Top kill fails to plug leak | Hacker News Reader

Top kill fails to plug leak

nytimes.com

140 pointsj_baker135 comments

BP knew for weeks in advance of the explosion that the well was unsafe, and had deliberately dialled-down the federally-required tests they were running on the well, which strongly suggests they knew it wouldn't pass the real tests:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/30/us/30rig.html

This is not an engineering puzzle; good engineers in the oil industry have been drilling much deeper wells than this for years:

http://www.wired.com/cars/energy/magazine/15-09/mf_jackrig http://factoidz.com/the-deepest-offshore-oil-rig-in-the-worl... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_platform#Deepest_oil_platfo...

This accident is the result of greed and a failure of regulation; an economic and political problem. Once we have found the engineering solution to shut down this well, the pressure to prevent it happening again must focus on politics, not technology.

But I thought regulation was always bad? Isn't that the consensus here?

I would love to hear the libertarian defence of a private enterprise's accident that is putting thousands of people out of work and destroying an entire coastline's worth of ecosystems.

#1 On the whole these wells are net positive.

#2 It's the government capping BP's liability.

Not a libertarian, but please.

Agree with #1. but on #2, that $75m liability cap is a crock - it only applies in cases where there has no been gross negligence or willful misconduct. If it can be shown that BP lied to the MMS or created the situation by failure to comply with regulations (even if they started complying once they realized they had trouble), then the limit doesn't apply.

See http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode33/usc_sec_33_0... subsection c.

I'm not a libertarian, but I imagine a libertarian plan might include the privatization of parts of the ocean and shoreline. When an spill like this happens, BP can then be sued for violating the rights of the owners of the clean ocean surrounding the rig, and the damage they've done to the shoreline. As long as the shoreline is public property, they can get away with convincing senators and bureaucrats that they'll spend $x on cleanup, donate $y to their campaigns, and that's that. If the cleanliness of the ocean/shoreline were privatized (those private rights enforced by courts), the threat of a lawsuit would lead to both more responsible pre-accident risk assessment on behalf of BP and a more responsible cleanup strategy.

Isn't tort reform and an ending to "frivolous" lawsuits one of the clarion calls of those same libertarians?

Usually corporatists, not libertarians.

Splitting the hairs pretty thin at that point.

Really? I don't think so at all. Libertarians are generally proponents of a whole swatch of changes that would knock large corporations in the US down a few pegs. That's in addition to greatly limiting the power corps have to do business by legislation.

Well, I'd say my picture of "what libertarians are proponents of" boils down to 3 categories or "levels of advocacy":

1) The "if we could remake the world", fully libertarian state -- I can see some libertarians agreeing with you about knocking corporations down a peg here, but many other "libertarians" that are basically supply-siders or mainline republicans with affectations that wouldn't.

2) The things libertarians actually advocate for as far as real-world policy, as in people lobby for these things and vote for candidates that espouse them.

3) The subset of those things that actually get traction

Out of those, 3) winds up being an unabashedly pro-corporate set of policies advanced by the republican party and 2) actually seems to lean more pro-corporate than anti. YMMV. But I can see your point in regards to 1).

Suing is all fine and dandy. But no amount of money is going to fix the ocean.

The idea is that assigning a tangible cost to fucking up will cause people to try hard to avoid it.

For example, if everyone in the BP executive chain were personally responsible, and would go to jail/get beaten up/etc. as a consequence of an oil spill, then this might not have happened.

No, it won't. The execs will make their money, spend it or squirrel it away, and be gone when the damage is done.

Even if you did something as extreme as threaten jail time, the chance to make millions still outweighs the chance of any punishment.

Thats all it is at that point, its gambling. Either you make a ton of money, or you loose. The only problem is, when you loose, you make a whole shitload of other people and the environment loose in the process.

That argument applies to any transaction that transfers money. The point is to give BP the proper incentives. There is some point at which the reward for drilling (cheap energy) is worth the risk of a disaster. By ensuring that they'll get sued for the monetary cost of the disaster, you can get the socially optimal level of drilling.

And if they'd been "regulated" by an insurer who promised to pay the cleanup costs of the once-a-decade spills, you can bet that these regulations would be to a higher standard.

And if they'd been "regulated" by an insurer who promised to pay the cleanup costs of the once-a-decade spills, you can bet that these regulations would be to a higher standard.

Given that a large insurance provider called AIG promised to pay massive clean up costs and utterly failed at regulating its clients, I think your theory is incorrect. At the very least, it is incomplete.

Your theory needs to incorporate the fact that human organizations often behave irrationally, and even when motivated by appropriate incentives, they are prone to systemic reasoning errors. In addition, it needs to deal with the fact that a representative government cannot credibly refuse to promise to clean up messes of this sort, so an element of moral hazard will always remain.

