Experts suggest BP took cheap, quick chances

"There are clear alternatives to the methods BP used that most engineers in the drilling business would consider much more reliable and safer," said F.E. Beck, a petroleum-engineering professor at Texas A&M University who testified recently before a U.S. Senate committee investigating BP's blown-out well in the Gulf of Mexico.

He and other petroleum and drilling engineers who reviewed a log of the Deepwater Horizon's activities obtained by the Sentinel described BP's choice of well design as one in which the final phase called for a 13,293-foot-long length of permanent pipe, called "casing," to be locked in place with a single injection of cement that can often turn out to be problematic.

A different approach more commonly used in the hazardous geology of the Gulf involves installing a section of what the industry calls a "liner," then locking both the liner and a length of casing in place with one or, often, two cement jobs that are less prone to failure.

But that process would have taken nearly a week longer for the company to finish the well -- with rig costs running at $533,000 a day and additional personnel and equipment costs that might have run the tab up to $1 million daily.

BP CHOICE BASED ON SITE

BP spokesman Toby Odone in Houston said the London-based company chooses between the casing and liner methods on a "well-by-well basis" and that the casing-only method is "not uncommon."

Investigators and Congress have already homed in on a series of suspected instances of recklessness or poor maintenance aboard the Deepwater Horizon -- looking, for example, at why the well's blowout preventer failed. Those instances, taken together, may have weakened the rig's defenses and fueled the April 20 explosion on the rig, which killed 11 workers and caused the biggest offshore-drilling spill in U.S. history.

Many of the experts interviewed by the Sentinel for this report, including Beck, would not directly criticize BP's choice of well design because some site-specific factors might still not be publicly known. But those experts provided extensive details about, and insight into, the company's chosen approach for completing the well versus the alternative method that's more commonly used by drillers in the Gulf.

Several other major companies active in the Gulf of Mexico, including Shell, Chevron and Marathon, declined to comment on their well designs.

FORMIDABLE CHALLENGES

Hunting for enormously rich deposits of oil and natural gas in deepwater regions of the Gulf of Mexico entails some of the most formidable drilling in the world. And BP's ill-fated Macondo exploratory well had more than its share of trouble and warning signs, according to the rig's activity log, or "well ticket."

Drilling began last year on Oct. 7, in water 4,992 feet deep and nearly 50 miles southeast of the tip of Louisiana's Mississippi River delta.

The first 4,023 feet of drilling was done by the rig Marianas, owned by the Switzerland-based Transocean Ltd. But a month later, that rig was damaged by Hurricane Ida and towed to a shipyard. Transocean's Deepwater Horizon, fresh from drilling a record-deep well elsewhere in the Gulf, arrived to take over by early February.

The rig, weighing about as much as the 900-foot-long Titanic and considered one of the most capable drilling vessels in the world, almost immediately encountered some of the problems for which the Gulf is known.

Beneath the Gulf's seafloor is a mush of sand, shale and salt in formations that are geologically young, unsettled and fragile. Coupled with that are layers of sand that hold crude oil and natural gas under high pressure.

For rigs such as Deepwater Horizon, drilling a Gulf well means working between a dangerous rock and a risky hard place.

AN EXACTING PROCESS

While boring into the Earth's crust, a rig pumps a chemical slurry called "mud" down the center of the drill pipe. The mud exits through the drill bit in a blast that washes cuttings out of the freshly cut hole and back up to the rig.

Mud plays another critical role: It often weighs significantly more than seawater, and so it serves as a kind of liquid plug that can hold pressurized reservoirs of natural gas and crude oil within their formations.

If oil and gas show alarming signs of wanting to "kick" up and out of the well, as they did twice on Deepwater Horizon -- once temporarily and later catastrophically -- drillers can call for a heavier mud.

In many of the world's petroleum regions, heavier mud will counteract the threat of a blowout. In the Gulf of Mexico, however, it can and often does make matters worse.

Pumping heavy mud into a deepwater well in the Gulf runs the risk of fracturing fragile layers of sand and shale. If that happens, mud can quickly vanish into subterranean voids and leave a rig increasingly defenseless against a blowout.

The classic and potentially perilous duel for drillers in the Gulf is to maintain a mud weight that keeps pressurized gas and oil underground but doesn't crack open fragile formations.

According to the Deepwater Horizon's well ticket, that struggle defined almost every foot of progress made by the rig -- until the Gulf's geology finally won.

RIG HAD CHRONIC TROUBLE

In late February, the rig was losing mud in a weak formation, according to the well ticket. Among the variety of tricks drillers have at their disposal when that happens, the most reliable is to continually reinforce a well with permanent sections of casing or with liner and cement. Deepwater Horizon did that nine times.

In early March, the rig experienced a double dose of trouble, according to the well ticket: The pressure of the underground petroleum temporarily overwhelmed the mud, triggering alarms on the rig. At nearly the same time, the rig's drill pipe and drill bit became stuck in the well.

Just one or the other of those occurrences would amount to a bad day for any rig.

Deepwater Horizon recovered, but only after losing hundreds of feet of drilling pipe -- likely at an equipment cost of several million dollars -- and losing nearly two weeks of rig time.

The rig then progressed an additional 4,955 feet before again losing mud to a weak formation.

By mid-April, Deepwater Horizon reached the well's total depth of 18,360 feet -- more than three miles -- where it again encountered a formation that swallowed mud.

WARNING GLITCHES

Rig workers twice lowered measuring instruments connected to steel cable into the well. The tools should have passed smoothly to the bottom, but instead they hit obstacles near the bottom -- more evidence of an unstable well.

Petroleum engineers who reviewed the rig's well ticket and other documents said drilling the well appears to have been more difficult than usual, though not beyond what current technology and extra care are capable of handling.

After rig workers ran the final section of casing into the well, they opted to fix it in place with cement modified to have foamlike consistency. That makes the cement lighter and less likely to fracture or break weak formations and, as can happen with overly heavy mud, drain away into underground voids.

Based on the array of measuring instruments lowered into the well -- and detailed by the well ticket -- the rig had most likely made a significant discovery.

But among the several possible errors and failures involving the Deepwater Horizon well, that final cement job is widely suspected of having broken down, allowing oil and gas to erupt up into the rig. That is what apparently occurred as rig workers were pumping out the well's costly and reusable mud -- the liquid plug -- and replacing it with seawater.

The well ticket's last entry states: "10:00 PM 4-20-10, EXPLOSION & FIRE."