The Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill: An Accident Waiting to Happen
It’s hard to believe now, asoil from the wrecked Deepwater Horizon well encroaches on the
Louisiana marshes. But it was only six weeks ago that President
Obama announced a major push to expand offshore oil and gas
drilling. Obama’s commitment to lift a moratorium on offshore
drilling reflected the widely-held belief that offshore oil
operations, once perceived as dirty and dangerous, were now so safe
and technologically advanced that the risks of a major disaster
were infinitesimal, and managing them a matter of technocratic
skill.
But in the space of two weeks, both the politics and the practice
of offshore drilling have been turned upside down. Today, the
notion that offshore drilling is safe seems absurd. The Gulf spill
harks back to drilling disasters from decades past - including one
off the coast of Santa Barbara, Calif. in 1969 that dumped three
million gallons into coastal waters and led to the current
moratorium. The Deepwater Horizon disaster is a classic “low
probability, high impact event” - the kind we’ve seen more than our
share of recently, including space shuttle disasters, 9/11, and
Hurricane Katrina. And if there’s a single lesson from those
disparate catastrophes, it’s that pre-disaster assumptions tend to
be dramatically off-base, and the worst-case scenarios downplayed
or ignored. The Gulf spill is no exception.
The post-mortems are only beginning, so the precise causes of
the initial explosion on the drilling platform and the failure of a
“blowout preventer” to deploy on the sea floor probably won’t be
established for weeks or months. But the outlines of serious
systemic problems have already emerged, indicating just how
illusory the notion of risk-free drilling really was, while
pointing to some possible areas for reform. These blunders include
weak government oversight of the complex technical challenge of
drilling deep wells many miles under the ocean surface and BP’s
failure to evaluate - or even consider - worst-case
scenarios.
A “blowout” on an oil rig occurs when some combination of
pressurized natural gas, oil, mud, and water escapes from a well,
shoots up the drill pipe to the surface, expands and ignites. Wells
are equipped with structures called blowout preventers that sit on
the wellhead and are supposed to shut off that flow and tamp the
well. Deepwater Horizon’s blowout preventer failed. Two switches -
one manual and an automatic backup - failed to start it.
When such catastrophic mechanical failures happen, they’re almost
always traced to flaws in the broader system: the workers on the
platform, the corporate hierarchies they work for, and the
government bureaucracies that oversee what they do. For instance, a
study of 600 major equipment failures in offshore drilling
structures done by Robert Bea, an engineering professor at the
University of California, Berkeley, found that 80 percent were due
to “human and organizational factors,” and 50 percent of those due
to flaws in the engineering design of equipment or processes.
Bea has worked as an engineer on offshore drilling operations and
was also one of the leaders of an independent engineering study of
the New Orleans levee failures during Hurricane Katrina. And the
Gulf spill has some similarities to the 2005 flood, which was
caused in large part by faulty floodwalls approved by the Army
Corps of Engineers. The common threads between Katrina and the
current oil spill, Bea wrote in an email, are “hubris, arrogance,
ignorance… combined with a natural hazard.”
With near-shore and shallow reserves of fossil fuels largely
depleted, drilling has moved farther offshore, into deeper waters
and deeper underground. The technology for locating oil and gas
reserves and for
‘We’ve pushed it to the bloody edge in this very, very
unforgiving environment.’
drilling has improved, but the conditions are extreme and the
challenges more formidable. “This is a pretty frigging complex
system,” Bea said in an interview. “You’ve got equipment and steel
strung out over a long piece of geography starting at surface and
terminating at 18,000 feet below the sea floor. So it has many
potential weak points. Just as Katrina’s storm surge found
weaknesses in those piles of dirt - the levees - gas likes to find
weakness in anything we connect to that source.”
He questions whether energy companies and government agencies have
fully adapted to the new realities. “The danger has escalated
exponentially,” he said. “We’ve pushed it to the bloody edge in
this very, very unforgiving environment, and we don’t have a lot of
experience.”
