june 2010 Responses

How has your engineering background helped you to understand the recent oil spill in the Gulf, and what do you see as the most effective preventive and corrective measures?

RESPOND | HAVE YOUR RESPONSE REMOVED

It is clear from media reports that the oil business could learn a lot from the nuclear business. All high hazard industries should use probabilistic risk analysis in the design process to build systems with very low chances of high consequence accidents. This has to be complemented with a rigorous root cause analysis of adverse events (including non-consequential events). The causes of consequential events are the same as the causes of non-consequential events. Legacy businesses like fossil fuels also have a legal history where spills and fatal accidents are accepted as part of doing business. That doesn’t need to be the case, and shouldn’t be. Mechanical systems can be designed to produce a desired result even in the case of a single active failure. It just costs a little more, but not nearly as much as cleaning up this kind of mess.

If the oil industry is smart they will develop a voluntary system of standards and best practices, and an insurance system that has significant financial enforcement ‘teeth’ to keep the BP’s in line. The alternative governmental system will be much more expensive and less effective.

Dwight E. Baker (EE ’77,’78)

After I heard that the blowout preventer was defective and the owner of the drilling rig may have used other than the correct parts in the blowout preventer's construction, my engineering and experience kicked in. Before I jumped to too many conclusions, I e-mailed my former son-in-law to get his take on the situation. David has worked on oil drilling rigs in as diverse places as the middle east, north sea, Texas, Wyoming, Oklahoma and the Gulf of Mexico. David is a tool pusher and has experience working for Baker Hughes. Baker Hughes is the company that the oil companies call to fix oil wells that have failed or where bits are broken and parts of them must be retrieved so the well can continue to be drilled.

I asked David if there was some solution other than a nuclear bomb to plug the well. He said the bomb would be the cleanest method and the quickest to stop the flow since the drilling only had to go down a couple thousand feet instead of the 15,000 feet that the relief wells would have to go.

It is obvious to me that the well has a great deal of pressure in it and it will take as much force to contain the oil release as the well has pressure.

Gordon Allison (Engr. Undeclared ’64)

My engineering background has helped me understand and explain to others what failed and why various approaches to stop the oil flow have not been successful. I have been able to explain concepts around the operation of a blow-out preventer, why hydrates formed in the containment dome, and how fluid dynamics issues doomed “top-kill”.

We have been successfully drilling offshore for more 60 years. There are no 100% guaranteed preventive measures to avoid failure for our most complex engineering challenges. Drilling 10’s of thousands of feet below the ocean floor in a mile of water is a complex engineering feat. However, blowout preventers work when maintained and wells seldom fail if properly completed. It seems like the problem here is that operational short cuts were taken to save a few dollars rather than doing what was known to be technically correct and safe. As engineers, we have a professional responsibility to stand up against cutting corners on design and operational safety for the sake of saving a few dollars. There are many lessons that will be learned from the Gulf Coast spill.

Oil-eating microbes offer the best chance for “cleaning up” the delicate wetlands. These microbes were pioneered during the Exxon Valdez spill, and research and development of the microbes continued after Valdez. Oil-eating microbes exist naturally, but we cannot wait on nature and the decades it might take to correct the environmental damage. We need to give nature a boost.

The best long-term measures, however, are to reduce our dependency on fossil fuels through development of renewable energy technology. Let’s avoid the need to drill for oil in the Gulf of Mexico or off the coast of Virginia. I recognize that developing renewable energy will be a long and costly proposition. However, we can do more now to reduce our dependency on oil as a fuel. The U.S. has more than 2000 TCF of natural gas reserves. At current daily U.S. consumption, this is about a 100-yr supply. Reserves of natural gas in very deep (25,000 feet or more) geo-pressured zones and in subsea and north slope hydrates could add 1000’s if not tens of 1000’s TCF of natural gas reserves. The U.S. is the Middle East of natural gas! Natural gas is cleaner burning and runs 20-30 percent cheaper than gasoline for the same energy content. In addition, it is difficult to imagine the damaging environmental effects of a “natural gas spill” like the oil spills that occurred in Prince William Sound or in the Gulf of Mexico. We should be doing everything to reduce the need for oil by exploiting cleaner and abundant natural gas supplies in the short term, while developing renewable energy technology for the long run.