What happens when the firm that destroys the coast simply goes out of business afterwards? All the profits they made before the recklessness came to roost has been funneled to shareholders around the world.

Not a problem, just require firms that have the potential to inflict substantial costs on the rest of society to carry insurance against such a catastrophe. The pricing mechanism on the insurance will act as an incentive to minimize the real risk to society.

But that's regulation... Lots of it actually because the insurance companies need regulated too (lest they default when a huge oil spill occurs).

Two problems here.

1. they do carry insurance. Their fuel assets are insured by Jupiter Insurance ltd. ( a wholly owned subsidiary of...BP itself. According to their annual report, they consider external insurance a poor economy and carry as little as possible - basically $1 billion per incident, figuring that any overages can be paid for out of revenues. Awesome.

http://www.bp.com/liveassets/bp_internet/globalbp/STAGING/gl...

2. OK, so make them carry more insurance...but then you're back to the dead hand of government regulation or whatever you want to call it. And with the best will in the world, sometimes events take place which are beyond our ability to predict. I imagine the government's recent cautious endorsement of more offshore drilling was based on a careful look at the number of rig disasters in recent years, and the assumption that the industry was sufficiently mature to appreciate the importance of risk management. It's kind of ironic that this occurred right after Obama upset the 'ban all drilling' crowd.

Sure! BP could just get an insurance policy from a reputable insurance provider like...AIG. What could possibly go wrong? I mean, a reputable insurance company like AIG would never, ever, ever offer policies for complex products that it did not fully understand for prices so low that it couldn't cover the risks involved. Insurance company officials would never ever ever cut lots of fundamentally unsound deals in exchange for big bonuses. And even if they did, such behavior could never blow up and eliminate a few trillion dollars of value in a massive economic collapse. That's totally absurd.

Really now, this "solution" boils down to "assume the existence of insurance companies that act radically differently from any insurance companies we have experience with"...tis much like "now, assume a can opener".

"Going out of business" is a product of regulation that artificially separates the assets and liabilities of a corporation from its owners. I expect that the hardcore libertarian argument would be to make bankruptcy conditional on the corporation having insurance sufficient to cover any possible liability - failing that, the shareholders are held fully responsible for their share of the corporation's liability.

I'm no Libertarian, but I think it's unfair to characterise their position as being a kind of corporate anarchism.

Actually, I've heard many libertarians argue for precisely a kind of corporate anarchism. That is, at the end of the day, exactly what deregulation really is: removing government from having power over the actions of corporations. Taken to the logical extreme that people such as Rand Paul seem to honestly want, then that implies that a government cannot enforce the conditions of bankruptcy, nor the liability of owners.

Straw man, red herring, spotlight...

Libertarian != Anarcho-capitalist

Stop trolling.

I don't know of a single libertarian that opposes government action to prevent harmful externalities. They may differ on the mechanism (property rights + tort law vs preemptive regulation), but they all believe preventing harmful externalities is a responsibility of the government.

You seem to be confusing anarchists with libertarians.

We must be operating under different definitions, then, because every libertarian I've ever met expresses their policy goals specifically as being against government action to prevent harmful externalities. "The market will work it out, and it's not government's job to make my decisions for me". From motorcycle helmet laws on upwards (we all pay for head injuries via insurance). It goes on up to a default position of being against regulation on almost everything -- against sarbox on principle, not just the implementation, against regulations regarding offshore drilling most likely until 4 weeks ago and now they're re-evaluating. If your default philosophy is to approach every issue with "less government" as priority #1, you're going to be against government taking action most of the time.

No, most libertarians are against government action to prevent non-externalities.

For example, motorcycle helmet laws do not prevent any external cost. Motorcycle drivers pay extra for insurance (except when the government prevents insurance companies from doing this), and the only other "externality" is caused by government action (forcing ERs to service people who don't have insurance). I don't know enough about sarbox - what externalities does it prevent?

Libertarians may differ on things like regulation of drilling. Some believe the externality only exists when the harm actually occurs (and should be handled by tort law), while others believe the risk of harm is an externality(I lean towards the latter).

But I'm pretty sure the boundary between libertarian and anarchist is when you call for the government to stop protecting people from the bad acts of others.

You're centering your argument around "the government is forcing ERs to service people who don't have insurance"

This is why libertarian arguments always become absolutely ridiculous when you try to apply them in the real world. In what world would an ER turn away someone with a massive head wound because they don't have insurance?

Sarbox is intended as a fraud prevention scheme. Libertarians tend to be opposed to it on principle because hey it's just creating a bunch of extra unnecessary paperwork, drag on the economy and all that. If corporations aren't committing fraud, why do they have to do all this unnecessary work and let the capital-G Government snoop all over the business? All fair points until Enron and Worldcom collapse and blow up a million people's retirement funds. I'll take the drag, thank you. (actual implementation of sarbox could undoubtedly be improved).

