BP Turns Pipe Leak Into Rocket Science

http://bit.ly/7XwAG

A week ago I was discussing the Gulf Oil leak with my cousin who retired as Director Technical Of Schlumberger to take up a teaching profession at the University of North Carolina last year. It seems Schlumberger only operates in the upstream area now having sold of its deep drilling oil rigs business to Transocean a decade ago.
Yes, the same Transocean whose drilling rig is creating the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Still being engineers and geologists who love to tinker with problems, we got discussing the same and found that the easiest way to plug the leak was to first create an relief vessel through an adjoining pipe and then either pumping the fluid collected in it to an away location ( could be a parked oil tanker ) or using boutique cement to plug it.

Closing a pipe leak could be difficult 5000 feet below the sea, but still remains a solution in mechanical engineering and not rocket science. So why is BP creating a fuss and messing up the waters in the Gulf Of Mexico.One reason could be that the leak is not at the top of the BOP but at the bottom of the BOP at the end where it meets the oil head. One must remember that there is a 3000 odd feet of distance below the BOP to the source of oil. BP knows that sealing the same is much more complex but is trying to pass time making cosmetic preventions and will keep doing so till August when the new wells are bored to cut off the oil supplies.

Another reason could be that the inherent restrictive design of the BOP is causing problems and BP is not willing to share the same with others. A careful look at the images of the Blow Out Preventer BOP which is a patented design of the supplier Cameron International shows that it is only a cluster of valves and safety devices in a housing .There could be inherent design defects and layout constraints in the very compact design leaving very little clearance head straight run pipes and also little room for maintenancein case leakage especially bottom leakage where the BOP sits on the well head.

This could be a patented widely used design. However it is obviously a low cost design, and the world is paying a price for it today. Lowering a larger dia casing pipe over the leaking joints would be possible with any liberally designed valve head, and by syphoning off the oil the problem would have been solved a month ago. However why was that was not the case. For years deep water oil rigs have been using this manufactured and designed valve system, the BOP that Cameron International had supplied. Surprisingly it is coming up for scrutiny only now when a major crisis has been created.

Why is there a lack of transparency in giving out information or inviting industry experts to brain storm a solution. Why is BP not being forced by the US Government
to lay bare the valve design and seek solutions from independant expert agencies, including competators using the BOP.People working on the BOP's, the maintenance guys of other deepwater drilling rigs, not academics or coastgaurd adminstrators would obviously provide the best solutions.

Why is a dummy prototype on a smaller scale not being tried and tested at BP's Houston control rooms to simulate the conditions and find solutions to the problems the actual BOP is facing. Lastly what is the protection against any mishaps in execution of Plan B namely the topkill and the junk shots. We have been fairly confident in our discussions that BP's solution will not work.The question is will the debri pumped in at high pressure escalate the leakages.

Managing this type of technology risk for any underwater oil well operation must not only be restricted to include financial risk management, which is mostly insurance cover. It must also have project operational risk management procedures for quick and effective mitigation. Whereas BP’s financial risk management procedures were of top order, it seems the project operational risk management procedures were under developed or totally non-existent.

As a result of several piecemeal fire fighting operations are being tentatively resorted to on a everyday basis, without an effective and adequate back- up plan to prevent the escalation of risk. What will happen if any of the the safety valves within the BOP burst when reverse pumping the cement and junk mixture at a substantially high pressure. Shall we have a million gallons gushing out of the well at Gulf of Mexico then, instead of the 200,000 gallons today? In short what is the back up plan to prevent risk escalation.