Posts Tagged ‘Gulf’
Gulf oil spill + design flaw in blowout preventer ≠ BP!
Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission
The blowout preventer that should have stopped the BP oil spill cold failed because of faulty design and a bent piece of pipe, a testing firm hired by the government said…in a report that appears to shift some blame for the disaster away from the oil giant and toward those who built and maintained the 300-ton safety device…
The report by the Norwegian firm Det Norske Veritas is not the final word on the Deepwater Horizon disaster last April that killed 11 workers and led to more than 200 million gallons of oil spewing from a BP well a mile beneath the Gulf of Mexico.
It helps answer one of the lingering mysteries nearly a year later: why the blowout preventer that sat at the wellhead and was supposed to prevent a spill in case of an explosion didn’t do its job.
The report cast blame on the blowout preventer’s blind shear rams, which are supposed to pinch a well shut in an emergency by shearing through the well’s drill pipe. In the BP crisis, the shear rams couldn’t do their job because the drill pipe had buckled, bowed and become stuck, according to the DNV report.
The 551-page report suggested that blowout preventers be designed or modified in such a way that the shear rams will completely cut through drill pipe regardless of the pipe’s position.
The blowout preventer was made by Cameron International and maintained by Transocean Ltd.
The report suggested that actions taken by the Transocean rig crew during its attempts to control the well around the time of the disaster may have contributed to the piece of drill pipe getting trapped.
“This is the first time in all of this that there has been a clear design flaw in the blowout preventer cited,” said Philip Johnson, a University of Alabama civil engineering professor who did not take part in the analysis. “My reaction is, ‘Holy smokes, every set of blind shear rams out there may have this problem…’”
Speculation on why the blowout preventer failed has persisted during the year since the disaster…
Johnson, the professor, said the report indicates that the blowout preventer had a design flaw that may have gone unnoticed by the entire industry, not just by Cameron.
RTFA if you feel you really need to know how each company’s lawyers attempts to pass the blame along to one or more of the other companies. Predictable.
The only item of substance – aside from laying the blame at the feet of Cameron International and Transocean – is that all the blowout preventers of this type may be potentially faulty. And that had better be changed real soon, folks.
Obama rolls out investigation into the Gulf Disaster
Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission
Calling the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico the “greatest environmental disaster of its kind,” President Barack Obama vowed to prosecute those responsible.
“If our laws were broken, leading to this death and destruction, my solemn pledge is that we will bring those responsible to justice ,” Obama said.
The president delivered those words as Attorney General Eric Holder announced a federal investigation into whether criminal or civil laws were violated in connection with the spill…
Holder last month dispatched Justice Department lawyers to the spill region to explore whether laws had been broken. Investigators have directed BP and other companies to preserve documents related to the disaster. Although government officials would not say who was being targeted in the criminal investigation, the probe could center on actions by well owner BP and rig owner Transocean…
And no one mentions Halliburton. They were performing the cementing prior to turning the well over to production. They were the outfit performing the same function on the drilling platform that exploded into fire in similar fashion off the coast of Australia, last year.
NOAA Predicts Largest Gulf Of Mexico ‘Dead Zone’ On Record
NOAA-supported scientists from the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium and Louisiana State University are forecasting that the “dead zone” off the coast of Louisiana and Texas in the Gulf of Mexico this summer could be the largest on record.
The researchers are predicting the area could measure a record 8,800 square miles, or roughly the size of New Jersey. In 2007, the dead zone was 7,903 square miles. The largest dead zone on record was in 2002, when it measured 8,481 square miles.
The dead zone is an area in the Gulf of Mexico where seasonal oxygen levels drop too low to support most life in bottom and near-bottom waters. This low oxygen, or hypoxic, area is primarily caused by high nutrient levels, which stimulates an overgrowth of algae that sinks and decomposes. The decomposition process in turn depletes dissolved oxygen in the water. The dead zone is of particular concern because it threatens valuable commercial and recreational Gulf fisheries.
Research indicates that the nearly tripling of nitrogen levels into the Gulf over the past 50 years from human activities has led to a dramatic increase in the size of the dead zone. Various models are useful in evaluating the influence of nitrogen loads and other factors on the size of the dead zone. The LSU model has a strong track record of accurately predicting the dead zone’s size.
Know-Nothings and other politically correct copouts will have to rework their rationales a bit for this one. First, record-keeping has been detailed for over a half-century – and is consistent with earlier anecdotal evidence. Second, the compounds threaded through this wasteful disaster are uniquely human-designed and often modified for agribusiness.
And waste is truly what we’re concerned with. This ain’t especially rooftop detritus, folks. It’s over-applied and mis-applied fertilizer and pesticides in combination with poorly treated human waste. It should be dumped into the Potomac so tourists visiting our government treasures might get a whiff of the Heartland, too.
