2. Disaster on the Horizon : High Stakes, High Risks, and the Story Behind the Deepwater Well Blowout by Bob Cavnar (2010, 194 pages, read Jan 7 - 20)

Bob Canvar writes for the Huffington Post and is the founder of The Daily Hurricane.* His output is described as prolific. He is also an oil industry expert with 30 years experience in various forms, including ten years working in the field with oil rigs. He even survived an oil field explosion, a story which opens this book. This makes him a left-leaning oil industry expert who is quite intimate with industry. I suspect this is pretty unusual.

Disaster on the Horizon is his first book, and, published in October last year, the first book published on the Macando well blowout. He makes every effort to provide a balanced and knowledgeable summary of everything known at that time about the blowout itself, including its causes and the warning signs and precautions skipped. He goes into technical detail about the signs coming from the well that were showing there were problems, signs that were ignored. This aspect is significantly enhanced by his own experience and expertise. He also goes into detail about how the blowout preventer failed, and technical flaws in blowout preventers (they have about a 50% success rate in deep water). Then he follows up with the political fallout, including the efforts of BP to cover up as much as possible, and minimize the extent of the blowout in the eyes of the media and public.

This was my first look into this event in any detail. So, I was admittedly clueless. I didn’t realize that the well was pumping out 50-75 thousand barrels of oil a day (BP argued for 5000 bdp, which we all knew was low, but which I assumed was the correct order of magnitude. BP knew the real amount all along, but concealed the information and argued publicly that they couldn’t measure it.). And I didn’t realize that the most of the spill was confined to the deep water. BP injected massive amounts of chemical dispersant to break the oil up into small pellets. This added a second chemical plume of the dispersant, worsening the environmental damage, but also helped large amounts of oil stay in deep water, where it moves now as a large deep water plume. As Cavnar explains, BP, with the approval of the US government, made a decision to sacrifice the deep water column in the Gulf of Mexico.

There was a great deal of interesting information here. Some other examples:
- I assumed the blowout was a consequence of the time pressure put on the rigs, as their costs-per-day are enormous. They can’t afford delays. Cavnar doesn’t mention this. He does argue that BP put pressure on the drilling company to ignore danger signs, and just finish what was already a problem well.
- Also, I’ve been curious about what was wrong with BP. They have had a series of major problems (the Texas City explosion in 2005**, pipes dissolving in Alaska… google “bp alaska problems” ). Cavnar blames BP’s problems partly on its history, but largely on ex-CEO Lord Browne, who spent his tenure aggressively cutting cost everywhere, including safety. Cavnar argues BP became a company who put effort into highly visual safety concerns, while becoming lax with the biggest and most dangerous safety concerns.
-I had no idea that the big oil containment booms spread across the water to catch surface oil were useless. They essentially don’t do anything – but they look good on the news.

Some final notes: This is a timely work, and Cavnar was literally writing sections as the information came out. While the writing is unpolished and practical, this is understandable. One complaint is that the technical terms are not explained up front. There are long sections discussing specific parts of an oil well that come before the actual explanations of what these things are. Another complaint of sorts is that the focus is on the engineering point of view. He covers what happened to the well, and why; and he covers what was done to try to stop the blowout. But, there is limited information on the environmental or economic consequences.

* If you have any kind of liberal tilt, The Daily Hurricane is good stuff. Go here: http://www.dailyhurricane.com/
** Texas City Explosion: http://www.texascityexplosion.com/

2011
http://www.librarything.com/topic/104839#2559825 ( )