How do I Stop Offshore Drilling? How, Indeed...

The question recently popped up among available titles for eHow writers at DemandStudio (an assemblage of the most tight-assed control freaks I've ever encountered in my life, but that's a different story): "How Do I Stop Offshore Oil Drilling?"

And it got me thinking: how does the average Joe or Jane stop offshore drilling, presuming of course that's what he or she wants? It's not as if marching around with picket signs in front of that BP office complex on West Memorial in Houston will have any effect - besides, I drive past it twice a day, and I have yet to see an enraged picketer. Is there a way to stop? It's a tough nut to crack, but the way I see it, there are three ways to stop offshore oil drilling and none of them is likely to happen...

First option: Someone - the Federal government or the states - has to prohibit or severely restrict offshore drilling. California has done this for years, spurred into action by a Unocal blowout off Santa Barbara in 1969. The Federal government has likewise prohibited drilling in the easternmost Gulf of Mexico and in Atlantic Coastal waters for more than twenty years, a policy the Obama administration announced would be relaxed only days before the BP Macondo blowout (see image) on April 20, 2010. The rescission of that policy is, as one might expect, now on hold.

Photo from the Christian Science Monitor

Given the "energy independence" talking point loudly bandied about by certain segments of the political spectrum (who seem perfectly content to repeat the lie that the US gets most of its oil from "unfriendly" nations¹), it is highly unlikely that the Federal government has the political will to ban offshore drilling. Some "blue states" in the northeast and northwest may enact new bans on drilling in state waters, but it's highly unlikely that a "red state" would even consider doing so. So the answer to "How do I [emphasis on the "I"] Stop Offshore Drilling?" could well be, "Elect a government that will ban it."

Second option: Enact legislation that makes offshore drilling so expensive that it's no longer a profitable enterprise. Increase the cost of drilling permits or require an indemnity bond so massive that no corporate entity can afford it. Realize, of course, that it already costs several hundred million dollars to drill one of these wells...

The political will question arises again for this option, so see the "Elect a government..." answer again. Unless there are two or three more Macondo blowouts in the next decade, rest assured that this will not happen.

Third option: Make drilling for oil unprofitable by reducing the demand. This is easier said than done, for several reasons. One reason is that, although the US still consumes approximately 25% of the world's oil production, the demand in expanding economies, such as China, is on the rise. Already China has surpassed Japan as the world's second largest economy (after the US) and it shows no signs of slowing. Reducing US consumption may no longer have the desired effect of reducing world output.

Currently, the US imports roughly two-thirds of the 20 million barrels of petroleum and finished petroleum products its citizenry consumes every day (in the neighborhood of 12-13 million barrels). In the US, petroleum products are mainly used for transportation. About two-thirds of all domestically-produced and imported crude oil is refined into gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel. The US transportation sector uses approximately forty-five per cent of its total petroleum consumption in the form of gasoline². What does this mean for so-called "energy independence" that offshore drilling will theoretically create? Well, one thing it means is that switching from incandescent bulbs to compact fluorescents does zip for reducing imported oil, because trifling few US power plants run on oil. Much of that imported oil (or oil produced by offshore drilling) goes straight into the fuel tanks of cars, trucks, trains, buses, and airliners.

It's a long way around to this, I know, but if you want to stop offshore drilling without government intervention (which ain't gonna happen as long as there are lobbyists and corporations can buy all the free speech they can afford), then you have to work to reduce the market value of oil. If you want to reduce the market value of oil, you have to reduce demand. If you want to reduce demand, you have to stop using so damned much of it - all those "yous" out there.


¹ per the US Department of Energy records, the two countries from whom the US imports the most oil are Canada and Mexico, neither of which is on any list of "unfriendly" nations.
² per the US Department of Energy again

The Anatomy of a Blowout

To comprehend a catastrophic oil well blowout, we first need basic understanding of how petroleum collects in underground reservoirs and how exploration for those reservoirs works. For starters; oil, natural gas, and water collect in underground layers when their path to shallower layers is blocked by an impenetrable zone. Instead of collecting in “lakes” or “rivers” of oil, however, hydrocarbons accumulate in tiny pores within huge volumes of rock.