You might be right about that boundary, but it's all in how you define bad acts. I'm glad that you see the risk as being an actual thing (5% chance of it means you caused 5% of the damage, statistically speaking, even if someone else drew the unlucky number).

I suppose it's all in how you define externality too. I'm all about hiking up the gasoline tax by 2-3 bucks a gallon over the next decade. We have a trillion dollar defense budget, a boatload of strategic issues and dubious alliances all based around oil - those aren't priced in, and that's why we have such a hard time getting off of it. But most libertarians would probably tell me that that's a perfectly functioning market, oil even gets traded on commodity exchanges, how can that not be a market? It's all in your frame of reference, I guess.

  "Going out of business" is a product of regulation that
  artificially separates the assets and liabilities of a
  corporation from its owners.

That regulation is the essential ingredient required to allow capitalism to function. It reduces the amount of risk that the natural persons involved in a company run. The company is the legal person carrying the full burden of risk, but it is also in the position to take on that risk, because it has the assets to do so. No individual person would ever have enough assets to take on the risk that a company like BP does. However, companies can also leverage more risk that they can chew and go out of business. However, the natural persons involved would have gone bankrupt long before that.

In short: the problem with straight up libertarianism is that it would destroy capitalism.

Risks should not be ignored. Doing so promotes risky behaviour and misallocation of resources.

If a supplier of a company agrees on limiting liability on the corporation, as they do now by obligation, that's ok. But if you commit an agression, as this oil spill is, there should not be any limit on the liability.

Well you could calculate the total damage of a spill and personally charge everybody from middle managed up for it. If that's not enough, go after the share holders, even grandma Millie.

But we can't do that, the whole point of LLPs and Incs. is to limit the investor's liability.

This is partly why we have agency risk.

This is why while I consider myself a libertarian, I still think we need competent and aggressive regulators in all the places where the market is not self-corrective.

But I'm not sure how we could avoid regulatory capture for ever.

Why would a libertarian viewpoint defend this? Are you suggesting that this is happening because it's an unregulated industry? Also, what is the success criterion for number and severity of accidents before whatever approach to regulation has been taken can be judged a success? If any time an accident happens it requires throwing away the whole system that might be too high of a standard to work with.

The libertarian belief is that BP is responsible for all costs incurred by its neighbors because of its actions. Your use of the word 'defense' here just shows ignorance.

In passing, this is an example of where libertarianism breaks down as a practical alternative.

How will you determine what these costs are? It might be simple if I have a fishing business in Louisiana, but what if I'm a bar owner who depends on the dollars of hard-drinking oil workers when they're on shore? What if I'm just depressed by the whole thing and miss work? There are millions of people living in that area, and the gulf coast economy is about 2-2.5 trillion. You simply can't handle every individual case in court, it's going to be a series of class actions. And without some kind of judicial standards for how those should be handled, the result will be arbitrary at best.

Additionally, BP will argue that oil drilling is fundamentally risky and the residents of the area liked it when the going was good. So there will be further arguments about the degree to which it is really their fault. Again, without agreed standards in place the outcome of such wrangling will be arbitrary.

Finally, whatever a court orders BP to hand over as compensation for its poor drilling practices is purely hypothetical unless there is some way of enforcing it; BP might just sink the remains the of the rig, announce the failure of its 'gulf operations subsidiary' and just turn its attentions to operations elsewhere, where they have never had an accident. Perhaps they'll just blame the whole thing on inferior oil workers in that region.

So without standards for judging claims and liability, or mechanisms for enforcement of judgments, the situation will not be properly resolved. Those standards and mechanisms are the basis of laws, and we elect governments to serve as our agents in establishing and promulgating them.

In a libertarian society, BP would just need to compensate the owners of the properties directly affected (ocean and shoreline).

Fishing business would then not pay those owners to operate in their property and lose an opportunity, but they are not owed anything, since those owners have no obligation of letting the fishing business operate in their property.

A Libertarian would probably point out that regulation played a significant role in this mess. The $75m liability cap gave BP incentive to continually act as recklessly as they did over the years. $75m is a joke compared to getting a new, high-production well up and running months or years earlier than if they were more cautious.

Obviously, it wasn't a good gamble this time, but it should be no surprise they've acted as our rules and regulations incented them to.

Forget about the $75m cap - it doesn't apply in cases of negligence or misconduct. That was only newsworthy when BP's 'oh no, what a terrible surprise' posture seemed credible.

That liability cap does apply to negligence. It applies to any civil suits. However, it does not apply to criminal charges, and the DoJ has intimated that it may pursue criminal charges against someone in this.

