homes — some of whom had to stay away for three weeks. Prator was not shy then in venting frustration about an apparent lack of coordination among the various agencies involved and difficulties in getting correct answers to the affected public.

His one wish then was answered in Tuesday’s meeting with the Governor’s Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness getting the designation to serve as a single spokesman for all of the state agencies such as the Department of Environmental Quality, Department of Health and Hospitals and Department of Natural Resources at future incident scenes.

It’s important to make sure a response plan is in place, Prator said, as drilling pulls closer to more heavily populated areas. Several natural gas wells are planned for the Greenwood area. A blowout there on the magnitude of what happened this spring could force an evacuation of 60,000 people.

“What are we going to do with them?” said Prator, noting that’s more than has been handled in hurricane evacuations.

But the task force will work toward a solution to a massive displacement as part of its response plan.

“I’m very pleased they all responded like they did,” the sheriff said of the meeting’s attendees, which included the Shreveport and Bossier City mayors, police chiefs, fire chiefs, representatives from surrounding parishes and state department heads.

Original Article

The extensive pipeline system that moves oil, gas and waste throughout BP’s operations in Alaska is plagued by severe corrosion, according to an internal maintenance report generated four weeks ago.

The document, obtained by the journalism group ProPublica, shows that as of Oct. 1, at least 148 BP pipelines on Alaska’s North Slope received an “F-rank” from the company. According to BP oil workers, that means inspections have determined that more than 80 percent of the pipe wall is corroded and could rupture. Most of those lines carry toxic or flammable substances. Many of the metal walls of the F-ranked pipes are worn to within a few thousandths of an inch of bursting, according to the document, risking an explosion or spills.

BP oil workers also say that the company’s fire and gas warning systems are unreliable, that the giant turbines that pump oil and gas through the system are aging and that some oil and waste holding tanks are verging on collapse.

In an e-mail, BP Alaska spokesman Steve Rinehart said the company has “an aggressive and comprehensive pipeline inspection and maintenance program,” which includes pouring millions of dollars into the system and regularly testing for safety, reliability and corrosion. He said that although an F-rank is serious, it does not necessarily mean there is a current safety risk.

Rinehart added that the company will immediately reduce the operating pressure in worrisome lines until it completes repairs. “We will not operate equipment or facilities that we believe are unsafe,” he said.

Rinehart did not respond to questions about what portion of its extensive pipeline system was affected or whether 148 F-ranks were more or less than normal, except to say that the company has more than 1,600 miles of pipelines and does more than 100,000 inspections a year.

In 2006, two spills from corroded pipes in Alaska placed the company’s maintenance problems in the national spotlight. At the time, BP temporarily shut down all transmission of oil from the North Slope to the continental United States, cutting off about 8 percent of the nation’s oil supply, while it examined its pipeline system.

Photos taken by employees in the Prudhoe Bay drilling field this summer, and viewed by ProPublica, show sagging and rusted pipelines, some dipping in gentle U-shapes into pools of water and others sinking deeply into thawing permafrost. Marc Kovac, a BP mechanic and welder, said that some of the pipes have hundreds of patches on them and that BP’s efforts to rehabilitate the lines were not funded well enough to keep up with their rate of decline.

“They’re going to run this out as far as they can without leaving one dollar on the table when they leave,” Kovac said.

BP Alaska’s operating budget is private, so the picture of its maintenance program is incomplete. But documents obtained by ProPublica show that BP has pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into maintenance and equipment upgrades on the North Slope since the 2006 spills. In 2007, BP’s maintenance budget in Alaska was nearly $195 million, four times what it was in 2004, according to a company presentation. In 2009, $49 million was budgeted to replace and upgrade systems that detect fires and gas leaks alone.

Despite the investment, workers say that the capabilities of equipment of all types continue to be stretched and that maintenance plans set years ago remain incomplete.

BP employees told ProPublica that several of the 120 turbines used to compress gas and push it through the pipelines have been modified to run at higher stress levels and higher temperatures than they were originally designed to handle. They also said giant tanks that hold hundreds of thousands of gallons of toxic fluids and waste are sagging under the load of corrosive sediment and could collapse.

