Big Argument between BP & Transocean hours before blowout!!!

This can't be right: A powerful corporation making a risky decision that put costs ahead of environmental safety? That's crazy talk!

About 11 hours before the Deepwater Horizon exploded, a disagreement took place between the top manager for oil giant BP PLC on the drilling rig and his counterpart for the rig's owner, Transocean Ltd., concerning the final steps in shutting down the nearly completed well, according to a worker's sworn statement.

Michael Williams, a Transocean employee who was chief electronics technician on the rig, said there was "confusion" between those high-ranking officials in an 11 a.m. meeting on the day of the rig blast, according to a sworn statement from Mr. Williams reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. Mr. Williams himself attended the meeting.

The confusion over the drilling plan in the final hours leading up to the explosion could be key to understanding the causes of the blowout and ultimately who was responsible.

What is known from drilling records and congressional testimony is that after the morning meeting, the crew began preparations to remove from the drill pipe heavy drilling "mud" that provides pressure to keep down any gas, and to replace this mud with lighter seawater.

Ultimately, the crew removed the mud before setting a final 300-foot cement plug that is typically poured as a last safeguard to prevent combustible gas from rising to the surface. Indeed, they never got the opportunity to set the plug.

[...] Typically well owner BP would have final say, since it was paying roughly $1 million a day to lease the rig and pay for services from 12 companies that had people on the rig.

What is clear is that workers soon began displacing the mud. Later that afternoon a pressure test provided ambiguous readings, a possible sign of gas seeping in, according to what Rep. Henry Waxman says a BP executive told House investigators. Eventually, in the evening, after further tests, BP made a decision to carry forth in removing more drilling mud. The rig blew about 10 p.m.

crooksandliars.com...

I will post more on this as I have further details from other sources. At the moment it seems like the BP representative (Company man) onboard insisted that the driller (Transocean) replace the mud with seawater prior to setting the cement down the casing. This resulted in a huge argument onboard. It really was the drillers call but he was overruled by the companyman.

Unfortunately the driller died but the companyman got off the rig safely and has took the 5th amendment in the recent investigative interviews.......

PEACE,
RK

Robert Kaluza & Donald Vidrine were BP's company men on the Deepwater Horizon, the former was the well site leader, both were scheduled to testify but have exercised their 5th Amendment rights to not incriminate themselves, Vidrine citing illness for his failure to attend.

BP is well known in the industry for its "Masters of the Universe persona" especially since it took over Amoco, always confident that it could go "where no one had ever gone before".

Well you certainly have now Bob

The above two and Transocean managers aboard the Deepwater Horizon spent hours attempting to determine why drilling mud had been lost from the down-hole casing before the tremendous blowout occurred.

Miles Ezell was the senior toolpusher for Transocean, he testified before a panel of federal investigators Friday that BP company man Donald Vidrine was puzzled by the loss of mud during a negative pressure test.

That test was intended to determine the safety of replacing mud in the riser with seawater as the rig crew prepared to cap that well and move to another drilling site. The weight of the head or column of drilling mud is one safeguard against a blowback of oil and gas from a highly pressurized underground formation.

“He (Vidrine) wasn’t happy” about the negative pressure test results, Ezell told a panel of investigators for the U.S. Coast Guard and federal Minerals Management Service. Ezell said Transocean’s offshore installation manager, Jimmy Harrell, had insisted that the negative pressure test be conducted.

“That was something that Jimmy Harrell … was adamant about,” Ezell said. “He (Harrell) said that day he would always do a negative pressure test.”

Harrell testified Thursday that Vidrine and another BP company man, Robert Kaluza, sent word that a second negative pressure test was conducted successfully.... Now then.... this is a bit fishy to me.... Why would both company men send word that the second test had been completed successfully. Surely this news would come to the OIM (Herrell) from the Transocean Driller or STP (Ezell)... I just dont get this, it stinks

Ezell testified that he received a call in his room at about 9:50 p.m. on the night of the explosion. That call was from assistant driller Stephen Curtis, 39, of the village of Georgetown in Grant Parish.