Even if the liability cap is pierced during this particular incident, that's still orthogonal to the impact it has had on the behavior of exploration up until now.

(c) Exceptions (1) Acts of responsible party Subsection (a) [incl the $75m cap] of this section does not apply if the incident was proximately caused by— (A) gross negligence or willful misconduct of, or (B) the violation of an applicable Federal safety, construction, or operating regulation by, the responsible party, an agent or employee of the responsible party, or a person acting pursuant to a contractual relationship with the responsible party (except where the sole contractual arrangement arises in connection with carriage by a common carrier by rail). [...]

sounds pretty cut and dried to me. http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode33/usc_sec_33_0...

You may be right about that, but again what happens in response to the gulf situation is orthogonal to this entire thread of discussion. BP has been racking up tens of millions in fines over the years, but they've been spending those millions to make billions.

Financially, they are incented to cut corners and risk paying MMS the occasional $25k, when the drilling platform costs $500k/day.

The protection of rights overrides the spectre of regulation. It is illegal for one citizen to kill another or even endanger another. Similarly, it should be illegal for corporations to endanger thousands and wreck ecological destruction on a wide scale.

Doesn't this preclude the manufacture of automobiles?

No, but it does require the manufacturers to build in safety features.

It seems that the citizenry of the United States, the carmakers, and the government have come to an agreement on the regulation of automobiles. In addition to safety regulation compliance before sale is allowed, most states have emissions standards and complex road laws.

Yes, automobiles have many negative externalities but they are distributed and stochastic. Arguably, it is actually the petrol that is directly responsible for these externalities as simply owning a car endangers no one and only has a sunk environmental cost.

In the case of automobiles, we have, as a society, agreed that this is a good trade-off. In the case of industrial accidents, we have, as a society, agreed that the scale of the potential failure should be matched with commensurate concern for safety.

BP clearly has difficulty controlling their risk and they should be held liable for that just as you or I would be held liable for causing an auto accident.

It's the government's own highway infrastructure that causes the problem. The problem there is that government, vis a vis its role as provider of infrastructure, has enabled, incentivized, and encouraged the use of large numbers of automobiles--not that the private automobile industry is at fault.

So there would be no motorized individual transport if not for streets built by governments? Would we all be taking the train … no, wait, I would guess that train networks are a pretty bad example in this case. So, would we all be flying instead? Riding the bike? Hiking?

Despite all it’s shortcomings, motorized individual transport still seems like a pretty sweet deal to me – I can’t really fault the government for forcing everybody and me to pay for the infrastructure, especially if – like you seem to argue – there is no other way to get that kind of infrastructure.

Somehow I don’t really think you are making a good case for your argument.

Trains are a great example, since they're motorized mass transport instead of motorized individual transport, and are more efficient and less ecologically destructive per capita at high densities. In cities that aren't built for cars at the expense of human-scale forms of transportation, cycling and walking are often legitimate options as well. (On cycling, read this about Copenhagen's infrastructure: http://www.sightline.org/research/sprawl/res_pubs/Livable_Co...)

If the standard is endangering thousands and wreaking ecological destruction at a wide scale, the disastrous choice of designing cities to favor the automobile over other forms of transportation is not only a failure, it's a government failure more so than a market failure.

Train networks are public – not private – projects in Europe or they were, at least, at the time they were built. I don’t know about the US but that’s why I think trains might not be such a good example.

My point is that the government builds highways instead of trains.

With the advent of electric motor vehicles and such technology non-dependent on oil, we should be transitioning to Type 2 technology

Regulations are generally the after-the-fact reaction to irresponsible, negligent, or ignorant behavior.

The problem is, the folks who think that more regulation is the answer seem to think that the government regulators are benevolent gods who themselves never make mistakes, are not subject to greed, corruption, political influence, negligence, incompetence, etc.

>the folks who think that more regulation is the answer seem to think that the government regulators are benevolent gods who themselves never make mistakes, are not subject to greed, corruption, political influence, negligence, incompetence, etc.

Give me a break. When you've finished tearing that straw man to pieces, maybe you can seek out what real people who support effective regulation are saying about it.

The corporate death penalty exists and it is a shame that it is never practiced.

See the case of multiple time convicted felon and statistical mass murderer Pfizer, where the law mandated a corporate death penalty, but the government hacked around that requirement.

http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/04/02/pfizer.bextra/index.htm...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pfizer

I agree. BP is not an American company but I think it would be entirely appropriate to rescind their US licenses and freeze any assets possible. On the basis of similar episodes elsewhere it could take several months to bring the spill under control. Economically speaking, this may become as expensive to the US as 9/11.

Yes, preventing BP from doing business in the USA would be a corporate death penalty.