Bob Bremer (ME ’79, ’80)

My engineering background has made me question whether the solutions that have been attempted by BP were the best technical solutions or (as so often must be the case) a compromise between technical efficacy and economic reality. At first, it remained profitable for BP to try and isolate the leak and to continue to scavenge oil off an existing well rather than taking extreme efforts to close off or collapse the well (e.g., explosives). After weeks of backlash, however, the net result may be a long-term loss of consumer faith in BP in specific, if not offshore drilling in general; not to mention immeasurable environmental and economic repercussions for Louisiana. This analysis is perhaps over-simplified. BP had crisis and contingency plans that were put in action. The fact is that the crisis and contingency plans were proven unsuitable to meet the magnitude of the disaster. Just as was the case for civil aviation authorities in Europe in the wake of the Icelandic volcano eruption, it was the first time the response was tested and it was found inadequate.

The experience of the Deepwater Horizon should be a reminder to all engineers that, while we may understand a great deal about the devices and technologies that we design and implement, these systems do not operate in the idealized conditions that often simplify our analyses and that they will often fail in ways that we had not foreseen. More pointedly, it is a reminder that the response to engineering disasters will often be governed not by what is technologically feasible, but within the constraints of governmental structures, financial realities, and environmental externalities. Most of us are fortunate to not have such public or catastrophic failures, but that does not mean that we should be any less professional in the exercise of our duties. I believe it is reasonable at this point to thank the STS department in SEAS for always emphasizing the fact that technology often has influence well beyond the technological scope and I hope that current undergraduates will be humbled by the lessons from this episode.

Will Goodrum (ME’07)

At some point time each organization involved in, should have been involved in, oil drilling has implicitly, if not explicitly, decided to accept the risk of a blowout. The decisions were made based on their best information available. Maybe some people made the decision for bad reasons, but I suspect there were not many. However, almost, if not all, of the people in these organizations are guilty of not asking what if. People in the oil companies, in the oil industry associations, in the Executive Branch, in the Congress, and in lobbying organizations if they have ever tried to reduce costs that affected this risk. It is very easy to blame BP. But the Government approved the risk plan. The Government approved the inspection schedule and chose not to abide by it.

I don’t have any answers, but we are getting some ideas as the days pass. For example, the recent comparison of all the oil companies’ risk plans. I have not seen them, but the news reported that all had essentially the same content, which was similar to BP’s content, and two even had identical covers.

Thanks for letting me rant. I can’t help but think that if the underwater research program at UVA had had continual funding that at this point, some 30 years later, there might have been some helpful spinoff knowledge or technology that would have been useful.

Bill Bigler (SIE ’76)

Current events with oil spilling into the Gulf of Mexico are unfortunate but familiar territory. For three years I worked as a controls engineer on a drill ship very similar the one shown on the news currently drilling a relief well near the site where the drilling rig sank in the Gulf. While onboard the Discoverer Severn Seas we drilled one well off Burma, one off Thailand, one off Egypt and one off the Ivory Coast. Deep water drilling is an inherently dangerous business. From what I read in the New York Times, I think BP is doing all that can be done to stop the leak. Politicians should get out of their way and let them get on with their work.

Although my degree from the UVA School of Engineering was in Aeronautical Engineering which had little to do with offshore oil drilling, my course work did give me the background necessary to learn how to do my job on the drill ship. My suggestion to undergraduates is to get as broad a background in engineering and physics as you can and to absorb all you possibly can from the material presented in the courses you take. You never know beforehand when it will come in handy in your career.

Andrew Thompson (AE '62)

Since the continuing flow of oil is getting more and more dispersed, it's going to require more & more resources to remove a specific amount of oil from the environment. Due to finite resources, as each day goes by we will remove less and less of it. The rest - say 50 to 100 million gallons of oil - will spend years in the food chain. And who's at the end of the food chain?

In 1974, there was a farm accident in Michigan that contaminated the local wholesale beef supply with PBB, a fire retardant chemical. By 1978, 97% of Michigan residents had detectable levels of PBB in their bloodstreams. To what effect? That hasn't been answered. The aromatic compounds in the oil spill might follow the same sort of bioaccumulation; the only certainty is that we are the lab rats in this experiment.

In sum, the BP spill is the Butterfly Effect with elephants substituted for butterflies.

