Catalogue of failures blamed for disastrous oil spill in Gulf
Source: Agencies |
May 14, 2010, Friday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
THE first firm evidence of what likely caused the disastrous Gulf of Mexico oil blowout - a devastating sequence of equipment failures - drives home a central unsettling point about the United States oil industry: key safety features at tens of thousands of US offshore rigs are barely regulated.
Wednesday's hearings by congressional and administration panels - in Washington and in the state of Louisiana - laid out a checklist of unseen breakdowns on largely unregulated aspects of well safety that appear to have contributed to the April 20 blowout: a leaky cement job, a loose hydraulic fitting, a dead battery.
The trail of problems highlights the reality that, even as the US does more deepwater offshore drilling in a quest for domestic oil, some key safety components are left almost entirely to the discretion of the companies doing the work.
It remains unclear what, if anything, Congress or the Obama administration may do to address these regulatory deficiencies.
So far, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar has proposed splitting his department's Minerals Management Service in two to make safety enforcement independent of the agency's other main function - collecting billions in royalties from the drilling industry.
As the day of the catastrophe got under way on the Deepwater Horizon rig 77 kilometers off Louisiana, workers were stabilizing the mile-deep exploratory well to mothball it until production.
Shortly after midnight, nearly 22 hours before the explosion, contractor Halliburton finished pumping cement into the well. Heavy cement is used to fill gaps around the drill piping and block any surge of natural gas or oil.
Workers next capped the drill pipe with the first of many cement plugs meant to stop any gas or oil upsurge.
But there are no federal standards for the makeup of the crucial cement filler. A group of Louisiana fishermen claimed in a lawsuit that Halliburton used a new quick-curing cement mix with nitrogen. It supposedly generates more heat than others and could allow dangerous bursts of methane gas to escape up the well.
When oil started to surge, desperate rig workers tried to activate a set of hydraulic cutoff valves known as a blowout preventer. However, hydraulic fluid was leaking from a loose fitting and a battery had gone dead in a control pod meant to switch on the preventer in an emergency.
Wednesday's hearings by congressional and administration panels - in Washington and in the state of Louisiana - laid out a checklist of unseen breakdowns on largely unregulated aspects of well safety that appear to have contributed to the April 20 blowout: a leaky cement job, a loose hydraulic fitting, a dead battery.
The trail of problems highlights the reality that, even as the US does more deepwater offshore drilling in a quest for domestic oil, some key safety components are left almost entirely to the discretion of the companies doing the work.
It remains unclear what, if anything, Congress or the Obama administration may do to address these regulatory deficiencies.
So far, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar has proposed splitting his department's Minerals Management Service in two to make safety enforcement independent of the agency's other main function - collecting billions in royalties from the drilling industry.
As the day of the catastrophe got under way on the Deepwater Horizon rig 77 kilometers off Louisiana, workers were stabilizing the mile-deep exploratory well to mothball it until production.
Shortly after midnight, nearly 22 hours before the explosion, contractor Halliburton finished pumping cement into the well. Heavy cement is used to fill gaps around the drill piping and block any surge of natural gas or oil.
Workers next capped the drill pipe with the first of many cement plugs meant to stop any gas or oil upsurge.
But there are no federal standards for the makeup of the crucial cement filler. A group of Louisiana fishermen claimed in a lawsuit that Halliburton used a new quick-curing cement mix with nitrogen. It supposedly generates more heat than others and could allow dangerous bursts of methane gas to escape up the well.
When oil started to surge, desperate rig workers tried to activate a set of hydraulic cutoff valves known as a blowout preventer. However, hydraulic fluid was leaking from a loose fitting and a battery had gone dead in a control pod meant to switch on the preventer in an emergency.
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