Gulf oil spill: The Halliburton connection
Investigators delving into the possible cause of the massive gulf oil spill are focusing on the role of Houston-based Halliburton Co., the giant energy services company, which was responsible for cementing the drill into place below the water. The company acknowledged Friday that it had completed the final cementing of the oil well and pipe just 20 hours before the blowout last week.
In a letter to to Halliburton Chief Executive David J. Lesar on Friday, Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Beverly Hills) chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, and Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.), chairman of the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, called on Halliburton officials to provide all documents relating to "the possibility or risk of an explosion or blowout at the Deepwater Horizon rig and the status, adequacy, quality, monitoring, and inspection of the cementing work" by May 7.
In a statement Friday, Halliburton said "it is premature and irresponsible to speculate on any specific causal issues." The company had four employees stationed on the rig at the time of the accident, all of whom were rescued by the Coast Guard. "Halliburton had completed the cementing of the final production casing string in accordance with the well design," it said. "The cement slurry design was consistent with that utilized in other similar applications. In accordance with accepted industry practice ... tests demonstrating the integrity of the production casing string were completed."
More than two dozen class action lawsuits have been filed after the explosion against BP PLC, the British company that leased the Deepwater Horizon rig, against the rig's owner, Transocean Ltd. and against Halliburton. BP is "taking full responsibility" for the spill and will pay for legitimate claims by affected parties, company spokeswoman Sheila Williams said.
Cement is used at two stages of the deep-water drilling process. It is used to fill gaps between the well pipe and the hole drilled into the seabed so as to prevent any seepage of oil and gas. And it is used to temporarily plug an exploration hole before production begins. At the time of the accident, the Halliburton statement said, "well operations had not yet reached the point requiring the placement of the final cement plug which would enable the planned temporary abandonment of the well."
Experts say cementing is a basic part of drilling, exploration and production of oil on the sea floor. Drill ships or rigs plant large pipes called "conductors" on the sea floor, and casings, or nested pipes, are placed inside of them. The pipes are fixed in place by cement, some hanging inside other pipes, and a drill string is run down a casing, and extended to the sea floor to bore holes.
Mud works its way back up the pipes and the “riser,” a pipe that connects the drill site to the ship or rig above. Or oil is brought up. Cement fixes the operations in place. Cement may also be used to plug a well, pumped down the string until it comes up on the sides, and stops the hole.
Cementing a deep-water drilling operation is a process fraught with danger. A 2007 study by the U.S. Minerals Management Service found that cementing was the single most important factor in 18 of 39 well blowouts in the Gulf of Mexico over a 14-year period -- more than equipment malfunction. Halliburton has been accused of a poor cement job in the case of a major blowout in the Timor Sea off Australia last August. An investigation is underway.
According to experts cited in Friday's Wall St. Journal, the timing of last week's cement job in relation to the explosion -- only 20 hours beforehand, and the history of cement problems in other blowouts "point to it as a possible culprit." Robert MacKenzie, managing director of energy and natural resources at FBR Capital Markets and a former cementing engineer, told the Journal, "The initial likely cause of gas coming to the surface had something to do with the cement."
In its statement, the company said, "Halliburton originated oilfield cementing and leads the world in effective, efficient delivery of zonal isolation and engineering for the life of the well, conducting thousands of successful well cementing jobs each year."
The company, which was once headed by former Vice President Dick Cheney, has been in the media spotlight before -- under under fire in recent years for its operations as a private contractor in Iraq.
--Margot Roosevelt and Jill Leovy
Gulf oil spill swiftly balloons, may move east
VENICE, La. (AP) — A sense of doom settled over the American coastline from Louisiana to Florida on Saturday as a massive oil slick spewing from a ruptured well kept growing, and experts warned that an uncontrolled gusher could create a nightmare scenario if the Gulf Stream carries it toward the Atlantic.
President Obama planned to visit the region Sunday to assess the situation amid growing criticism that the government and oil company BP PLC should have done more to stave off the disaster. Meanwhile, efforts to stem the flow and remove oil from the surface by skimming it, burning it or spiking it with chemicals to disperse it continued with little success.
BP Fought Safety Measures at Deepwater Oil Rigs
BP, the company that owned the Louisiana oil rig that exploded last week, spent years battling federal regulators over how many layers of safeguards would be needed to prevent a deepwater well from this type of accident.
