One theme that has been consistently sounded throughout the saga of the BP oil spill has been that “BP didn’t have a plan.” The idea is that it is irresponsible to drill for oil in deep water without knowing how to turn the well off if things go wrong. The proof that BP did not have a plan is that it took over 100 days before they were able to devise a method of capping the well, and that several of the approaches they tried (the top shot, and the large containment cap) did not work as planned.
Now, I’m no petroleum engineer, but I suspect that characterization is unfair. BP did have a plan for what to do if things went wrong with their wellhead, a mile under the water. That plan was to use the blowout preventer to seal off the well in the event of problems.
The blowout preventer is a large, expensive piece of equipment that is installed at every wellhead. Its function is to automatically seal off the well if pressures inside the well exceed specified levels. Indeed, the pressures inside the well are used to drive the mechanical rams that pinch shut the opening inside the well pipe. Failing an automatic shutoff, the blowout preventer also has a manual shutdown mode as well.
Blowout preventers are a well proven piece of technology, having been originally developed in the 1920’s. Used worldwide, there are many instances of their stopping oil gushers from occurring in multiple environments throughout the world.
Of course, the blowout preventer installed on the Deepwater Horizon rig failed to work on the day of the accident, allowing the explosion that sank the rig. That was as bad as it had ever gotten on an oil drilling site. A couple of days later BP sent down a deep water submersible, to manually close off the blowout preventer. That’s when things got worse, because turning the manual valve had no impact on the gusher of oil spewing into the Gulf.
When Plan A fails, you go to Plan B. If the combination of Plan A and Plan B has always worked, you don’t need to prepare a Plan C ahead of time. That is the situation the BP engineers found themselves in a little over 100 days ago.
The building where I work, like almost all commercial buildings in this country, is protected from fire hazard by a sprinkler system. In addition, we have fire extinguishers strategically located throughout the building. The experience of BP in handling the Deepwater Horizon disaster would be like having a fire break out in our building, and the sprinklers failed to pop. Then, when we rushed to the fire extinguishers, we found that they were all empty.
If we then had to invent the Fire Department, while simultaneously trying to capture all of the smoke to control air pollution, that would be analogous to what BP has tried to do in the last three months. The miraculous thing is that they have eliminated three quarters of the spilled oil while using a mix of proven and invented techniques to close off the broken well.
There was plenty of opportunity for negligence in the operation of the Deepwater Horizon rig. But the real question will be why did Plan A and Plan B not work, not why was there no Plan C on tap. The central issue will be: why did the blowout preventer fail?
Maybe this incident shows the need for a Plan C. Perhaps equipment recapping undersea wellheads needs to be stockpiled, ready for use if an incident like this ever happens again. But that wasn’t obvious in advance, and I’m not sure it is obvious even now.
One thing I do know: experience is what you get when things go wrong.
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