The bulletin flashed on a screen: Crisis in the Gulf. Oil spill. Everyone to battle stations. And, thus, with great alacrity did oil company managers and engineers race to their appointed tables in various corners of the ballroom.
This “tabletop” exercise took place recently in a Marriott Hotel in a Houston suburb.
The offshore-drilling industry vows that it is fully prepared to handle the kind of calamity that struck a year ago this Wednesday, when the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded in a fireball that killed 11 workers and triggered the nation’s worst oil spill.
But the realities of petroleum engineering do not always follow the script. The question remains: Are we ready to go back into the deep water? The industry, environmental groups and the Obama administration all give different answers, while Congress wrangles over Republican- backed legislation that would speed up approval of drilling permits — a political debate framed by $4-a-gallon gasoline.
No one doubts that the horror of last year has put the industry on its toes and sharpened the oversight of the federal government. Two industry groups have developed hardware packages that they say could be deployed quickly to cap a blown-out well in as little as 10 days.
The era in which oil companies would carelessly list a dead person as an expert to turn to in an oil spill, or mention walruses as an example of Gulf of Mexico marine life, is apparently over. What happened to BP, which is facing more than $40 billion in costs as a result of its Macondo well, is enough to sober up any oil exploration company.
But the problem has hardly been solved. Oil companies say the government has had trouble finding people qualified to judge permit applications and monitor the 276 deep-water wells and 46 deep-water production platforms in the Gulf of Mexico.
And critics of the industry note that new wells will go deeper, testing the limits of technology that last year showed itself to be less robust than advertised. In this view, the industry and the government are like generals and admirals who have geared up to fight the last war.
“Hope is no strategy for success,” said Robert Bea, a University of California professor who headed a team of industry experts and academics known as the Deepwater Horizon Study Group. “Quite frankly, I think we’re scared. The scare is that we’ll go off half-cocked, half-prepared, have another significant loss of well control, and that’s going to be an industry- stopper.”
Bea suggests that not all deep-water prospects should be treated equally. Some geological formations in what Bea calls the “golden zone” of the northern Gulf of Mexico have unusually high pressures, temperatures and gas-to-oil ratios.
Combined with brittle rock, these features make the region a tricky place to drill. No one, he said, has done a close analysis of the “failure modes” of drilling into such formations.
The politics of drilling is especially contentious in Washington. With gas prices surging, Republicans in Congress have pushed legislation that would accelerate approvals of deep-water drilling and open up new areas off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts to oil and gas exploration. One bill passed last week by the House Natural Resources Committee would deem drilling permits to be approved automatically if the administration did not act on applications within 60 days.
Republicans assert that demonstrating an aggressively positive attitude about drilling can bring down gasoline prices.
Oil experts, however, say there would be no near-term impact — drilling and development would take years before any new oil would begin to flow to the market.
Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., a frequent critic of BP during the spill, scoffs at the GOP bills: “It’s all ‘drill, baby, drill.’ “
