This morning a few stories surfaced with what looks like  good – but is actually deeply disturbing – news for a quick end to the Macondo well’s gusher, aka the BP Deep Horizon gulf oil spill disaster. At Bloomberg, Jim Polson and Jessica Resnick-Ault report it in too-understated a fashion. The gist is that the new cap that has gotten so much ink lately, a 12-meter stack of valves, is in essence a new blowout preventer bolted to the top of the old one. And that once there, like a faucet, it may be able simply to turn off the flow – provided the well casing beneath the first one is undamaged and can take the pressure when the rising oil is forced to stop rising. It may also provide a way to turn the well into a production unit, sending all its crude to tankers at the surface, but the main lesson here is that it may be able to turn it off, period.

That’s right, just turn it off. That’s what the original B.O.P. was supposed to do – just slam shut on the leak from the deep. An intact well casing farther down, it naturally follows, should not burst. Polson and Resnick-Ault report the fundamentals well. It’s a must-report story. Others, as we’ll see, have it too.

What’s lacking is the obvious. Which is that if BP and the oil industry and the Minerals Management Service has been acting like grownups for the last 20 years or so, there would have been developed a blow out preventer with a fitting for a backup on top, without customized on-the-fly engineering, that could be added to finish the job. Think about it. All a B.O.P. does is to act like a faucet. That means there is no reason to think good engineering would not have found more than one way to replace the tap should it go bad. Or entirely different strings of valves, some at depth, to turn off a runaway well. The deep kill drill mud method may be the one that shuts it off forever and forget it.

This good news is, in reality, the scandal. It underscores the laxity of imagination and penny pinching that got BP and the gulf coast into this mess in the first place. That’s the story: it is not fundamentally difficult to turn off an oil well. One has only to invest time and money up front in the way to do it.

....nytimes graphic

There is much talk about failure of the press to get the ultimate reason for the disaster right, our “addiction” to oil and other energy that is cheap to produce. That’s a fine, philosophical position. But just as important is to report why the technology failed and whether it had to be that way. I’d say the press and gov’t regulators alike must demand immediate development of smart, 21st century hardware that gives oil drillers a whole set of proven, robust hardware for rebuilding the top of an oil well, complete with shut-off systems and backup shut-off systems, to start deploying the day a major leak begins. These guys practically started from scratch. If they came up with this in a few months of near-panic conditions, think what could have been done over the last few decades had there been proper leadership and oversight.

Other stories:

• NYTimes – Henry Fountain: Tests to Determine if New Well Cap Will Halt Oil Flow ;
• Washington Post – Joel Achenbach: BP to install new containment cap, test shutting down flow ;

*UPDATES – More stories:

• NYTimes – Henry Fountain: Critical Test Near for BP’s New Cap ; Superior description of the reasons for a pressure test ;
• BBC: How BP is trying to stop the Deepwater Horizon Oil Leak ; Watch this for animation – apparently provided by BP.
• AP – Colleen Long, Harry R. Weber: BP prepares to test new cap installed on oil leak ;

Grist for the Mill: BP Press Release with the intended self-exculpatory phrase “..never have been deployed at these depths or under these conditions…” to which reporters should long ago have responded with dropped jaws.

- Charlie Petit

This entry was posted on Monday, July 12th, 2010 at 3:08 pm and is filed under Environment & Energy Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.