“When you make a complaint about it, rather than fix it right, they come up with another Band-Aid,” said Kris Dye, a BP oil worker and United Steelworkers representative on the North Slope. “It’s very frustrating.”

One critical maintenance issue concerns the replacement of the warning systems used to alert workers to a gas leak that could lead to an explosion.

The need to replace the gas detectors was made a priority in 2001 in an internal BP report that said oil field technicians were “very concerned about continuing degradation of system reliability, and the ability of these systems to protect the workforce.”

Nine years later, outdated systems to detect fire and leaked gas remain in place at some of BP’s largest and most important plants, including the Central Power Station, several drill pads and two flow stations that route oil and gas into the pipeline system.

Many of the detection systems are obsolete – the manufacturers that made them are shuttered – so replacement parts are hard to come by, said Kovac, the mechanic. More important, the systems have to be shut down every time BP conducts maintenance on its facilities and pipelines, because the methods used to scan the equipment for flaws have been known to trigger the ultraviolet detectors that set off the fire and gas alarms.

As a result, BP technicians on the North Slope say, the detectors at some facilities are shut down nearly a third of time. When they are off-line, the company relies on what employees refer to as “human fire detectors” – a foot patrol that sniffs for flammable materials and listens for the hiss of broken pipes.

BP has been upgrading the detection systems in recent years and has installed new ones at several facilities, including the buildings that house its workers. But many important facilities remain on the list.

According to people inside BP who declined to be identified because they were not authorized to speak about company affairs, replacing all the detections systems could take nearly 20 years at the current rate of investment.

“They say, ‘Yep, in the next few years we’re going to upgrade all this fire and gas stuff and it’s going to be more dependable,’ and blah, blah, blah,” said Glenn Trimmer, a BP technician who works on the Slope. “Well, after a few decades, I’m not buying it anymore. We can’t even maintain the equipment that we have.”

A close call in 2007 illustrates the risks presented by aging facilities with limited alarm systems. In August of that year, a giant turbine used to compress gas before it is pumped back through the company’s pipelines caught fire inside BP’s Gathering Center 1 after an oil hose ruptured and spewed flammable liquid across the motor. A mechanic on patrol in the facility – seeing smoke – fled the room as the turbine burst into flames. But the automatic fire and gas alarms were never triggered.

A subsequent investigation by Alaska state authorities found that a ruptured hydraulic oil hose was jury-rigged in a position that chafed against the turbine’s hot engine. The probe also found that the facility’s fire and gas detectors – which Kovac and Dye likened to life boats on a cruise ship – were not on at the time.

The turbine fire was potentially serious not only because no alarms were sounded but because the turbine engines operate near gas and oil pipelines that could be detonated by an uncontrolled fire. The incident was classified by BP Alaska’s then-president, Doug Suttles, as a “high potential” event, and news of it was distributed around the BP organization globally as a precaution.

Yet this year, even before the enormous costs of the Gulf oil spill created an estimated $30 billion in BP liabilities, the company was eking out more “efficiencies” in its Alaska budget. It said it would maintain record high funding for new projects and major repairs while reducing its budget for regular maintenance, according to a letter that BP Alaska President John Minge sent to Congress in February. The letter said holding-tank inspections will be deferred and replacement of one pipeline will be postponed; flows through that line will be reduced “to mitigate corrosion.”

Original Article

There is not just one piece of good news in the lifting of a moratorium on deep-water drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. There is also reason to believe that drilling will be safer in future.

No more blowouts.

That should be the motto going forward.

Across the political spectrum in Louisiana, public officials took up the cause of the energy industry, in large part for good reasons.

The moratorium in the wake of the BP rig disaster was a broad-brush approach to a real problem. We would have been much happier if there had been no formal moratorium and instead a reasonable but stepped-up pace of inspections and safety improvements.