Being buried under miles of solid rock means that hydrocarbon reservoirs are under enormous pressure. The pressure increases, on average, by a factor of 0.433 psi/foot or 9.792 kPa/meter. This regular pressure gradient means that pressure at the bottom of a ten-thousand-foot well is more than 4300 pounds per square inch; compared to a pressure of about 30-35 psi for a car tire. Since liquids cannot be compressed, deeply-buried reservoir fluids seek any possible pressure relief.

Drilling a hole ten or fifteen inches in diameter from the surface to a deep reservoir provides just such relief. To keep oil and water from spurting out of a wellbore, drillers fill the hole with fluid of their own. Called “mud” or “drilling mud,” this fluid is carefully designed to carry out several different functions, one of which is to match the pressure in the underground layers and prevent the crude oil from rushing to the surface. Maintaining balance is relatively simple in areas of normal pressure, where pressure at depth can be predicted from the standard pressure gradient (above).

There are, however, subsurface layers in which the pressure is much higher than that predicted by the pressure gradient. Unexpected penetration of such an overpressured zone can result in a blowout, as can improper drilling practices or poor well design.

When a blowout occurs liquids in the reservoir stream into the wellbore, forcing tons of drilling mud and thousands of feet of steel pipe from the mouth of the well at the surface. The rising column of oil, water, and natural gas are under such vast pressure that they can reach supersonic speeds; more than 1100 feet per second. Crude oil and natural gas are both flammable, and are often ignited by the heat of friction in the moving column or by sparks as metal and chunks of rock smash against one another. In the early days of exploration, drill rigs often “burned to the ground” after a blowout; though such gushers were looked on favorably before scientists understood the environmental havoc wreaked by such a disaster.

A blowout is both an environmental and an economic disaster, for not only are large quantities of a valuable resource wasted, the infrastructure at the surface is destroyed. In the April, 2010, blowout in the Gulf of Mexico, the semi-submersible drillship Deepwater Horizon burned and sank at a cost of $600 million and eleven lives. Five thousand barrels of oil per day, valued at some $400,000, poured out of the breached drill pipe. Because of such costs, exploration companies take expensive measures to prevent blowouts.

The first line of defense against blowouts is the drilling mud, described above. Before drilling into potential overpressured zones, mud engineers “mud up” to increase the density of the fluid in the well. The second line of defense is casing, heavy-weight large-diameter pipe that is cemented in place to line the hole and isolate zones of different pressure. The final line of defense is a massive mechanical device called a blowout preventer or BOP.

Blowout preventers come in several designs depending on the manufacturer (leading makers include FMC, Hydrill, and Cameron). A BOP is placed at the ground surface or, for offshore work, at the seafloor; between the drill rig and the well head. BOPs are designed to trigger automatically upon detection of rapid uphole flow, or trigger remotely on command. Blowout preventers come in two types: the first is basically a giant rubber doughnut that can be activated to seal off the annulus – the space between the drill pipe and the casing. The second type consists of massive hydraulic rams that force hardened, edged surfaces inward to cut the drill string and seal the well with a thick metal wedge.

The worst-case scenario of a blowout is one in which reservoir fluids breach the cement holding the casing in place and reach the surface around the outside of the pipe – in this instance, even BOPs are of no use. There has been speculation that this is what happened at British Petroleum’s Macondo well off the Mississippi Delta (April, 2010).

If the BOPs fail and a blowout occurs, options for recovery of the well are few. One option is to collapse the wellhead with shaped charges (compare to John Wayne’s portrayal of Red Adair in the movie “Hellfighters”). A more likely scenario is to drill a relief well that intersects the blown well – a technological challenge, to be certain, but doable. The relief well is used to dump high density “kill fluids” – super-weight drilling mud – into the wellbore of the flowing well and, eventually, bring it under control. Drilling a relief well takes weeks or months, while the blowout continues to spew crude oil, and can cost tens of millions of dollars.

In spite of all the technology and wellfield expertise, blowouts still occur. The April 2010 is one of the largest ever, a list that includes the Pemex IXTOC I blowout, which poured 10,000 barrels of oil per day into the Gulf of Mexico in 1979-80; and the 1969 blowout of a Unocal well in the Santa Barbara Channel off southern California. The environmental damage caused by the Unocal blowout is responsible for California’s strict regulation of offshore drilling.


Glossary: http://www.glossary.oilfield.slb.com/search.cfm
more information: http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/business/deepwaterhorizon/6973912.html