Finally, there’s a problem with fragmentation of responsibility:
Deepwater Horizon was BP’s operation. But BP leased the platform
from Transocean, and Halliburton was doing the deepwater work when
the blowout occurred. “Each of these organizations has
fundamentally different goals,” Bea said. “BP wants access to
hydrocarbon resources that feed their refinery and distribution
network. Halliburton provides oil field services. Transocean drives
drill rigs, kind of like taxicabs. Each has different operating
processes.”
Andrew Hopkins, a sociology professor at the Australian National
University and an expert on industrial accidents, wrote a book
called Failure to Learn about a massive explosion at a BP
refinery in Texas City in 2005 that killed 15 people. He says that
disaster has several possible insights for the oil spill: one was
that BP and other corporations sometimes marginalize their health,
safety, and environmental departments. “The crucial voice for
safety in Texas City was shielded from the site manager, and the
very senior agency people in the BP corporate head office in London
had no role in ensuring safety at the site level,” he said. “The
organizational structures disempowered the voices for safety and I
think you’ve got the same thing here” in the Gulf spill.
But the more profound problem is a failure to put risks in
perspective. BP and other companies tend to measure safety and
environmental compliance on a day-to-day, checklist basis, to the
point of basing executive bonuses on those metrics. But even if
worker accident rates fall to zero, that may reveal nothing about
the risk of a major disaster. “These things we are talking about
are risks that won’t show up this year, next year - it may be 10
years down the road before you see one of these big blowouts or
refinery accidents,” Hopkins said. “This same thing happened in the
global financial crisis. Bankers were paid big bonuses for risks
taken this year or next year, but the real risks came home to roost
years later.”
That assumption - that catastrophic risks were so unlikely they
were unworthy of serious attention - appears to have driven a lot
of the government decision-making on drilling as well. The Minerals
Management Service, a division of the Interior Department, oversees
drilling on the Outer Continental Shelf. Since the 1980s, the MMS
has routinely granted a
Energy companies have aggressively lobbied to avoid
formally analyzing worst-case scenarios
blanket exemption from doing a comprehensive environmental
impact statement to individual drilling operations, according to
Holly Doremus, a professor of environmental law at Berkeley.
The Washington Post and the Associated Press reported last
week that BP’s Deepwater Horizon lease received that exemption
(called a “categorical exclusion”) last year. It was based on
several analyses that downplayed the risks of a major oil spill.
One, published in 2007, estimated the “most likely size” of an
offshore spill at 4,600 barrels. NOAA’s current, conservative
estimate of the Gulf spill put its total at more than 80,000
barrels, increasing at a rate of 5,000 per day.
Energy companies have aggressively lobbied to avoid formally
analyzing worst-case scenarios since the Carter administration
first required them in instances where there was uncertainty about
the risk of disaster.
“They thought it would lead to irrational public resistance to
projects,” Doremus said. “But to me this Deepwater Horizon thing is
an example where a worst-case analysis would have been useful. If
they had done a worst case analysis they’d have to consider, well,
‘What if our blowout preventer didn’t work? And what if it happened
during a bout of bad weather when the spill might reach the
shore?’” Instead, BP officials admitted they were stunned by the
disaster, and they and the government have largely improvised their
response.
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The evidence shows MMS has not taken an aggressive stance
policing offshore drilling. Based on experience with malfunctioning
blowout preventers, for instance, the MMS did suggest that energy
companies install backup devices for triggering them. But it was
only a suggestion, not a requirement, and U.S. drilling operators
have declined to do so.
MMS has also been plagued by scandals in recent years, including
one in which eight employees were disciplined for partying, having
sex with, and receiving expensive gifts from their energy industry
counterparts. Critics question whether the agency possesses the
independence or the power to effectively tackle these issues
post-spill. One sign of trouble: The MMS is a major player in
investigating the spill and in the Outer Continental Shelf
Oversight Board set up by Interior Secretary Ken Salazar to examine
the broader safety issues the accident raises.
“MMS is the regulator, and regulatory failure is a part of this,”
Hopkins said. “It’s going to be investigating itself. It’s totally
inappropriate.”
John McQuaid is a journalist specializing in science,
environment, and various forms of government dysfunction. His
reporting at the New Orleans Times-Picayune won shares in three
Pulitzer Prizes.
