Oilbama In The Mines of Moria

Richard B. Simon
May 3, 2010

The most interesting story about the "BP oil spill" in the Gulf of Mexico was a piece in the LA Times over the weekend that provided a pretty convincing explanation for what may have happened.

As it turns out, a crew of men from Halliburton - yes, Cheney's company, the one in which he still owns stock, and which profited handsomely from all the Bush Administration's policies - had been working to cement the rig's oil-sucking pipe in place on the sea floor, twenty hours before the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon rig on April 20.

This oil rig was no ordinary offshore drilling operation - this was among the first deep-water rigs (hence the name) to operate in the Gulf of Mexico, where BP has been particularly active this decade. It was this rig that found the deep off-shore "Tiber" reservoir of oil in 2009, the strike in the Gulf of Mexico that is among very few significant new oil finds in the world these days - and which has emboldened an otherwise dying industry with dreams of more, more, more.

And this was an exploratory well. Halliburton's men were nearing the point at which a cement plug could be inserted into the hole, so that the well could be temporarily abandoned, apparently to await the installation of a production rig.

The well-head - the place where the pipe goes into the sea floor to worm its way through mud, silt, and rock and eventually into the highly-pressurized oil - sits at 5000 feet below the ocean's surface. That's awfully deep - too deep, unfortunately, for a human being to go down there and fix the problem. The first responders on the scene were robots.

Another problem with drilling at 5000 feet is that the ocean floor at that depth is riddled with frozen pockets of crystallized methane hydrates. Methane, as we know, is a volatile explosive gas, often used these days as fuel.

The Times reports that Hallibuton engineers had raised concerns about the cementing process and the methane hydrates. Cement, as it cures, undergoes a long chemical reaction that generates a lot of heat. And that heat, Halliburton engineers fretted in 2009, could destabilize nearby methane hydrates.

Some speculation has centered on methane pockets frozen into crystallized formations beneath the seabed that could be warmed by the cementing process and become unstable. A 2009 Halliburton presentation to the drilling engineers association described the challenges of methane hydrates, asking: "When do hydrates become unstable?" and "Will cement hydration cause this outcome?" The presentation noted that "gas release is a challenge for safety and economics."

A company spokesman declined to comment on whether methane hydrates, warmed by cement curing, may have been a factor in the gulf explosion.

Again, Halliburton's crew was cementing the pipe in place on the ocean bed just hours before the rig exploded. That means that the cement was just starting to get really, really hot.

Imagine, if you will, viscous liquid cement pumped down a 5000-foot pipe to the ocean floor, to "slurry" up around the wellhead pipe and thereby seal it in place. Imagine now that thick blob of cement, enough to hold a pipe gushing with oil at pressure equal to the weight of 5000 feet of ocean, heating up as it cures, and that curing cement triggering a methane explosion at 5000 feet - around the base of a pipe filled with venting latent volatile, flammable natural gas, connected to a massive reservoir of crude oil. The curing cement triggers a methane explosion at the wellhead, sending flaming oil and gas shooting up the pipe and onto the rig, igniting the rig in that spectacular fire - and, just like the jet fuel cascading down the steel superstructure of the World Trade Center towers, superheating and thereby softening (and likely burning) the steel, causing the rig to collapse into the sea.

The Wall Street Journal's reporting also points to Halliburton's cement job.

"The initial likely cause of gas coming to the surface had something to do with the cement," said Robert MacKenzie, managing director of energy and natural resources at FBR Capital Markets and a former cementing engineer in the oil industry.

Halliburton cementing is implicated in a similar catastrophic rig failure in Australia in 2009:

Halliburton also was the cementer on a well that suffered a big blowout last August in the Timor Sea, off Australia. The rig there caught fire and a well leaked tens of thousands of barrels of oil over 10 weeks before it was shut down. The investigation is continuing; Halliburton declined to comment on it.

Elmer P. Danenberger, who had recently retired as head of regulatory affairs for the U.S. Minerals Management Service, told the Australian commission looking into the blowout that a poor cement job was probably the reason oil and natural gas gushed out of control.

The Journal reports elsewhere that this well lacked a secondary shut-off valve, which could be operated by remote control. Attorney Michael Papantonio - the attorney for plantiff fishermen who are already suing BP for the spill - argues that the secondary emergency shutoff valves were mandatory until the Cheney Energy Task Force's deregulation of the energy industry, which, as we well recall, was the young Bush Administration's first priority on entering office in 2001. After all, if you're a corporation, why spend $500,000 of your own money to prevent something that some other sucker would have to spend the billions to clean up?

This page did not fret when President Obama announced on March 31 that his administration would approve new offshore deepwater drilling - twice as far offshore as the Deepwater Horizon was operating in April. Had it been the Bush administration, the response from these quarters would have been different. That's not purely hypocrisy - it's a matter of context.

The new drilling was a clear sop to Republicans and fossil state Democrats who insisted on an "all of the above" energy plan (as if supply were the sole problem, and not consumption-related planetary climate catastrophe).