No, I don't think it would. It would increase the supply of oil to the rest of the world, and decrease the supply to the US, which would depress prices in the rest of the world and raise them in the US, which in turn would encourage other oil suppliers - other than BP - to sell their oil to the US, rather than outside it.

The only way it would really harm BP would be if BP's share of oil production approached the US's proportion of global oil consumption, and even then, its effect would be to raise US oil prices.

For similar reasons, the notion of relieving the US from its dependence on foreign oil is similarly meaningless. Oil is fungible, and the price of oil for the man on a US street will still be affected by events in the Middle East, even if not a drop of oil he uses comes from outside his own country.

Maybe not a death penalty, but a pretty serious wound:

BPs total revenues in 2009 were $239 billion - of which about $130 billion was from the USA.

So if they stopped selling the oil in the US, there's no other country on earth that would have a use for it?

They would maybe take a % hit, however they'd still sell all their oil. Banning them in the US would not cause that $130 billion dollars to just "vanish"

I'm not sure if I agree with you or not so I'm going to play devil's advocate. Corporations in and of themselves can't make decisions. Plus, if a corporation were to receive the "death penalty" you're suggesting, it could be as bad for us as it is for the company (in terms of lost jobs, competition, etc).

Why does the corporation need to be held responsible for something like this? Why not hold the employees behind these incidents accountable?

Why not hold only the particular neurons responsible for a crime accountable?

If that were possible, I'm sure that's exactly what we would do.

If you take a cog out of a machine because it broke (couldn't take the pressure exerted on it or some such) and replace it with a nearly identical one... why think that one will last any better? Corporations intentionally structure themselves with the goal that the people in most roles can be replaceable with minimum impact on the company performance. It is odd to only look at the lower level units that are used to build a system and ignore the possibility of structural, system-level issues or pathologies.

When you open the machine up, you're going to check which parts are causing it to break, not just which parts are broken. You'll fix those parts of the machine as well, to carry on the analogy.

Not that any of this is going to happen in real life. But as long as we're speculating . . .

Corporations are held to be capable of engaging in political speech; so to the extent that they can enjoy the benefits of legal personhood, I see no reason why they should be able to offload the responsibilities of same onto their individual officers. I agree that a corporation lacks an actual brain, nervous system and so on, but in practice we treat the collective decisions of the board as equivalent.

That's a bit of a stretch from the Times article. Yes, they were trying to get the well under control, that's what they were doing when it blew up. Yes, the MMS approved lower pressure tests so it would be less risky to run the tests.

I love how people act as if it were in Transocean and BP's interest for the well to explode, people to die, and the ocean to be poisoned. They didn't want this to happen. BP shareholders have already lost $52B. Transocean shareholders are down $6B.

"Politics" is not a great way to solve this and the engineers on the rig were not driven by greed. For wells this deep, it looks like the risks are higher than estimates, and a relief well needs to be prepared. Human progress requires us to try new things. We learn what works, and what doesn't. We learn to price the risk.

It is absolutely in BP's and Transocean's interests for this well to explode and people to die. That's my point.

Avoiding accidents by drilling more safely and expensively is not in the interests of BP and Transocean; it makes more sense for them to be risky, gamble 50 times on other wells, make 10x more than they would if they were doing it more safely, and use those profits to cover this one unlucky time.

Forcing them to do it safely even though this makes the well 2x, 5x or 10x less profitable is the purpose of government regulation. In the case of the US oil industry, the regulator is corrupt, completely in thrall to the industry with no accountability.

Hence, the solution is not about pricing risk -- BP have already done that, and this is the logical result. The solution is a regulatory one, which means a political decision.

Can you cite the source that leads you to believe that BP stands to make 10x more profit by running a risky drilling operation? I find it hard to believe.

My numbers were for illustration. It doesn't need to be 10x more profitable, it just needs to be any degree more profitable and the unlucky event sufficiently rare that the profit of the successful wells outweighs the costs of the failure (also keep in mind that oil companies drill many, many unsuccessful wells, so a marginal increase in the cost of drilling an exploratory well is significantly magnified).

Despite the costs of cleanup, we're not anywhere near the point where it makes sense for them to change their practices. BP made $4bn in profit last year, and current cleanup costs have yet to hit $1bn. They can get a lot, lot higher before they outweigh the profits of years of risky drilling.

What, and risk being shut out of the US market indefinitely, for the same political reasons? Which pol is going to defend them now?

They've just lost all the money they spent on those full-page "BP does lots for the environment" adverts.

Between the bad PR, increased risk of regulation and chance of being shut out of the market, this is absolutely more expensive than running a few extra tests.

Frankly, that's some bad math. BP just lost 3-4 years of net profit. You could talk about management interests versus shareholder interests being misaligned, but this event is not in shareholder interest. Also, I don't know where you get your "10x more" profitably number, but I have a feeling you made it up.

