Abstract
Transocean and Halliburton’s crews finished cementing the Macondo well at 12:40 a.m. on April 20, 2010. At 5 p.m. on the same day, or some 16 hours later, the fateful negative pressure test began.
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Notes
- 1.
 President’s National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling, 1/11/2011 Report, page 102.
- 2.
 Usually purchases the 3D seismic data from geophysical data acquisition companies or from governments.
- 3.
 The capitalized letters were used by Halliburton.
- 4.
 A drilling-mud subcontractor had predicted that it would take a pressure of 570 psi to circulate mud after converting the float valves. Instead, the rig crew reported that circulation pressure was only 340 psi. A BP representative expressed concern about low circulating pressure. He and the Transocean crew switched circulating pumps to see if that made a difference, and eventually concluded that the pressure gauge they had been relying on was broken. Instead, however, the stuck pipe and open floats or the parted casing provided an easier pathway for the mud flow, thus causing a lesser pressure drop.
- 5.
 If reservoir fluids start flowing through permeable cement, the cement will be eroded away gradually until it is washed away.
- 6.
 Choke and kill lines are the high-pressure tubes for circulating drilling mud to the subsea BOP. The mud booster line provides additional mud to the base of the riser to maintain return fluid velocity.
- 7.
 The riser was filled with drilling mud, and at the wellhead, it exerted the hydrostatic pressure of 3,688 psi. The kill line was now filled with seawater, and it exerted the pressure of 2,258 psi at the wellhead. The pressure difference, 1,431 psi, had to be applied at the rig, to push the seawater into the kill line. Somehow, most of this extra pressure was not bled off from the kill line when its bottom valve was closed. Why this was not done remains a mystery; maybe the bleed-off valve was stuck, and the people in charge were rushing.
- 8.
 Jon Stewart asked on his show, “Anybody here majored in oil leaks? Anybody? Anybody?”
- 9.
 Here is a good example of confusion: “Safety was a bigger component than downtime,” Mr. Winslow [a Transocean employee], said. “Safety is one of our core values.” Adviser says he raised concerns to BP on well, Robbie Brown, The New York Times, 8/25/2010.
- 10.
 We know how well our government handles the unknown unknowns, Mr. Rumsfeld’s self-congratulations notwithstanding.
Further Reading
Bulgakov, M.: The Master and Margarita. Grove Press, (1988): Probably the best novel ever written, with a sweeping treatment of good, evil, and punishment
Deepwater Horizon Accident Investigation Report, BP. http://www.bp.com/liveassets/bp_internet/globalbp/globalbp_uk_english/incident_response/STAGING/local_assets/downloads_pdfs/Deepwater_Horizon_Accident_Investigation_Report.pdf. (2010) Accessed 9 August, 2011
Deep Water – The Gulf Oil Disaster and the Future of Offshore Drilling, Report to the President, National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling. http://www.oilspillcommission.gov/final-report (2011) Accessed 9 August 2011
Gardner, C.: National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling – Cement Testing Results, Chevron Energy Technology Company. http://motherjones.com/files/chevron_final_report.pdf. (2010) Accessed 9 August 2011
Patzek, T.W.: Self-similar collapse of stationary bulk foams. AIChE J. 39(10), 1697–1707 (1993). gaia.pge.utexas.edu/papers/SelfSimilarCollapseOfFoams.pdf: A lot of physics and math pertinent to foam collapse
Perrow, C.: Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies. Princeton University Press, Princeton (1999). Accidents are unavoidable, and no safety precautions will reduce their risk to zero. http://www.oilspillcommission.gov/final-report (2011). Accessed 9 August 2011
Zipf, G.K.: Human Behavior and the Principle of Least Effort – An Introduction to Human Ecology. Hafner Publishing Company, New York (1949). A classical discourse of how human communication works. http://www.oilspillcommission.gov/final-report (2011). Accessed 9 August 2011
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Tainter, J.A., Patzek, T.W. (2012). Why the Gulf Disaster Happened. In: Drilling Down. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-7677-2_8
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