Stopping another blowout

Tuesday, June 22, 2010 | 2:01 a.m.

On the day BP’s oil well in the Gulf of Mexico exploded, there was an argument over operations. The crew of the drilling rig Deepwater Horizon was trying to cap a deep-sea well that had been troublesome — and costly.

A BP executive demanded that the rig change the way it was working, and executives of Transocean, which owns the rig, objected. BP’s plan raised concerns about safety. Douglas Brown, the rig’s chief mechanic, said the argument ended when the BP executive said, “This is how it’s going to be.” Brown said Transocean executive Jimmy Harrell walked out grumbling, “I guess that’s why we have those pinchers.”

The “pinchers” are hydraulically operated rams that are designed to cut and seal the well in an emergency. They are part of the blowout preventer, which sits on the wellhead at the bottom of the ocean. The oil industry had hailed blowout preventers as the ultimate fail-safe device — but that was before the one on BP’s well in the Gulf of Mexico failed.

To the experts who deal with blowout preventers, the failure may not have been a surprise. As The New York Times reported on Sunday, several studies have outlined the problems, including one that suggested their rate of failure on deep-sea wells was 45 percent.

As The Times noted, hundreds of things could go wrong with the massive blowout preventers, which often stand five stories high and weigh hundreds of thousands of pounds. On BP’s well, the preventer sat 5,000 feet below the surface of the ocean in frigid seawater and had to withstand some incredible forces — there was immense water pressure and it had to contain a well that BP engineers described as “crazy” and a “nightmare.”

In 2001 a study commissioned by the Minerals Management Service, which oversees offshore oil drilling, recommended mandating a second set of pinchers on blowout preventers as a matter of redundancy. Researchers said the extra set was needed because they weren’t powerful enough to cut through the thick joints that connect sections of the drill pipe. Those joints account for roughly 10 percent of the length of the pipe, meaning there was a 1 in 10 chance of failure. MMS, however, declined to require a second set of pinchers.

MMS is part of the problem as well. It doesn’t require oil companies to prove that the pinchers work, nor does it require them to look for a number of problems that could cause a blowout preventer to fail.

President Barack Obama has been criticized for ordering a six-month moratorium on deep-sea oil drilling in the gulf, but his critics have ignored the seriousness of the situation. Two-thirds of the blowout preventers in the Gulf of Mexico have only one set of pinchers, and the fact that MMS neglects to check whether they work is horrifying.

This moratorium should give MMS time to regroup, raise standards and start making sure that blowout preventers can actually do the job.