Lisa Miller (ChE ’73)

In a Nuclear Power Plant, we build the containment building as a normal part of the plant. While the building design ( essentially design pressure times free volume = energy that can be contained via steam releases , just like in thermo class.........) cannot handle everything that one can imagine, it can handle a spectrum of what are called Design Basis Accidents (DBAs). You would have to "be there" to see the calculational expenditures required to show this.

By analogy, containing the releases from a blowout would ( presumably) require a p V product essentially equal to the numbers associated with the oil formation itself...not feasible, as I understand the geology of it all.

This leads to the question of why the blowout preventer failed. I read that the devices have never been tested under real world conditions. This implies that they have not been tested at ocean depths of a mile or so. The pressure at this depth is a couple of thousand psi, comparable to that used in a Nuclear plant ( pressurized water reactor) ... and large pressure vessels ( ten or so feet in scale) are routinely tested to these pressures .

Seems to me that full scale testing is possible after all?

Having said this, I also read where the pressure @ the blowout was 50,000 psi... if this is the case, then I'm guessing we can test re depth but maybe not re closure after the fact?

I've not seen an engineering sketch of the closure device. I suppose that Charlie Gaylord could do a force balance on the thing to show that it should work.

What is to be done? Simple... turn a bunch of mechanics loose , with some engineering backup, and see where it takes you.

Dr. Chu and I are both U of Rochester grads... the similarity ends there, with his Nobel prize that is well beyond me. With all due respect, I do not think that a high energy physics approach or culture is the way out here. The media articles leave us empty handed in terms of where the feds are taking this here.

Perhaps your ME Dept has some ideas, or at least some contacts to promulgate the state of things.

Consider this... BP says that the 2 (?) relief wells being drilled will fix it all when they come on line ( August?). But if the new wells ( assume 2 ) are the same size as the blowout , then wouldn't we only be capturing 2/3 of it all... and wouldn't we still have to wait for the reservoir pressure to drop to several thousand psi before the uncaptured release essentially stops?

Hopefully, the BP folks know a lot more about it than I do.

I'm not liking what I'm thinking, and keep coming back to square one here: either find a way to stop the blowout, or "it’s going to be a long summer".

Bill Dove (Aero ’59)

My engineering background has caused me to think of the recent oil spill in the Gulf in terms of motivation, risk, profit and loss, serving the customer, consequences, realistic disaster preparedness, and responsibility.

Some of what I suggest may amount to a solution for various components of this problem. Other things I suggest may just serve to point out the difficulty of doing things that appear to be needed. Being aware of the latter class and, thereby, being motivated to think on it may also be helpful.

If businesses are going to engage in deep sea, offshore drilling then maybe that necessitates legally redefining how far out that our coastal waters extend. Are the ocean currents further out (beyond BP's destroyed rig) more vigorous and more likely to wash unwanted oil leaks out to sea instead of inland toward our coast? Of course the waters there would be deeper too and make the drilling problem more difficult.

Just how could engineers go about highly motivating management to want to be prepared for catastrophes like this one? Real problem solutions don't just consist of making plans. They also consist of having real, existing hardware/software/people systems that effectively deal with the catastrophe.

Fire departments are like this. They don't go to fires every day, every minute. But disbanding them because of that would be unthinkable.

How do engineers convince management to set aside money to deal with a problem that management is not a priori enthused about dealing with? How do we convince them of the virtue of being prepared when they have been taught that risk taking is a virtue? Can we convincingly demonstrate to management that not dealing with such problems potentially impacts profits?

If one or more engineers develop disaster recovery systems on the QT then they get in trouble when management asks where the project funding came from. If they do it at home and in their off time then they may be accused of making use of company proprietary information.

Management tends to think of engineers as perfectionists who never know when to quit. Can an example be sited for a real world organization that has been created to continually deal with catastrophe recovery, even though its solutions may not be completely perfect? Yes. I read a magazine article saying that the software for the space shuttle consisted of the interconnection of many commercially available software programs that were never intended to work together. This lead to exotic, unexpected errors. Some were potentially lethal, such as shutting off communication between the shuttle and Houston when shuttle malfunctions occurred. To "deal with" this problem, NASA formed a small division of about 2000 employees to be responsible for compiling a flight crew instruction manual to tell what to do if various software problems occurred.

Sam Mackey (MSE ’75)

Responses have been edited for clarity, grammar and length. Not all responses are posted.