BP Deepwater Horizon Explosion research paper

BP Deepwater Horizon Explosion

 “If possible, something that will disrupt the hang,” This is what used to be called “Murphy Law,” which proved to be true in the Gulf of Mexico in a catastrophic incident in April 2010. Its consequences persist and are ascending. A gas leak and subsequent explosion and fire happened at the “Deepwater Horizon” platform owned by “Transocean” and leased by British Petroleum (BP) in the production of offshore wells field “Macondo.”

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The damage to the platform led to a very large sinking, but more importantly, a tenth of the platform workers lost their lives and other workers could not recover their bodies. The oil slick was huge, and was formed as a result of the shut-off valve of the well failure. The news has stated that approximately 5000 barrels per day leak from the well to the sea floor and tend to scatter towards the beaches and the sea, and now covers thousands of square kilometers of the surface of the eastern Gulf of Mexico. This puts marine life in a real risk. Other estimates indicate that the size of the oil spill is much larger, up to 75 thousand barrels per day.

Amid accusations the Company (BP) has tried reduce the size of the spill.

It is now difficult to estimate the consequences of this incident and the ability to shut down the well, but it certainly would have a significant impact on the future of exploration, development, and production of oil from the offshore fields.

At the present time, and since the first day of the accident, BP is focusing on the damage that may be caused by leakage in the states of Louisiana and Florida, particularly with regard to marine life and the difficulty of cleaning these beaches. Louisiana had already been quickly affected by the Gulf Stream; This current could convey the same effect to Florida and Cuba as well. This effected the wild life, “More than 8,000 birds, sea turtles, and marine mammals were found injured or dead in the six months after the spill.”

The government decided and take advice from the president and create strict rules to make this not happen again. The first law was to require stronger equipment for oil drilling, “The draft rule by the US Interior Department would require stronger blowout preventers, devices meant to close an offshore well in case of an accidental drilling breach.” (Tully, 2015) Also, they called for strict rules for the material in each wall of the drills.

It is worth mentioning that this is not the first big event in the history of offshore production as it was preceded by a similar company “union” incident off the coast of California in 1969. In this incident, one of the offshore wells exploded, resulting in 100 thousand barrels of oil leaked before being brought under control. That incident led to the birth of the environmental movement on a global scale and the annual celebration of Earth Day since the following year. It also led to the formation of the Federal Environmental Protection Agency in the United States and the tightening of regulations and related laws. Fox News said that the oil spill was not an incident, going indirectly to Dick Cheney and Halliburton contractor, claiming that they installed equipment under the water before the incident. The exchange of accusations between the relevant companies has led to increase this conflict, prompting President Obama ask companies to stop such behavior.

Key Investigative Findings and Conclusions

As with other major incidents, the Macondo blowout culminated from a complex, closely connected interplay of technical, human, organizational, and regulatory factors. Below are the key findings of the CSB Macondo investigation.

Technical Factors

1. A BOP is subject to design capability limitations like any piece of technology. A BOP can act as a barrier only if closed manually by the well operations crew or automatically by a catastrophic event, such as a fire and explosion, which can trigger emergency backup systems.
2. The BOP’s emergency disconnect system, the Automated Mode Function (AMF)/deadpan, uses two redundant control systems, the yellow pod and the blue pod, to initiate closure of the blind shear ram (BSR).

• 10 This redundancy is intended to increase the AMF/ reliability, but on the day of the incident only one of the two pods was functioning.

1. The blue pod was miswired, causing a critical battery to drain and rendering the pod

inoperable on the day of the incident (Volume 2, Section 3.2).

1. A critical solenoid11 valve in the yellow pod had also been miswired. Redundant coils

were designed to work in parallel to open the solenoid valve, but the caused

them to oppose one another. Had both coils been successfully energized during the

incident, the solenoid valve would have remained closed and unable to initiate closure of

the BSR. A drained battery likely rendered one of these coils inoperable, allowing the

other coil to activate alone and initiate closure of the BSR (Volume 2, Sections 3.2).

3. The safety-critical systems responsible for shearing drill pipe in emergencies had performance deficiencies even before the BOP was deployed to the Macondo wellhead.

Leading Indicator

The goal of leading indicators for safety is to identify the potential for an accident before it occurs. Past efforts have focused on identifying general leading indicators, such as maintenance backlog, that apply widely in an industry or even across industries.

The concept of leading and lagging safety indicators have been around and on the radar screen of safety-critical industries for a while. Lagging indicators are facts about previous events, measurements collected after an incident occurs, such as injury rates; while leading indicators are pre-incident mea-surements, they provide “a check of system functioning”, and have a predictive quality. A special issue of the prestigious journal Safety Science in 2009 was dedicated to a debate on Process Safety Indicators, which was inspired by a seminal and thought-provoking paper by Hopkins (2009). According to the National Safety Council (NSC 2014, p. 3) expert panel, leading indicators are: “Proactive, preventative, and predictive measures that monitor and provide current information about the effective performance, activities, and processes of an EHS [Environment, Health and Safety] management system that can drive the identification and elimination or control of risks in the workplace that can cause incidents and injuries.”

Management

“The risk management in this report is not a traditional insurance risk management,” Mr. Guild said. “It’s a real risk management for the work that you do and the recognition of the risks and make sure you’re safe before taking the next step in the process.”

Risk Management in question in the disaster Deepwater Horizon included the understanding of the risks faced by crews drilling, as well as checks and balances designed to prevent such incidents. Responding to a question, Mr. Guild, “with all of the protection that should have been available, why do they still have this problem?”

Chris Moss, senior risk management consultant, said in Charles Taylor Risk Consulting in Dallas report quoted “technical steps that must be taken” and “warning signs” that should be heeded. “The event Deepwater Horizon has a significant impact on risk management in general,” Mr. Moss said. “At its widest, and there are many examples of simple things only you can do. This is like a lot of disasters and man-made, which is the result of a series of things that went wrong.”While he has not yet read the report in its entirety, Mr. Moss said that some of the results that he was aware, “There was a striking resemblance Piper Alpha incident in the North Sea for many years.” Piper Alpha platform was destroyed by fire in 1988 after the explosion, killing 168.Brian T. Beattie, executive vice president for government affairs at the international hacker, based in Washington. Of Drilling Contractors, he said late last week that the results of the report is still being studied by the industry, and it is unclear what new risk management lessons may be part of the results. Like a report released this year by a presidential commission studying the disaster, this latest report suggests various regulatory and industry reforms aimed at preventing such incidents in the future. The industry generally moves quicker than government regulators in responding to problems, Mr. Petty said, noting that “the industry has been in response mode since the Macondo blowout.”