Posted by Sten Westgard, MS
The National Oil Spill Commission released a preliminary chapter of its report today. This is the commission charged with finding out what went wrong with the Deepwater Horizon / Macondo oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico that blew up in 2010 and spilled 4 million barrels of oil and killed 11 workers.
Whenever there are big stories in the media, we like to take a look at them to see if we can learn anything, find any connection between the disaster and our own situation in the medical laboratory community. But from a distance, it's hard to see any similarities between oil rigs and labs, right?
Right?
As it happen, one of the specific causes of the Macondo blowout did in fact involve laboratory testing, in this case, testing of the cement slurry. Cement is used to seal the space between casing and the wellbore of an oil well and basically help maintain the integrity of the well. However, since the cement is being used at the bottom of a well, where pressure and temperature can vary, and also since the cement mixture can alter during storage on an oil rig, "companies...normally fly cement samples from the righ back to a laboratory shortly before pumping a job to make sure the cement will work under the conditions in the well."[report, page 101]
In the case of the Macondo oil rig, tests on the cement slurry, in particular something called the foam stability test, did not look good. We go right to the text of the chapter [report, pages 101-102] to pick up the story:
"On February 10, soon after the Deepwater Horizon began work on the well, Jesse Gagliano [ed. a Hallburton engineer] asked Halliburton laboratory personnel to run a series of “pilot tests” on the cement blend stored on the Deepwater Horizon that Halliburton planned to use at Macondo. They
tested the slurry and reported the results to Gagliano. He sent the laboratory report to BP on March 8 as an attachment to an e-mail in which he discussed his recommended plan for cementing an earlier Macondo casing string.
"The reported data that Gagliano sent to BP on March 8 included the results of a single foam stability test. To the trained eye, that test showed that the February foam slurry design was unstable. Gagliano did not comment on the evidence of the cement slurry’s instability, and there is no evidence that BP examined the foam stability data in the report at all. Documents identified after the blowout reveal that Halliburton personnel had also conducted another foam stability test earlier in February. The earlier test had been conducted under slightly different conditions than the later one and had failed more severely. It appears that Halliburton never reported the results of the earlier February test to BP.
"Halliburton conducted another round of tests in mid-April, just before pumping the final cement job. By then, the BP team had given Halliburton more accurate information about the temperatures and pressures at the bottom of the Macondo well, and Halliburton had progressed further with its cementing plan. Using this information, the laboratory personnel conducted several tests, including a foam stability test, starting on approximately April 13. The first test Halliburton conducted showed once again that the cement slurry would be unstable. The Commission does not believe that Halliburton ever reported this information to BP. Instead, it appears that Halliburton personnel subsequently ran a second foam stability test, this time doubling the pre-test “conditioning time” to three hours.
"The evidence suggests that Halliburton began the second test at approximately 2:00 a.m. on April 18.45 That test would normally take 48 hours. Halliburton finished pumping the cement job just before 48 hours would have elapsed. Although the second test at least arguably suggests the foam cement design used at Macondo would be stable, it is unclear whether Halliburton had results from that test in hand before it pumped the job. Halliburton did not send the results of the final test to BP until April 26, six days after the blowout."
To recap: in the key moment, the laboratory test produced an "out-of-control" result. But rather than accept that result, the lab repeated the test under more favorable conditions. Then, even before this repeated test came back with the desired favorable result, the rig decided to move ahead with the job anyway.
No, no similarities.
One last comment. The report doesn't just blame BP, Halliburton, and Transocean for the systemic management failures that led up to the disaster. It also points out that regulation was lacking.
"...[E]fforts to expand regulatory oversight, tighten safety requirements, and provide funding to equip regulators with the resources, personnel, and training needed to be effective were either overtly resisted or not supported by industry, members of Congress, and several administrations. As a result, neither the regulations nor the regulators werre asking the tough questions or requiring demonstration of preparedness that could have avoided the Macondo disaster." [report, page 126]
Nothing to learn here.
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