However, the over-the-top criticism of Department of Interior officials and President Barack Obama was always a bit, well, over the top. There is no way that the U.S. department — a lax regulator of offshore drilling for at least the past decade — could have avoided taking a long and hard look at drilling practices. The nation demanded it in the wake of the BP disaster.

Eleven workers died in that blast. That’s not a situation that can be shrugged off by a rightly embarrassed regulatory agency.

The head of Interior, Secretary Ken Salazar, said he is now confident that new efforts by industry and closer regulation of drilling will improve safety. That is the second piece of good news in the announcement that the moratorium is ending.

Louisiana needs a thriving and safe drilling industry. Both parts of that equation are important.

Original Article

David Hammer, The Times-Picayune David Hammer, The Times-Picayune

A top engineer for BP’s doomed Macondo oil well made several contradictory statements Thursday as he defended decisions he and his colleague made to place structures and equipment inside the miles-long hole under the Gulf of Mexico.

oil-spill-hearings-oct7-leader.JPGView full sizePatrick Semansky, Associated PressDeepwater Horizon joint investigation board co-chairman Capt. Hung Nguyen speaks with BP Macondo well team leader John Guide during Guide’s testimony at the oil spill investigation hearings held by the Coast Guard and the Bureau of Ocean Management Regulation and Enforcement in Metairie on Thursday.

Halliburton, the contractor BP hired to pour cement in the notoriously wild well to seal its walls, had warned that more devices called centralizers were needed to reduce risk of an incursion of the kind of gas that eventually blew out, destroyed the Deepwater Horizon rig above, killed 11 workers and set off the worst oil spill in U.S. history.

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But BP engineering team leader Gregg Walz testified Thursday that he felt they would be able to get a safe cement seal along the walls of the well by simply spreading out the six centralizers they already had, rather than by increasing the number to 21, as Halliburton suggested.

With Transocean lawyer Brad Brian, Halliburton attorney Don Godwin and Coast Guard Capt. Mark Higgins questioning his logic, Walz said he his colleague John Guide came to the conclusion that simply spreading out the six devices would “honor the modeling” from Halliburton that said 21 were needed.

At first, Walz said Halliburton didn’t raise concerns about the decision to go with fewer centralizers, but under questioning from Godwin, Walz acknowledged that Halliburton engineer Jesse Gagliano came to him in person April 18 to make sure he had seen a report warning of possible severe gas flow if they went with seven or fewer centralizers.

Notes by internal BP investigators, which Godwin read to the board Thursday, said that Walz then went to Guide to warn him about the gas flow issue. Guide previously testified that he never was notified about the gas flow warning and didn’t read the report that Gagliano sent him via e-mail April 18.

Asked about that apparent contradiction Thursday, Walz said he couldn’t remember if what the BP investigators’ notes portrayed was correct.

Walz appeared to twist his testimony when he said a decision to use a special, relatively new type of foam cement made the six centralizers comply with the modeling. Godwin pointed out that the decision to use the special nitrogen-infused cement came in March, well before Halliburton ever ran the modeling in the first place.

Walz said he stood by his decision to use six centralizers because any problems they might have discovered by testing the cement’s integrity could then by fixed with more cement.

But Walz and Guide, who also testified Thursday, were part of a group of BP leaders who subsequently decided not to run the definitive test of cement integrity, called a cement bond log. They had hired a team from contractor Schlumberger and flew them out to the rig to do the test, but it was never done.

The test itself would have cost another $128,000 and taken another two days or so, at a cost of about $1 million a day. Other testimony this week established the well was already $54 million over-budget, and Walz and Guide testified Thursday that BP employees are graded every year based on how much money they save the company.

Walz acknowledged under questioning that BP’s own internal protocols require a definitive test of cement integrity, such as a cement bond log, whenever cement covers less than 1,000 feet above a reservoir of oil. He admitted the Macondo well had only 920 feet of cement there, but he decided that was close enough “to the intent” of the rule, and he said no definitive test of cement integrity was ever done.

joint-investigation-hearings-metairie-walz.jpgView full sizePatrick Semansky, The Associated PressBP PLC drilling engineer Greg Walz said he and his colleague John Guide came to the conclusion that simply spreading out the six devices would ‘honor the modeling’ from Halliburton that said 21 were needed.

