Four years after 11 men lost their lives and the ecosystem of the Gulf of Mexico was laid waste by the Macondo well blowout disaster, operators in the offshore industry have still not learned its lesson.
This was the stark warning from a key member of the Deepwater Horizon Study Group, DHSG, which produced the definitive report on the failures of the project for a commission appointed by President Obama in response to one of the worst disasters in offshore oil industry history.
David Pritchard, a registered petroleum engineer for over 40 years, believes the industry is at risk of more accidents unless it can overcome its “deeper, cheaper” mentality.
He agrees adopting a new approach to safety is “critical” for the North Sea, particularly as BP – the firm that operated the ill-fated drilling vessel on the Gulf of Mexico – and others begin unlocking finds in the deep, challenging waters of the west of Shetland. “The sooner we get the message out the better,” said the 65-year old Texan.
The crux of the problem, he reckons, is not that the industry doesn’t think about its workers’ safety. But the industry’s emphasis – led from the top by senior management down the chain of command – is on the wrong kind of safety.
“When we as an industry hear the word ‘safety’, we think about personal safety – slips, trips and falls and avoiding dropped objects,” said Mr Pritchard.
“We have done a good job of that. But when we come to process safety we have to understand that is a completely different dynamic. Until we integrate that we will not have reliability.”
Process safety, he explained, is an integrated approach to “realisable engineering design execution process”.
“It is about avoiding major incidents, hazards, fires and blow-outs,” he said.
“That is quite different from personal safety.”
But despite one of the deepest investigations into the causes of the Gulf of Mexico fiasco, getting the industry to understand the ramifications of this approach has been frustratingly slow. Mr Pritchard said he was bitterly disappointed by reaction at a recent conference whose sole aim is to ensure catastrophes like the Macondo never happen again.
The Centre for Offshore Safety – established in the wake of the Macondo blow-out – held its second annual forum in Houston in April, where a senior oil executive made clear the lack of understanding required to prevent disaster from happening. “One of the leaders from the forum, a senior leader of a major oil company, stood up and said, we are not all here to talk about a leak in a pipe.
“But that was exactly why we were there – it was a catastrophic leak in a pipe. It killed 11 people and polluted the gulf for 87 days.
“When some of the best and brightest in the industry say we are not here about a leak in a pipe, we have a problem.”
The issue is the industry’s focus on cost, said Mr Pritchard. The DHSG’s final report was unequivocal in its criticism of BP whose “culture remained one that was embedded in risk-taking and cost-cutting”. But Mr Pritchard believes that greater emphasis on the safety of the engineering process is vital – “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” he says.
“It’s simple but it is true,” he said.
“But if you take time to listen to the drillers and the geoscientists, you can avoid problems and shut-downs.”
After writing several papers for the DHSG report, he found that there were tell-tale signs before the fateful moment of 9.47pm on the evening of April 20, 2010, when an uncontrolled flow of water, oil mud, oil, gas, and other materials came out of the drilling riser and caused a series of fatal explosions with disastrous consequences.
“Even down to the last day, there were a lot of complaints and a lot of issues with pressure tests – often from lower-echelon folks on the rig. If they had been listened to, it would have been quite different.
“For a safety issue, if someone sees a broken strand of wire they will not hesitate to call ‘stop work’.
“On the other hand, if somebody sees a difference in pressure readings, they will start discussing – but no one feels they have the authority to say stop without getting fired.”
He insists it is not just an isolated problem.
“I don’t want to make this a BP criticism, this frankly is across the broad spectrum of the industry,” he said.