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Comment by jofer | Hacker News Reader

Actually, deep water wells are usually quite easy to shut in by design. They frequently need to be shut in due to hurricanes or infrastructure maintenance. You don't drill a $100 million deepwater well without all the bells and whistles.

Very cheap wells with low production (onshore, say ~10 barrel per day) are the ones that tend to be difficult to shut in, as they're not designed for easy temporary shut-ins.

That having been said, most of the "must produce" issues are contractual. There are plenty of contracts with production quotas/etc. Similarly, pipelines need a minimum volume to keep flowing, and once they're stopped, they can be difficult to start again (inspections/etc, as well as physically starting things flowing).

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ALL wells, including the "very cheap wells" are easy to shut in, by design. It is an essential safety feature, mandated by all relevant codes, rules and regulations.

SOME wells can be a little difficult to restart after a shut-in. This includes, for example, offshore wells which extract waxy crude - the crude can simply solidify in the pipe if allowed to cool down to ambient temperature. See link below. This is usually not a big problem for a planned shutdown, as the facility will take measures to prevent such a situation (eg flush the pipes with diesel right after shutdown).

I suspect the problem might be more difficult with some pipelines, as these may be impractical to flush.

https://www.khavaranparaffin.com/articles/161-wax-problems-i...

Yes, any well must be able to be shut in. I phrased that poorly. What I meant was that not all wells respond to a shut in in the same way. It's not uncommon for things to take months to recover to the same production levels after a shut in. (At least for conventional wells -- unconventionals are significantly different.)

(Major caveat here: I'm an exploration geologist who later went into remote sensing, so my knowledge of actual operations is pretty spotty. Feel free to ignore me on this, but I'm going to keep rambling anyway.)

I was referring to a lot of onshore wells in declining or very small conventional fields. In many cases, a shut in that lasts for more than a few weeks basically leads to a P&A, as production won't recover without a workover, and a workover isn't worth it. That's what I meant by "not designed for it" -- production is expected to be sub-par after a shut in and a workover was never in the plans. A shut in means a death sentence for some wells, so operators prefer to keep them trickling along when possible, as it leads to a higher EUR. (Also most of these are hooked up to stock tanks, not production gathering pipelines, so it's a bit of a different world.)

However, I'm extrapolating from the very little experience I've had with that. Literally one tiny onshore field in TN (yes, Tennessee) that I worked in/with 15 years ago a summer after undergrad (I was actually mostly collecting seismic with a tiny source and a short string of geophones from the back of a pickup truck, so not terribly closely related). I may very well be way off base.

You've missed your very best chance ever to lead with "Well, actually"!

That might have been true 20-30 years ago. Today, all of the easy oil has been tapped. They're going out farther, deeper, and under much high pressures than before. Oh, and they're less regulated.

> You don't drill a $100 million deepwater well without all the bells and whistles. <

You will if you can make a couple $B off it. It's a risk. The deep gulf has mudslides that take out rigs. It happened to Taylor Energy in 2004. All the tech in the world couldn't prevent that spill.

https://www.nola.com/news/article_a55f87c0-8253-11ea-9f24-23...

What does that have do the ability to shut in a well? A shut in isn't stopping something that's leaking or stopping a blowout. It's the ability to deliberately and temporarily stop production.

A loss of containment is very very very bad and a huge problem, but it's not related to a shut in.

I'm well aware of shallow hazards (e.g. mass wasting aka mudslides). I've mapped them in many areas. I'm well aware of the ongoing Taylor spill. I've actually worked with monitoring it using satellite imagery from the regulatory side. I've also worked with it from the oil industry side...

None of that is even remotely relevant here, though... I'm still very unclear how anything you mentioned relates to anything I said...

That having been said, if you think _anything_ around the oil industry isn't done with safety and environmental concerns first and foremost, you've _clearly_ never been anywhere around the industry. I'm dead serious.

What they do is really, really, really damned dangerous and it's fair to debate whether that risk is worth it at a societal level.

However, don't for a goddamn second think that these folks don't care or are sloppy. _Every_ meeting all the way to the top starts with a discussion about safety and possible environmental impacts. I really, really mean that... Every damn one. It's vastly more important than very literally anything else. The first decision is _always_ HSE, never money.

Yeah, things can go wrong in very bad ways. It's not because people don't care or are trying to make a buck at the expense of the environment. It's because they're working in a really difficult environment. Yes, deepwater horizon was preventable. Yes it was due to a poor well design. BP fucked up. That doesn't mean that the oil industry is some evil mustache twirling villain.

You want cheap vegetables, flights across the continent, and plastics? Right now, we have to have oil for that. It ain't ideal, but it's not because people are out there trying to make money off of environmental disasters.

If the disasters happen repeatedly despite safety and environmental concerns being the top priority, then clearly they are not.

Money comes first, safety second.

Obviously there will be a lot of effort spent on safety, because otherwise there would be even more accidents, and the whole company might be forced to shut down.

As it is, they have just found an equilibrium of safety and greed.

Businesses exist to make money. There is a constant demand for oil in the market; the world as we know it needs some level of oil to continue to function. If you can't ban the extraction oil, and you believe in the continued existence of private business, then profit and safety have to co-exist as priorities.

All industrial operations are inherently exercises in risk management. I think it's smug to phrase that as an "equilibrium of safety and greed" but frankly, yes, in order for things with risk to happen, you have to accept a level of risk, which will never ever be 0.

I work in another industry (not oil & gas) where safety is a consideration in every action we take, and it's not just lip-service. It's a down-to-our-bones mentality that we won't do anything unsafe, or allow anything unsafe to happen. Accidents still happen, and it's not because if avarice.

In many countries oil is taxed at over 70%. If oil prices grew by let's say 50% - these countries can lower the tax and consumers wouldn't even notice.

There's no excuse for ignoring external costs - these costs are real and paid by everybody while profits are gathered by only a few people.

It's deeply unethical but more importantly irrational - people profiting from the fossil fuels have no incentives to fix anything if they aren't forced to deal with the external costs.

Currently the system is - they get the profits and everybody pays for external costs. That makes alternatives to fossil fuels less attractive because you will pay "petrol tax" anyway in taxes spent on all the external costs, even if you don't buy any fossil fuels ever.

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