There is new information about the risk- new to the regulators, new to the companies. We don't even know what the best mitigation approach is. The regulatory structure will follow what works and is cost effective. If the risk is too high, wells of this type will not be built until a better approach is found.

Regulatory decisions are not political- not about power. They are ultimately bureaucratic.

You're missing the point: of course it's not in BP's interests to have a well explode, but the people making the important decisions are often not making those decisions based on sound engineering, but on political pressures and incentives from above.

Richard Feynman showed an excellent example of this after the Challenger disaster. He was on the Presidential task force after that disaster, and he asked NASA management and engineers, separately, to quantify what they felt the odds of a catastrophic failure resulting in crew loss were prior to the disaster. The risk values quoted by engineers and by management were something like 2-3 orders of magnitude different (with the engineers quoting the much more likely value)...

"Engineers at Rocketdyne, the manufacturer, estimate the total probability [of catastrophic failure] as 1/10,000. Engineers at Marshal estimate it as 1/300, while NASA management, to whom these engineers report, claims it is 1/100,000. An independent engineer consulting for NASA thought 1 or 2 per 100 a reasonable estimate."

— Personal observations on the reliability of the Shuttle by R.P. Feynman http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/missions/51-l/docs/roger...

  Empirical post script (as of STS-132 2010-05-26)
  Total launches  131
  Failures          2
  Successes       129
  Failure rate:  1.5%

If you read the report, you will find that NASA declared a reliability number that the shuttle was to meet (1/100,000), and then backed into the calculations that justified that reliability number. In other words, it was top-down, rather than bottom-up. IMHO, bottom-up tends to be pessimistic, but top-down tends to be be a figment of management's imagination. In his report, Dr. Feynman pointed out that many of the calculations had reliability figures that, while not necessarily wrong, were so small as to be impossible to validate... but that was the number necessary to generate the 1/100,000 roll-up (actually, rolled-down) number.

Update (I can no longer edit parent): the Wall Street Journal has a longer and even more damaging report on what was going on inside BP prior to the blowout:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870402620457526...

In summary: they were doing it cheaply, and in a hurry, and skipped standard safety precautions, and ignored several warning signs.

As interesting of a problem as this is, I don't quite understand how a) BP and other oil companies aren't required to have solved it prior to drilling and b) after more than a month of the world watching, all they could come up with was a solution that might work.

I'm inclined to call to question the caliber of the engineer s working to resolve the leak. Maybe I'm being too harsh?

EDIT: To clarify point (a), I would have assumed that oil rigs would be required to build-in some sort of kill-switch in the event that even the smallest part of the process didn't go as planned.

They did build in a kill-switch, but it failed. To be fair to the engineers, this is the first time they've encountered a leak at 5000 feet below the ocean.

I appreciate how much of a challenge those conditions must be but I still don't understand why they were so unprepared to fix a leak. Couldn't a 5,000ft leak have been simulated by a computer or in a lab environment? It seems like they're just throwing untested solutions at the problem hoping something will work. With the amount of money these oil companies make there is no excuse to not be fully prepared.

It's for much the same reason you'd struggle to stop an avalanche or a hurricane.

All of the remedies they've tried are ones already tested and modelled like you mention - but at the end of the day this happens so infrequently and under such varying circumstances it's hard to cover every eventuality.

One of my friends pointed out that it's much akin to running one of the mars landers - it takes a long time to sort out what to do, send down the ROV's and give it a shot.

I'm sure they did run computer simulations. However, this is the first time they've had to physically stop the leak.

Good point. However, I think it should not have been the first time they had to stop a physical leak. They could have carried out experiments, at the same depth, with the same set of equipment. Except not under emergency conditions.

Agreed. I bet for a mere $20 million (ok, maybe $100 million, who knows) they could setup an operation to create a man-made "controlled" leak on the ocean floor at 5000 feet depth. And then they try out various methods of stopping that leak. Take notes. Fine-tune. Then they stop the test. Document everything, train people, put resources in place to be able to implement the same solution when a real leak occurs.

I don't think that's a very good excuse. It's not like as if they didn't know beforehand that conditions at 5000 feet are difficult.

I would assume that many of the safety systems already failed. It’s probably (like nearly always in such cases – unlikely events happen all the time on a planet with six billion people) a 1:100,000 freak accident. The only question is then whether that probability should be lower still.

I'm not sure what to think. While I don't know a lot about drilling oil wells specifically, my first degree is in mechanical engineering and although I've never worked as one I know that engineers prefer to oversecure everything where a failure would cause injuries, not to mention disasters on this scale. Simply put, safety always comes first on the drawing boards of engineers.

