Jun 15 2010

‘Nightmare Well’: BP Internal Email 5 days before fire

(10AM EST – promoted by Nightprowlkitty)

From Waxman’s letter to Hayward of today (June 14th) :

We are looking forward to your testimony before the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations on Thursday, June 17,2010, about the causes of the blowout of the Macondo well and the ongoing oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. As you prepare for this testimony, we want to share with you some of the results of the Committee’s investigation and advise you of issues you should be prepared to address.

The Committee’s investigation is raising serious questions about the decisions made by BP in the days and hours before the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon. On April 15, five days before the explosion, BP’s drilling engineer called Macondo a “nightmare well.” In spite of the well’s difficulties, BP appears to have made multiple decisions for economic reasons that increased the danger of a catastrophic well failure.

In several instances, these decisions appear to violate industry guidelines and were made despite warnings from BP’s own personnel and its contractors. In effect, it appears that BP repeatedly chose risky procedures in order to reduce costs and save time and made minimal efforts to contain the added risk.

The whole thing is a blast at BP :

http://online.wsj.com/public/r…  

32 comments

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    • Edger on June 15, 2010 at 02:45
    • #

  2. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/

  3. Have you trumped even the entire CT community news network?

    Or is this another false flag we did not pick up on.

    And no I do not mean this in that ultimate evil way.

  4. Interesting!  BP was well aware of the “faultiness” so long before a few days before the worst catastrophic environmental/ecological criminally negligent disaster we could ever imagine.  They were aware of the Federal and their own internal violations, but their choice was not to attend to repairs of any of it.  That was a CHOICE by BP.  Afterall, their profits were just not great enough to warrant any expenditure for repairs, such as 2009, 1st quarter PROFITS of $6.8 billion; and:

    BP said its first quarter profits more than doubled from a year ago on higher oil prices as the British oil giant continued fighting a growing oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico caused when a drilling rig sank last week at one of its offshore fields. . . . .

    We need to mention their profits non-stop — of late, I’ve been hearing “poor mouth” for BP — what?  

    Have you seen this one, wilberforce, yes, it’s about the same subject, but note that there is an attempt to completely exonerate Halliburton!

    BP engineer called doomed rig a ‘nightmare well’

    WASHINGTON – BP took measures to cut costs in the weeks before the catastrophic blowout in the Gulf of Mexico as it dealt with one problem after another, prompting a BP engineer to describe the doomed rig as a “nightmare well,” according to internal documents released Monday. . . .

    Waxman and Stupak also said BP apparently rejected advice of a subcontractor, Halliburton Inc., in preparing for a cementing job to close up the well. BP rejected Halliburton’s recommendation to use 21 “centralizers” to make sure the casing ran down the center of the well bore, they said. Instead, BP used six centralizers.

    In an e-mail on April 16, a BP official involved in the decision explained: “It will take 10 hours to install them. I do not like this.” Later that day, another official recognized the risks of proceeding with insufficient centralizers but commented: “who cares, it’s done, end of story, will probably be fine.” . . . . .

    The thing that I find somewhat, if not a lot, interesting, is the accounting by Mike Williams (who appeared in a two-part segment of “60 Minutes”), wherein he told of the many problems and all that happened to him before he took a “plunge” of almost 100 feet below the rig.  His story, to me, was irrefutable!  Did no one in the WH listen to this man?

    No matter, however, what is said, BP had a responsibility to “maintain” this rig in a manner that was safe for the “waters” and for the “workers.”  THEY DIDN’T CARE — FINAL ANSWER!

  5. concerned. The private law suits will drag on until the plaintiffs (what remains of them) say uncle and the lawyers have taken most of the money. It won’t matter anyhow as BP will have recouped whatever they pay from huge spikes in profits and gas at $5 a gallon. Heck, Obama has probably told them our oil purchases will even increase and not to worry about cost, wink wink.

  6. from TOD, suggesting that BP is by no means alone:

    sakhalinsk on June 15, 2010 – 3:25am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Parent subthread | Comments top

    Good point(s).

    I know people may well think I’m some sort of mouthpiece for BP for what I’m about to write, but what really worries me is that this could be an industry, rather than a company-specific problem.

    I work for another major, as a geo. 90% of my experience has been deepwater. All for major operators. I’m the fella who says “drill there”. I’m not a driller, but privately, the drillers I currently deal with have said things along the line of ” phew, that could have been us”, “dodged a bullet there” etc., etc. In total there are a lot of poor decisions, sure, but many of the drillers have seen examples of each of them. Yup, BP didn’t follow best practice. But hardly anyone does. Best practice does not equal SOP. Not all the time.

    And whilst it’s making big headlines, some of the items people are fixating on (CBL for instance) are commonly not run, or not trusted. Likewise with the spacers. I just checked the last well I worked on for instance… Let’s be clear, I’m not exonerating BP, they may well have some serious management issues. Particularly in downstream and the stuff coming out about Alaska worries me greatly. But from where I sit it could have been nearly any of the deepwater operators. The drillers I’m talking to would practically cr*p to go on the record when the CEO is saying “it couldn’t be us, no way”, and that sort of thing. In the Witch Hunt, and with the (understandable) emotions running so high it really does seem like it, we run the risk of missing the bigger picture here. Could it have been XOM, or CVX, or RDS? What would have happened if it was one of the smaller deepwater players, most of whom are US based but relatively small cap?

    *(oh, and could PEOPLE please calm down about the size of the field. BP haven’t said anything, but it is not a multi billion barrel field stretching to the coast that could have impacted our imports. The sad fact is that the amount of oil ruining the gulf is an incredibly small portion of our DAILY consumption. That’s what we should sort).

  7. Up again.

    sheeeeet.

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