A Sea in Flames - Carl Safina [17]
BP’s September investigation will conclude: “The investigation team did not find evidence that the pits were configured to allow monitoring while displacing the well to seawater. Furthermore, the investigation team did not find evidence that either the Transocean rig crew or the Sperry-Sun mudloggers monitored the pits from 13:28 hours (when the offloading to the supply vessel began) to 21:10 hours (when returns were routed overboard).”
Consultant Dr. John Smith will later testify that bypassing the flow-out meter amounted to “eliminating all conventional well control monitoring methods. That’s essentially in direct violation of the Minerals Management Service rules.”
There’s another major wrinkle. Typical spacers are 180 to 200 barrels in volume, an amount that can be pumped out in fifteen to twenty minutes. But because the crew was trying to get rid of all the unused kill-pill material and bypass the solid-waste requirements by using unwanted material, this spacer was over 400 barrels. That meant that the rig crew had to spend an extra fifteen to twenty minutes or so pumping it overboard.
This extra fifteen minutes occurred between 9:15 and 9:30. Had any crewmates been monitoring the flow through the meters, they would have seen some very irregular pressure and flow readings. Those fifteen minutes, fifteen crucial minutes of not monitoring the volume of their fluids, ended at 9:30 P.M., when they so clearly should have realized they had a problem. Those fifteen minutes could have saved the rig.
Halliburton’s cement. M-I Swaco’s spacer. Transocean and BP’s misinterpretation of the negative pressure test. BP’s push to replace all the heavy fluid with seawater. An observation comes to me via this e-mail from a friend: “My ex-brother-in-law was up for the weekend. He was a mud engineer on rigs all over the world, offshore and on. He says there are no excuses, the company man’s supposed to be in charge of everything. One thing he was very insistent on is that there’s no such noun as ‘drill’ on the rig. You can have drill bit, drill string, drill pipe, but a drill is what you use to find the lifeboats.”
Now the crew is bypassing their monitors as their excess spacer is being dumped overboard.
They’d slowed the pumps at approximately 8:50 P.M. in anticipation of the returning spacer. Slowing meant they should have seen reduced flow coming out, but the flow out actually increased. This was another indication that pressurized oil and gas were entering the well.
Starting at approximately 9:01 P.M., without a change in pump rate, the drill pipe pressure increased from 1,250 psi to 1,350 psi. Another indicator. The pressure should have decreased at this time, not increased, because they were replacing fluid weighing 14.17 pounds per gallon with 8.6-pounds-per-gallon seawater. This increase should have gotten the rig crew’s attention.
Over the ten-minute period from 8:58 to 9:08, they gained 39 barrels of fluid, the result of upward pressure in the well.
BP’s September report will note: “No apparent well control actions were taken until hydrocarbons were in the riser.” In other words, gas had already gotten past the blowout preventer and was rushing the final mile to the surface.
Now the rig crew begins sending returning fluids into a mud-gas separator with limited capacity. They may have thought this was just a “kick,” a belch.
In fact, an enormous volume of methane was streaming into the well, shooting upward from miles below, expanding as the surrounding pressure lessened, pushing out the fluid above it, gathering itself into an accelerating blowout. In an awful irony, this would have been the time to send all the returning material overboard.
BP’s report says that they’d gained 1,000 barrels of liquid volume before anyone tried to activate the blowout preventer. The report adds, “Actions taken prior to the explosion suggest the rig crew was not