Less noticed in environmentalists' (and news organizations') flutter and fury over the newly-minted Oilbama was the President's announcement the next day of an unprecedented increase in fuel economy standards -- which would save an ocean of oil every single year, for eternity - and was a far more significant move that, coupled with the drilling announcement, signalled a seriousness about getting the country off fossil fuels altogether.

According to the Christian Science Monitor,

The first cars to be affected by the law will be automakers' 2012 lines. By 2016, model year greenhouse gas emissions must not exceed an average of 8.8 ounces per mile - a 21 percent reduction from today's levels. To get there, vehicles' gas mileage will need to achieve on average 35.5 miles per gallon fleetwide - a 40 percent improvement from current levels ... the rule will cut the nation's oil use by 1.8 billion barrels over the vehicles' lifetimes. It is the equivalent of removing 42 million cars from the road, [EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson] said.

Bush expanded drilling as the only answer to our civilization's energy problems. There was no accompanying action to deal with climate change - other than to purposefully torpedo all international attempts to deal with the problem, on behalf of the state-less corporations that his administration served as proxy. The Bush administration's agenda was to release multinational energy corporations from government regulation - to take away the rules that protect ordinary humans from the amorality of the corporate urge to profit.

Without a rule - a government regulation - requiring that unprecedented deepwater oil drilling be accompanied by catastrophic spill prevention plans, and that those plans would be bolstered by backup plans, there were no plans whatsoever. No secondary device to backup the now-famous failed blowout preventer. No plans for quickly sealing a blown wellhead, for containing a spill, or for cleaning up a spill. It was as if, even in unprecedented drilling conditions, failure was not an option. In those heady days of hundreds of billions in profits and loosened regulations, who could have - who would have - predicted the breach of the wellhead?

Last week, a BP spokesman likened using robots to attempt to stop the flow of oil at 5000 feet to operating in outer space. According to the Guardian (UK),

The plan put into operation yesterday called for four underwater robots to dive 1,500 metres (5,000 ft) below the surface of the water to try to activate the gargantuan system of pipes and valves that sits next to the well on the ocean floor.

BP said it was the first time such an operation had been mounted at this depth.

"It is a slow process," said Ron Rybarczyk, a spokesman at the command centre in Louisiana.

"If you can visualise it, it's like robotic arms doing something outside the space station. It is operating something with a mechanical claw on it that grasps things and turns things and adjusts equipment way down at the floor of the ocean."

BP also admits that the robots may not be successful. Doug Suttles, the chief operating officer of BP's exploration unit, said activating the blowout preventer was a highly complex task - in part because it remains unclear whether the valve is working.

The valve should have stopped the leak at the outset. "The issue we have is that we don't know the condition inside that blowout valve," he said. The laborious effort is by far the quickest means available for capping the leak.

They are flying completely blind. Now in the third week of unabated flow of an ocean of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, BP suggests that it could take up to three months to drill a second well, in order to relieve enough pressure to allow the capping of the failed wellhead. But even that solution is not certain. We are in uncharted territory. This has never happened before - we've only been drilling for oil at these once-unfathomable depths for a few short years. BP is inviting all comers with ideas for how to stanch the flow to step forward.

That's not assuring.

Lucky for BP, a 1991 law, passed cynically in the wake of the Exxon Valdez disaster, caps the amount of damages the company must pay at $75 million.

Unlucky for the rest of us, as BP engineers toy with dropping a giant steel box over the wellhead, the spill is nearing the Loop Current, which would carry it into the Gulf Stream - and up the east coast of the United States to Greenland, then on to Europe.

It certainly seems within the realm of possibility that the hole could never be plugged, that we have opened a wormhole to catastrophe, an ocean-connecting passage like the Panama Canal, only this time irreparably opening an ocean of noxious triassic dinosaur goo into the already-damaged water ocean that is necessary for sustaining life in our time.

In this case, it was Tolkien who warned us.

In the first installment of The Lord of the Rings, The Fellowship of the Ring, the titular fellowship - four Hobbits, two men, a dwarf, an elf, and the wizard Gandalf - are taking a shortcut through the mountain Khazad-dûm.

Here dwarves once dug the Mines of Moria in search of mithril, a mystical metal, used to fashion impenetrable armour, and so valuable that one suit of it is worth more than the Hobbits' entire homeland, the Shire. But Moria is a haunting ruins - chamber after chamber of high vaulted ceilings, borne atop ornate columns carved from the living rock. The dwarves are all dead. What remains of their once-great civilization are bones ... and the occasional bit of armour.

"Something has crept, or has been driven out of dark waters under the mountains," Gandalf tells his spooked companions. "There are older and fouler things than Orcs in the deep places of the world."

The Balrog - firebreathing and black, a monster from the prehistoric depths.

"The Dwarves tell no tale," he continues later, "but even as mithril was the foundation of their wealth, so also was it their destruction: they delved too greedily and too deep, and disturbed that from which they fled."

Fossil fuels have provided us with both the enormous wealth that allowed us to rise from our primordial state, and the means of our own destruction.

It all depends on what happens next.