Deep Water Drilling Explained

Here's a good presentation by Shell Oil on how deep water drilling is done and what safety systems are in place. This is great for those who worry that drilling is just one big risky venture. You get a feel for the technology that has been developed to make it safe.

Skip the first 7:50 of introductions to get to the guy who actually does deep water drilling and is the presenter:



This video is from the Aspen Ideas Festival, July 5-11, 2010 held by the Aspen Institute and was entitled "Drilling for Oil: A Visual Presentation of How We Drill for Oil and the Precautions Taken Along the Way".

When the engineer talks about the "safety case", he is taking about a risk assessment with the associated plan to minimize those risks (see Wikipedia risk management tools). I'm used to projects with a probabilistic risk assessment with an associated plan to minimize those risks. The R&D projects I worked on were so unique we did qualitative assessments of likelihood and severity. Any numeric assessment would be giving the impression we had more insight than we actually had. Since the assessment was qualitative, the plan ranked the risks. Obviously high likelihood and high severity risks required a more extensive analysis and risk plan.

Prior to my R&D experience, when I worked on large projects we usually did more extensive risk assessments. For military projects (and large quasi-military, i.e. for big government agencies) with a loss-of-life and very expensive failure modes, we would treat the risk assessment as rough hazard analysis and investigate it via a full top-down Fault Hazard Analysis to flesh out all failure modes. This guided us as we elaborated a FMECA to document the more extensive analysis of failure modes with analyzed criticality.

When the engineer discusses the Shell safety design versus what BP was doing, this says to me that BP has done what it has a long history of doing: BP cut corners. BP has a terrible operating history (see here and here) and safety record (see here) because it has played fast and loose with regulations and safety concern. You will note that the engineer points out that all the of "extra bells and whistles" that Shell uses to prevent a catastrophe have now been mandated by the government. Sadly this is too late for this Gulf Oil spill, but hopefully this means that this BP spill will be the last one caused by this kind of cutting of corners by BP.