For example, simple elevators are typically designed to be able to safely carry 7-10 times their normal operating weight, including the cabin. I find it hard to believe that "many of their safety systems" just failed - I think it's a lot more likely that a series of really stupid human mistakes are behind this as well as management that is unable or unwilling to enforce (sometimes costly) safety procedures and practices.

It would in many ways be much better if this were only a failure of regulation. It’s trivial to change rules and with a catastrophe like this the incentive to do so is there. Looking back at other catastrophes (I always have to think of Chernobyl, I don’t know why) I fear much rather that your view of the causes (mistakes and laziness) might be closer to the truth. That’s not as easy to change.

Something like 1 billion! oil wells have been drilled. And about 100,000 offshore oil wells. Many many accidents have there been?

It's actually a pretty good safety record.

Sigh. I wrote billion, but meant million. :(

And when I wrote "Many many" I meant "How many". :(

I'm pretty sure they do, but the explosive (literally) nature of the situation negated all of them. A few people died in the original incident, iirc.

The one safety measure of note is the relief well. They're not required to drill them along with the primary well. I read somewhere that it's not this way in Canada, and that BP had been lobbying them to let them drill without a relief well. Good luck with that now, BP. Hopefully we'll see a law that requires relief wells here in the US.

Of course, they're scrambling to drill a relief well now, which they predict will be done in early August.

a few = 11

> I read somewhere that it's not this way in Canada, and that BP had been lobbying them to let them drill without a relief well.

That's from Reddit, and it looks like it wasn't exactly correct: http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/c8t30/in_canada_it...

Wasn't even close to correct.

If you read it on reddit you know it's not true. This is a general rule.

Thanks

According to 60 Minutes's interview with one of the engineers, the main failsafe equipment was damaged weeks before the explosion, and BP didn't bother repairing it and in fact increased drilling speed since they were slipping behind schedule.

http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=6490509n

http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/content/view/35642/

I've been reading many of the news articles about the leak, but most seem to stray away from the long term effects of the leak if it's not fixed soon. If the engineers don't stop the leak within, say, a month, what kind of ecological damage can we expect? What about three months? A year? Longer? Is there a chance that it will just "run out" anytime soon?

I've been wondering that too, and the best answer I have is to look at the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ixtoc_I_oil_spill

It spilled for 10 months! At that spill was 2 to 6 times worse in terms of barrels per day.

The only difference was that it took 2 months to reach the US coast, so we were a bit more prepared for it.

I have not yet read about the long term effects. But my quick skimming did not come up with anything major. (Just short term effects.)

And no, it won't run out anytime soon.

Don't quote that barrels per day figure too readily, the barrels per day from the BP spill figure is based on.. BP's estimate. I'd double the estimate just on general principles.

I did. That's why I said "2 to 6".

Fair nuff

The relief well they're drilling should resolve the issue sometime in August. Everything else they're trying in the meantime are just stop gap measures to mitigate the flow until the relief well is finished.

they tried all these retarded ideas back in the 70s with the Ixtoc oil spill http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ixtoc_I_oil_spill

the only thing that worked was drilling the relief well

I bet the reason they are doing these retarded ideas while they drill the relief well is to make people think that something is being done

Well to a non-oil expert, they seem to have some merit. To me, the execution seems flawed.

All businesses work this way to day, but only few has such a high risk. What BP did there was practically a 50/50 game of chance, and they've lost. It seems that in the shadow of profit, the risk becomes transparent. Sometimes other risks, like 'losing market value' seem more real than the risk of bursting such well. Maybe it is because economists are in charge and their lack of technical expertise, makes the technical risk less real.

This proves the #1 regulation that should be created after this is a relief well MUST be drilled at the same time a main well is drilled, regardless of cost if they want to do business.

A few of these per century will really destroy the environment, and who knows how much worse this is going to get with just one hurricane in the next few months.

It's not too surprising. Sad, but not surprising.

Yesterday I sat and read up on the past examples of this happening. It's hardly a big field of literature but the overriding result seems to be it takes a long time to fix these things.

The one thing that hacks me off is the way the us govt is jumping up and down banning this and questioning that. Clearly at some point we need to assess what occured and set out blame where appropriate - but it seems to me right now we should quit the politcal posturing and focus solely on stopping the leak.

Which parts of the us govt, specifically? Questioning or banning what?

Obama has banned deepwater drilling (I can buy that at a stretch, but I'm not convinced he's done it for the "right reasons") and the Senate is already hearing testimony.

Ok, so you seriously don't think temporarily banning deepwater drilling is reasonable, given the circumstances?

It might be reasonable - we aren't experts so it's impossible to know if this incident is part of a wider risk. But this big thing about banning it till 2011 is political posturing. Suspend things, let the experts review and decide on the safety, then make a decision.

Let's say the experts do a 6 month review, starting today. That takes us to 11/30/10.

2011 is totally unreasonable?

