A Sea in Flames - Carl Safina [2]
With a platform bigger than a football field, the Deepwater Horizon was insured for over half a billion dollars. The rig cost $350 million and rose 378 feet from bottom to top. On the rig were 126 workers; 79 were Transocean employees, 6 were BP employees, and 41 were subcontractors to firms like Halliburton and M-I Swaco. None of the Deepwater Horizon’s crew had been seriously injured in seven years.
Operations began at Macondo 252 using Transocean’s drilling platform Marianas on October 6, 2009. The site was forty-eight miles southeast of the nearest Louisiana shore and due south of Mobile, Alabama. As the lessee, BP did the majority of the design work for the well, but utilized contractors for the drilling operation. Rig owner Transocean was the lead driller. Halliburton—formerly headed by Dick Cheney, before he became vice president of the United States under George W. Bush—was hired for cementing services. Other contractors performed other specialized work.
The initial cost estimate for the well was approximately $100 million. The work cost BP about $1 million per day.
They’d drilled about 4,000 feet down when, on November 8, 2009, Hurricane Ida damaged Marianas so severely that the rig had to be towed to the shipyard. Drilling resumed on February 6, 2010, with BP having switched to Transocean’s Deepwater Horizon rig.
By late April, the well would be about $58 million over budget.
Being a deepwater well driller—what’s it like? To simplify, imagine pushing a pencil into the soil. Pull out the pencil. Slide a drinking straw into that hole to keep it open. Now, a little more complex: your pencil is tipped not with a lead point but with a drilling bit. You have a set of pencils, each a little narrower than the last, each a little longer. You have a set of drinking straws, each also narrower. You use the fattest pencil first, make the hole, pull it out, then use the next fattest. And so on. This is how you make the hole deeper. At the scale of pencils-as-drills, you’re going down about 180 feet, and the work is soon out of sight. As you push and remove the pencils, you slide one straw through another, into the deepening hole. You have a deepening, tapering hole lined with sections of drinking straw, with little spaces between the hole and each straw, and between the sections of straw. You have to seal all those spaces, make it, in effect, one tapering tube, absolutely tight.
And here’s why: the last, narrowest straw pokes through the lid of a (very big) pop bottle with lots of soda containing gas under tremendous pressure. As long as the lid stays intact and tight, there’s no fizz. But only that long. Everyone around you is desperate for a drink of that pop, as if they’re addicted to it, because their lives depend on it. They’re in a bit of a hurry. But you have to try to ignore them while you’re painstakingly working these pencils and straws. And you’d better keep your finger on the top of the straw, or you’re going to have a big mess. And you’d better seal those spaces between sections of straw as you go down, or you’re going to have a big mess when you poke through that lid. And before you take your finger off the top of the straw, you’d better be ready to control all that fizz and drink all that pop, because it’s coming up that straw. And if, after poking a hole in this lid that’s been sealed for millions of years, you decide you want to save the soda for later, then you’d better—you’d better—have a way to stopper that straw before you take your finger off. And you’d better have a way to block that straw if the stopper starts leaking and the whole thing starts to fizz. If it starts to fizz uncontrollably, and you can’t regain control, you can get hurt; people can die.
The real details beggar the imagination of what’s humanly and technologically possible. Rig floor to seafloor at the well site: 5,000 feet of water, a little under one mile. Seafloor to