The Gulf Oil Disaster: "Minimizing the Risk of a Blowout"

"Minimizing the Risk of a Blowout"

By John Collins Rudolf

“Just after midnight on March 15, 2001, a gas explosion ripped through the starboard aft of the P-36, a drilling platform anchored off the coast of Brazil. Within hours, a second, far larger explosion rocked the rig, owned by Petrobras, Brazil’s state energy company. Ten crew members were killed and the rig quickly capsized, sinking in roughly 4,300 feet of water. At the time, the rig’s undersea well was producing 84,000 barrels of oil each day. Unlike the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico, the accident did not result in an uncontrollable oil spill. The spill was limited to roughly 10,000 barrels of oil stored on the P-36 platform.

Such accidents may have contributed to a sense of overconfidence in the offshore drilling industry and a tendency to play down the risk of a major spill. Explosions are relatively common on offshore rigs — with dozens occurring in the last 30 years. A number have involved the total destruction and sinking of drilling platforms and loss of life, including the 1998 Piper Alpha accident in the North Sea, which killed 167 people.

But uncontrolled undersea blowouts are extremely rare. The great exception is the Ixtoc I spill of 1979, when an exploratory well suffered a catastrophic blowout and dumped 140 million gallons of crude into the Gulf of Mexico over several months. Since then, it has been largely oil tankers and storage tanks, not offshore platforms, that have been responsible for the worst spills. “We underestimated the risk and overestimated the effectiveness of the control and cleanup capabilities,” said Robert Bea, a professor of engineering at the University of California at Berkeley and an expert in ocean engineered systems like drilling platforms.

As my colleagues Eric Lipton and John Broder reported on Friday, complacency is also reflected in the battle that drilling executives waged against federal regulators’ attempts to tighten safety precautions against undersea blowouts. And recent statements by oil companies about the risk of a major spill are almost certainly to return to haunt the industry. An environmental impact plan submitted by Shell for its proposed drilling in the Beaufort Sea in the Arctic, for instance, asserted that a “large liquid hydrocarbon spill … is regarded as too remote and speculative to be considered a reasonably foreseeable impacting event,” according to The Associated Press."

- http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/09/minimizing-the-risk-of-a-blowout/?ref=science

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For more information:

Lisa Pelstring
Washington, DC
May 10th, 2010, 7:34 am

I work for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/NOAA, a trustee of coastal resources. NOAA and other state and federal agency co-trustees will be assessing the oil spill impacts to natural resources and the public's lost uses of those resources (recreational fishing, hunting, wildlife viewing, canoeing, etc.). This multi-year effort is called a Natural Resource Damage Assessment (NRDA) and the goal is to restore resources injured by the spill and lost-uses of those resources. Some examples of restoration projects include restoring wetlands, removing fish passage barriers, improving recreational facilities, creating oyster reefs, improving bird habitat, and improving shellfish habitat. Once the full extent of natural resource injuries is assessed, citizens will have an opportunity to help identify potential restoration projects. For more information, please visit http://www.darrp.noaa.gov

Below are some additional links you and others may find useful about Deepwater and oil spill impacts to wildlife and shorelines:

http://www.incidentnews.gov/incident/8220
http://response.restoration.noaa.gov
http://www.tristatebird.org
http://www.owcn.org
http://alaska.fws.gov
http://www.response.restoration.noaa.gov

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