The full quote, “But, who cares, it’s done, end of story, will probably be fine and we’ll get a good cement
job.” That’s the voice of one Brett Cocales, Operations Drilling Engineer, BP, regarding the company’s decision to install six “centralizers” around a critical section of well casing instead of the recommended twenty-one at the Macondo Well/Deepwater Horizon site.
Cocales’ comment comes in an email to Brian Morel, another BP Drilling Engineer, who two days earlier referred to the project as a “nightmare well.”
The emails are recounted in a memo dated June 14, 2010, from congressmen Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Bart Stupak (D-MI) to BP CEO Tony Hayward advising him of “issues you should be prepared to address” during testimony before the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations on Thursday, June 17, 2010.
The memo’s second paragraph pretty well sets the stage,
In spite of the well’s difficulties, BP appears to have made multiple decisions for economic reasons that increased the danger of a catastrophic well failure. In several instances, these decisions appear to violate industry guidelines and were made despite warnings from BP’s own personnel and its contractors. In effect, it appears that BP repeatedly chose risky procedures in order to reduce costs and save time and made minimal efforts to contain the added risk.
The memo focuses on five crucial decisions made my BP in the chain of events leading to the disaster,
(1) the decision to use a well design with few barriers to gas flow; (2) the failure to use a sufficient number of “centralizers” to prevent channeling during the cement process; (3) the failure to run a cement bond log to evaluate the effectiveness of the cement job; (4) the failure to circulate potentially gas-bearing drilling muds out of the well ; and (5) the failure to secure the wellhead with a lockdown sleeve before allowing pressure on the seal from below. The common feature of these five decisions is that they posed a trade-off between cost and well safety.
The fourteen page document is a must-read with its mix of technical substantiation and accessible description. The memo clearly documents how BP personnel violated industry best practices and the scientific advice of contractors to cut corners; and includes citations from undated revisions of a “Forward Plan Review” amended to reflect the decisions to take short-cuts at the expense of, well, integrity.
Download the memo and read it yourself here. Seriously, read it.
Who cares? Will Probably be fine? How’s that working for you, today, Mr. Cocales?
mark
June 16, 2010
It just goes to show what the all mighty ” Greed ” will do. It creates disaster ! Did Mr Hayward not earn enough last year ? Was it $ 6 million ? You’d think with a salary like that you would take some responsibility, and also concentrate on safety issues, not just how to make more $$$$ & cutting corners while doing so. Shame,! shame,!shame!!!