In a letter sent last year to the Department of the Interior, BP objected to what it called "extensive, prescriptive regulations" proposed in new rules to toughen safety standards. "We believe industry's current safety and environmental statistics demonstrate that the voluntary programs…continue to be very successful."
Gulf spill is really a river of oil, environmentalists say
To understand the gravity of the danger facing Louisiana's coast from the oil that began washing ashore Thursday, pollution clean-up veterans offered this starting point: Forget the word "spill."
"This isn't a spill," said Kerry St. Pe, who headed Louisiana's oil spill response team for 23 years. "This isn't a storage tank or a ship with a finite amount of oil that has boundaries. This is much, much worse."
It's a river of oil flowing from the bottom of the Gulf at the rate of 210,000 gallons a day that officials say could be running for two months or more. If that prediction holds, much of the state's southeastern coast will become a world-watched environmental battleground that hasn't been seen in the United States since the Exxon Valdez ran aground in Alaska 21 years ago.
For residents of coastal communities and the vast fleet of commercial and sports fishers that call those wetlands home, that fight will become part of the daily scene. Coastal scientists and clean-up experts say the source and volume of the pollution combined with seasonal wind directions and tides have the potential to push oil deep into local estuaries, bringing the army fighting the oil and its miles of containment booms to much of the marsh. And, it has the potential to spread to every state along the Gulf Coast.
"Oil floats on water, so it goes where the water goes," said Roger Helm, chief of the Environmental Contaminants Division of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. "This is going to be big, very big. They have announced it's five times the release they originally thought, and that release will go on for some extended period of time. Do the math."
The timing couldn't be worse, Louisiana clean-up experts said, because the warm weather months will bring stiff southerly breezes, which can push the oil deep into the long, shallow estuaries.
A complete list of coastal wildlife at risk from an oil spill
"In a lot of places tides are the key for moving oil but we have very small tides here -- a 2-foot tide is a big deal to us," said St. Pe, who now is executive director of the Barataria-Terrebonne national Estuary Program. "So wind is everything in Louisiana. A stiff southeastern blow will defeat a falling tide here. And we're going into the season when we get strong southeasterly winds.
"So, if we've got a steady flow of 210,000 gallons a day and southerly winds pushing it, it's going to get over the marsh into a lot of areas."
Given the volume and the extended flow period, St. Pe said he would expect oil sheets to invade the marshes on the east side of the river north into the Delacroix area, the western reaches of Lake Borgne and most of the Bird's Foot delta. If stiff winds blow more from the east, the oil could flow to the west of the river, and quickly invade the wetlands in Barataria Basin, already battered by erosion, canal dredging and subsidence.
"If this thing comes west into Barataria, there's nothing really to stop it," he said. "The area from Buras to the (Barataria Seaway) is pretty much just open water now."
St. Pe said the public should not expect containment booms to keep all oil from the wetlands.
"Oil gets through, especially in rough weather - it just washes over these things," he said. "With the volumes we're talking about here, and the length it will be coming into the coast, you can see that almost every area in the southeastern coast could be impacted.'
Birds, fish and shellfish will feel the effects, St. Pe said.
"If you get a thick sheet of oil over a large area, the first thing that happens is it cuts off the oxygen exchange with the water column," he said. "You get low dissolved oxygen in the water, so the fish respond by coming to the surface to try to get oxygen, and of course they get their gills coated with oil, and they die."
Birds become fouled with oil by diving on food in oil-slicks, or wading and walking through contaminated areas, then preening feathers, further spreading the oil.
And while birds, fish and marine mammals are the victims most noticed, there is even more damage going on below the surface, St. Pe said. "Shrimp die and crabs die and oysters die, but they don't float to the top. You just never see them, but the damage is often severe."
And in this case, the impact could be long-lasting.
"The worst spill I ever worked was a 10,000 barrel spill in 1997 that was inshore in Lake Barre, and that was terrible," he said.
"But that was a spill. This is worse. This isn't one spill. It's a constant flow for months. This is something a lot of people will be living with for a long time."
Exxon Mobile Q1 profits up by 38% How timely?
No comments:
Post a Comment