It is time for Plan C: http://trueslant.com/juliaioffe/2010/05/04/nuke-that-slick/

It's an interesting question, that one, isn't it? I don't think "nuke" is the operative word because they would want a tiny nuke so "conventional" explosives might do. From what I hear Prof. Bea and some other sources saying I infer that the real danger of that approach is that it can make things much, much worse. (Namely, while it might collapse the pipe, it might also create a large total volume capacity of escape paths for the oil, spread over a larger area. There is already a new leak from the sea-bed 400ft away.).

Probably a dumb question, but since I don't know the answer, I'll ask it: why not blow up the entire reservoir with a big thermonuclear bomb? Or otherwise set it on fire such that it all burns up before getting out?

Oil needs air to burn. You can't burn all of that sucker at once, you'd start a hurricane as all the air started swirling into feed it and then there CO2 would create an outward pressure wave that would prevent it from staying lit. Complicated and messy.

Not sure about the hurricane. Hurricanes have orders of magnitude more energy than atomic bombs. It would have to be helluva fire.

I didn't mean that it would generate one by itself, but it could disturb the air currents significantly in the area, possibly allowing one to form via some kind of feedback loop. Disclosure: I am not an atmospheric scientist.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firestorm

This is a serious question that I've been wondering. You seem like you might know. The drill goes very deep below the sea floor into the earth to find the pocket of oil, right? Why can't they just collapse the hole they dug using explosives on the sea floor and allow it to close in on itself? Surely it is fragile if it's so deep/hard to drill..

What if it creates lots of little holes all around the area and the oil continues to leak. Now you have a bigger problem on your hands -- stopping lots of leaks a mile below the surface instead of just one.

From what I've read, that option isn't viable in the gulf, due to the composition of the ocean floor there. It would be more likely to open new breaches into the same bore hole than seal the leak.

So I looked at this link (via the above) from the WSJ:

http://bit.ly/cqsUZV

Anybody know why digging a hole say 500 feet deep, 50 feet side by side with the gushing well and putting some c4 in there wouldn't work?

At any rate, I read this:

http://www.wnd.com/?pageId=158297

Particularly, the non-nuclear option. I think they should run models and truly consider it. Perhaps they need to run models and then f-ing blow that up (if the models say that the resulting rubble will sufficiently re-cover the well).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KkhbbX4AcU

They could assemble a massive amount of dirt around the well. Create a large circular mound, and then just collapse it from underneath. That's what I would do. And I didn't even stay a Holiday Inn last night. Jk. I'm sure everyone has an opinion. I couldn't find a place to really say anything here:

http://www.deepwaterhorizonresponse.com/go/doc/2931/546759/

So I posted this. Anyway...

1. The leak is at 1,500m. Doing anything is difficult and dangerous.

2. The well has a measured depth of +10,000m, the pressure acting on the reservoir is ejecting the hydrocarbons with a very large force.

This might be a naive question, but why are they still estimating how much oil is leaking? If they have pumped x amount of heavy mud in which temporarily capped the leak but was subsequently blown out because of the pressure of the escaping oil, couldn't they determine the exact pressure that the oil is coming out, and if they know the size of the opening, a flow rate?

The pipe is leaking both oil and gas. The ratio of the two is unknown and therefore makes calculating the oil flow difficult.

My layman's idea for stopping the leak:

Insert a drill pipe into the well with some sort of expandable yet sturdy bag tucked into the end. Once the pipe is fairly deep inside the well, pump a dense liquid into the pipe expanding the bag similar to an angioplasty procedure. Then cap the well from the top once the flow is stopped or reduced significantly.

Another similar solution would be to attach high explosives to the drill pipe and collapse the well from deep inside.

Have these approaches been considered?

I think that a problem with this idea is that the "expandable yet sturdy bag" would have to be able to withstand great pressure, not just of the oil itself but to survive a mile underneath the ocean.

You may want to follow BP's PR Twitter... http://twitter.com/bpglobalpr ;)

Hacker news!

This sad attempt at questioning the merit of the article is truly part of the problem with this oil leak. We're talking about one of the greatest ecological disasters in the history of the United States and people seem uninterested. It's pretty sickening. For another perspective see http://www.businessinsider.com/matthew-simmons-dylan-ratigan...

Well I certainly knew nothing of these developments until they appeared on this website. This is where I go for national news.

It's relevant as an unsolved engineering problem.

We're all waiting to see which "hack" is going to finally work.

Totally off-topic, but I'm posting this here, since it's where most of my other posts were: I was being hugely inappropriate and venting my frustrations in an entirely idiotic manner. I apologize (sincerely) to everyone, and their good taste, that I offended.

Phew. Accepted. Lets continue having fun and a sense of acceptance on HN. Its (part of) what makes it better then other sites.

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