Woke up early this morning and watched on C-SPAN the hearings of the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling. The Legal Counsel led by Fred Bartlit walked through what their investigation had found out about the April 20 explosion.
Here are their preliminary conclusions:
TechnicalFlow path was exclusively through shoe track and up through casing.
Cement (potentially contaminated or displaced by other materials) in shoe track and in some portion of annular space failed to isolate hydrocarbons.
Pre-job laboratory data should have prompted redesign of cement slurry. Cement evaluation tools might have identified cementing failure, but most operators would not have run tools at that time. They would have relied on the negative pressure test.
Negative pressure test repeatedly showed that primary cement job had not isolated hydrocarbons.
Despite those results, BP and TO personnel treated negative pressure test as a complete success.
BP’s temporary abandonment procedures introduced additional risk.
Number of simultaneous activities and nature of flow monitoring equipment made kick detection more difficult during riser displacement.
Nevertheless, kick indications were clear enough that if observed would have allowed the rig crew to have responded earlier.
Once the rig crew recognized the influx, there were several options that might have prevented or delayed the explosion and/or shut in the well.
Diverting overboard might have prevented or delayed the explosion. Triggering the EDS prior to the explosion might have shut in the well and limited the impact of any explosion and/or the blowout.
Technical conclusions regarding BOP should await results of forensic BOP examination and testing.
No evidence at this time to suggest that there was a conscious decision to sacrifice safety concerns to save money.
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In our May 20 cover story, “Fighting for Papa Bear,” we reported on the Blair Manuel’s family’s memories of April 20. Manuel was one of the people responsible for the “mud” used to check the pressure of the well.
Their story matches what the investigators found:
The day of the explosion Blair was set to leave at 5 p.m. but had to stay a little longer because of problems with the well tests.
Rep. Henry A. Waxman, chairman of the Committee on Energy and Commerce Inquiry into the Deepwater Horizon Gulf Coast Oil Spill Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, said in his opening statement at the inquiry that the well did pass positive pressure tests, but there is evidence that it may not have passed crucial negative pressure tests. According to a senior BP official, significant pressure discrepancies were observed in at least two of these tests, which were conducted just hours before the explosion. These discrepancies are what may have kept Blair at Deepwater Horizon beyond his scheduled 5 p.m. departure.
By 7 p.m. Blair had completed his work and was waiting for final clearance for him to leave. He talked on the phone with Kelli for about forty minutes, asking her to help him pass the time. Blair had tickets to the LSU Tigers weekend baseball series against Ole Miss.
Less than three hours later, a methane gas bubble erupted from the well head, rocketed up the drill pipe’s sheath and exploded on the deck of Deepwater Horizon. Blair was one of the 11 men that went missing.