Walz arranged for the delivery of 15 additional centralizers to the rig to get up to Halliburton’s recommended number of 21, but decided not to use them when he was told they were the wrong type.

Again, he was contradicted in other testimony. Last month, Kent Corser, who led the well design portion of BP’s internal investigation, told a National Academy of Engineering panel that the centralizers were in fact the correct type and BP leaders on the rig incorrectly reported back to Houston that they were another kind with which the company had experienced problems.

Daniel Oldfather, the contractor from Weatherford who was sent to install the centralizers, testified Thursday that he had the devices with him when he arrived by helicopter April 16, but ancillary equipment he needed to do the job never made it.

Meanwhile, BP had chosen to line the well with a series of telescoping metal casings that the company acknowledged gave them fewer barriers against gas flowing into a side space and blowing out the well.

The internal BP investigation has concluded the gas didn’t get into the well through the sides, but through the center, so it concludes the lining design isn’t a significant factor. But Guide, Walz and others were concerned enough at the time that they considered suspending operations altogether, Walz said. In the end, they chose not to stop work and then chose the cheaper of two options for lining the well’s walls.

In an internal BP document, one of Walz’s employees, Mark Hafle, stated the choice of that well design would save the company as much as $10 million.

Questioning of Guide was limited Thursday. He had already spent a full day on the witness stand, and the panel co-chairman, Coast Guard Capt. Hung Nguyen, asked lawyers to respect that he had voluntarily returned. Nguyen noted Guide must be under a lot of pressure after other BP officials fingered him as the man ultimately responsible for the controversial well plan.

Four key BP employees have declined to testify before the board, with three of them citing their Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate themselves, including Hafle, who testified once and then refused to come back for a second round of questioning.

Original Article

It has been nearly six months since the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded April 20, killing 11 workers and touching off a spill that spewed millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

But the oil-and-gas industry and the government have been slow to adopt reforms aimed at preventing or limiting the damage from a future spill.

A report this week by The Associated Press details some of the steps the industry and its government overseers could put into action to improve safety. Unfortunately, few changes have been made.

The Obama administration imposed a ban on exploratory deepwater drilling following the explosion.

The announced purpose of the ban was to give the government time to investigate the spill and revamp safety protocols to make future blowouts less likely.

The ban is set to expire at the end of November and could be lifted even sooner because of widespread criticism that it is needlessly punishing oil-producing states and their people and businesses.

That news is welcome to the oilfield workers who have been mired in uncertainty since the ban was imposed. But the lifting of the ban without any significant changes in law or procedure calls to mind again the question of why it was ever needed.

The process of improving safety will have to take place after drilling begins anew, so why couldn’t it have been progressing in the previous months?

The goal of getting the ban lifted, though, will take precedence, giving the industry and its many workers a return to stability.

The larger goal, though, of lessening the chances of future blowouts and major spills will have progress much more smoothly than it has to date.

Some steps, such as implementing a mechanism where a third party, rather than the responsible company, oversees future cleanups, can be accomplished almost immediately. Inexplicably Congress has taken no action.

Other improvements will take time, but progress is being made. For instance, Exxon Mobil has been joined by BP in its effort to develop a system to contain leaks in water up to twice as deep as the Deepwater Horizon spill. But that project is more than a year from producing a possible cure for future spills.

Perhaps most importantly, though, is the task of separating the government tasks of encouraging offshore development and being an effective watchdog over a profit-driven operation.

Even in the redesigned Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, the people overseeing Gulf leases and those overseeing safety enforcement would report to the same administrator.

As many have pointed out, the process of improving safety is independent of the deepwater drilling ban. Even as we celebrate the potential lifting of the ban in the coming weeks, we must make sure the government follows through on the more important task of preventing future disasters.

Editorials represent the opinions of the newspaper, not of any individual.

Original Article