Readers Respond to Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill

The following comments refer to my July “Viewpoint” editorial, titled “To Regulate, or Not to Regulate” (page 4), which pondered whether politicians, regulators and industry could ultimately find a logical middle-ground when considering new requirements for U.S. offshore drilling in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

– Matt Migliore, Editor-in-Chief
Flow Control Magazine

First, the federal government is complicit in this disaster. Several years ago there was a similar accident in the Gulf of Mexico, albeit in Mexican waters and in shallower water. At that point, the federal regulatory agencies in charge of policing drilling in the Gulf should have taken steps to contend with a similar event in American waters. Nothing, of course, was done. Studies of how to handle an event such as the BP accident should have been made.

Second, standards and procedures to mini- mize this hazard should have been developed. Even a SIL-4 level of protection might have been required for drilling in deep water. Obviously none of this was done. If the man- agers of the agency or agencies with the responsibility to oversee deep water drilling were political appointees with little or no knowl- edge of the complexity of drilling operations, as they probably were, the accident was almost preordained.

Finally, the ignorance and intellectual laziness of the elected politicians was clearly demon- strated at the hearings about how this disaster occurred and who was responsible. The com- mittee who questioned BP and other oil compa- ny executives seemed to have no idea about what they were querying the oil company peo- ple on. When you realize that these politicians have almost unlimited resources, they should have been as familiar with drilling procedures as the executives. They weren’t. In addition, the idea of quizzing executives is in itself absurd. The people who can give accurate, informed answers to questions about how and why the blowout and oil spill occurred are the engineers and drilling technicians who spend their careers drilling for oil. Executives are essentially bean counters who may have an engineering degree, but are, most likely, not involved with the daily problems of drilling.

Until the politicians and bureaucrats begin to accept the complexity of this and many other systems we are faced with, and put the people who are capable of understanding and appreci- ating these system complexities in charge of regulating the drillers, I’m afraid that disasters like this one will occur more frequently.

No amount of wishful thinking that business and the politicians will play nice is going to fore- stall another major calamity. Si via pacem para bellum.

1. I think that most industry is in favor of sensible regulation, sensibly applied, such as personnel safety, environmental, etc. When reg- ulation is either written by people who obvious- ly know nothing about the activity they are reg- ulating, or written to gain a political or ideologi- cal end, then industry and the public at large are wise to object to it.

2. I would not call a moratorium or ban on drilling of any sort "regulation" – this is almost always political in one form or another, whether for ideological purposes (possibly President Obama's thinking behind a Gulf deep water drilling ban) or environmental purposes (which often seem to be ideological – for example, the environmentalist's objections to drilling in Alaska's ANWR).

3. Regarding the Liberty project (see July 2010, page 4), I would want to know more before I objected to it. First, how deep is the water where they are drilling? Certainly drilling down two miles (10,000 feet) is well within day- to-day oil industry practice. Turning and drilling horizontally for 30,000-40,000 feet may or may not be pushing the state-of-the-art, but I would not consider it to be dangerous from either an environmental or personnel safety standpoint.

While we can drill in water depths of one or even two miles, it does (as we have seen) pres- ent challenges. If the Liberty project is off the north coast of Alaska, the water offshore is quite shallow for a ways out; it makes sense to put the drilling rig in relatively shallow (a few hundred feet max.) water, drill down a couple of miles, and then drill horizontally 6-8 miles to an oil reservoir that lies in much deeper water.

It might be mentioned in this context, that most of the wells at the Prudhoe Bay field are drilled directionally from a relatively few drilling sites in order to recover as much oil as possible with the least infrastructure footprint (and envi- ronmental impact). Of course, those wells are drilled from onshore.