Proper Prior Planning

…Prevents Poor Performance, as the hokey saying goes. I read and heard recently about BP’s latest failure to stop the oil gushing out of their offshore well. Their next attempt will be to cut off the bent pipe with robots and place a new valve on top. Apparently the preparation for this will take four days. This raises a question: If the top kill procedure that just failed was such a chancy maneuver, why didn’t BP have the next option already in place?

I was discussing this with an engineer friend the other night, and he asked why they hadn’t pursued six different possibilities, both long and short term, all at once. Perhaps the third option would have worked and the fourth through sixth would have been wasted money, but so what? Spending money on contingencies is the price of safety.

This raises the further question of what they had, or didn’t have in place when the well blew. As I mentioned in a previous essay, BP could have spent what now looks like chump change on an auxiliary, remotely operated emergency valve on the sea floor.

That containment dome that they hurriedly fabricated – why wasn’t it already made and waiting on a barge? My engineer friend proposed the plausible idea of a set of hydraulic rollers that could crush the leaking pipe and roll a section of it flat. Why not have something like that ready to go, plus half a dozen other devices for various situations?

The answer, as always, is that insurance costs money and requires a long term view. BP, like the rest of its corporate cohort, has an eye on the next quarter’s earnings report.

But wait, there’s more. According to an article in the Alaska Dispatch (hat tip to HuffPo), BP and other oil companies have known for years that their blowout preventers only work about half the time. The last ditch device on the blowout preventer is called a shear ram. It is a combination of a sliding door and a knife, powered by a large hydraulic ram, that can cut off the pipe and seal the top of the well. As far back as 2002, oil companies were reporting that existing designs of shear rams couldn’t cut the pipe in all situations. An independent study in 2004 confirmed this. If there was a drill down the pipe, or if a weld was in the way, the shear ram failed. The existing designs had trouble with stronger modern pipes as well. Chevron has a stronger shear ram under development, but the industry has been operating with a demonstrably defective technology for the past eight years.

The investigative journalist Greg Palast has written about the response, or non-response, to the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill. The government required BP to have oil spill response equipment and crews stationed around Prince William Sound. (What? BP, not Exxon? Yes, BP was in charge of spill response in the Sound.) At the beginning the company did just this. They trained local Inuit people to handle spills, stationed skimmer barges around the Sound, and hired teams to be on call like firemen. Then they abandoned it all. The response teams were laid off and the equipment left on shore. When the Exxon Valdez ran aground there was nothing in place to deal with the disaster. But BP’s and Exxon’s quarterlies looked just that little bit better. Exxon blamed their captain, who wasn’t at the wheel, instead of the broken and never fixed radar. Twenty years later there is still a layer of oil three inches under the beaches. Prince William Sound is dead. The surviving natives got paid off at ten cents on the dollar.

BP is heading down exactly the same path today, trying to save money while the oil kills the Gulf of Mexico. I’ll bet the rent that BP will try to place the blame on operator error rather than ongoing safety violations and cost cutting. Likewise, it will be cheaper for BP to pay lawyers to obfuscate and delay than to pay the price of cleanup. And you can be sure that a full PR blitz will ensue, with high profile, yet inexpensive acts of kindness towards the residents of the Gulf Coast.

As long as I am channeling Greg Palast, I should note his recent report that another BP facility, the Alaskan oil pipeline, leaked 100,000 gallons onto the tundra last week. BP explained that “procedures weren’t properly implemented.”

Can we still pursue offshore drilling? Perhaps. There would have to be backup valves on top of backup valves, with skimmers and domes, booms and crews standing by. There would have to be constant inspections and perp walks for violations. With flow rates from existing wells disappointing their owners, the cost of safe operation might not appeal to the major oil companies. It might just be that offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico is technically feasible but not ethically feasible. Of course, ethics gets in the back seat when America wants to hop in its 5,000 pound SUV and go get a bag of chips. We’re all guilty, to some extent.

There’s the hard part – it’s about lifestyle change. Not new car models, not biofuels, not windmills and solar panels, although these things are part of a long term solution. We could ban offshore drilling, and we should at least scale it back, slow it down, and tighten it up, but what follows that decision?

What follows is the necessity of preparing for expensive oil. It will take fifteen years to work through our present stock of cars, and a similar time scale to make a dent in our fossil fuel use through efficiency upgrades and renewable energy installation. In the meantime it’s a question of how we behave. Forty years ago we drove half as many miles per person annually. Extrapolate that to today and it would eliminate 10% of the world’s oil demand, about 8.5 million barrels a day. Right now, offshore oil platforms in the Gulf of Mexico produce about 1.5 million barrels per day. A nine or ten percent reduction in our annual mileage would offset that. We’re going to have to reduce our driving by that much at some point, and then more. Why not now, before the next blowout?