“He said: ‘The well is blowing out,’ ” Ezell recalled.

Ezell said he threw on some clothes and stepped into a passageway just in time to be knocked down by the force of a huge explosion.

Curtis, Gordon Jones, 28, of Baton Rouge; Blair Manuel, 56, of St. Amant; and Jason Anderson, 40, of Bay City, Texas, were on the rig floor at the time of the blowout and are considered to have died then.

Christopher Pleasant is a subsea supervisor for Transocean who also was on the rig that night, he testified Friday that a supervisor told him approximately four hours before the explosion that the first negative pressure test revealed that the well pipe had lost 60 barrels of drilling mud.

Transocean’s Anderson and BP’s Vidrine then disagreed on the type of negative pressure test to run on a second attempt, Pleasant said he was told. He said he also was told that Kaluza preferred a different test from the others. Yeah I bet he did....perhaps the type of test that would find 60 barrels of lost mud...

A second test was performed, Pleasant said. He said he didn’t know which type of test was employed. (WOAAHHH..... COP-OUT OR WHAT??) “We didn’t see anything flow back,” he added. “We started displacing the well with seawater.”

Pleasant said he left the rig floor to tend to other duties in the forward part of the rig. He never heard the steel-smashing explosion. “I heard popping,” Pleasant said. “But I never heard the big boom.”

Once the blowout occurred, Pleasant testified, it was his predetermined duty to punch a button activating the rig’s emergency disconnect system. That system was designed to cut and seal the well pipe and detach the rig from the well. (This means operate the BOP)

Pleasant said he ran to the bridge and announced: “I’m hitting the EDS.”

“The captain (Curt Kuchta) told me: ‘Calm down, Chris. We’re not EDSing,’ ” Pleasant said.He said the captain moved away from the button and was talking with other people on the bridge.

The others were doing their jobs, Pleasant said.“I did mine,” he said, adding that he punched the button 30 seconds later. Four or five minutes after that, Pleasant said, Kuchta gave the order to hit the EDS button. He said the next order was to abandon ship. So which was it? 30 seconds or four or five minutes? one thing we know for sure is that the BOP did not seal the well.

alertnet.org...
www.2theadvocate.com...
detnews.com...

PEACE,
RK

Posting here because its the most recent thread, somethings happening on the live feed, it just got majorly worse.

www.bp.com...



[edit on 29/5/2010 by who-me?]

reply to post by who-me?


I think they started pumping more drilling mud into it so the plumes got heavier. What you are seeing is the mud not petroleum and that remains a good sign.

I'm still cautiously optimistic that this is going to work.

reply to post by rnaa


I hope your right, but I've only seen it this color. There's definitely some action, when I posted just now there was another light source behind the flow and something disrupted the water currents and clouded the view. I still feel the flows intensified. Hopefully not.

reply to post by Rigel Kent



OK... this info might explain the radio/TV? news blurb.

a 20 second blurb that said just hours before the rig explosion, there was a reported confrontation between the driller operation & the rig lessee, as to cutting corners around safety procedures...
(heard on friday 28 may '10)

Originally posted by St Udio
reply to post by Rigel Kent

 

OK... this info might explain the radio/TV? news blurb.

a 20 second blurb that said just hours before the rig explosion, there was a reported confrontation between the driller operation & the rig lessee, as to cutting corners around safety procedures...
(heard on friday 28 may '10)

Yeah,
Unfortunately the driller died in the explosion and both of the BP reps have gone into hiding and are saying nothing. The upshot of this is that BP were warned about the unsafe condition of the well but overruled the driller.
we know the rest.

PEACE,
RK

The mud logger should have told BP to f*ck off and called into his own people! This is why we attend college. If i was there my super would be called also Halliburton pulled cementing so really it was HALLIBURTON

F*ck HALLIBURTON you never try to dilute an initial cementing with damn sea water because of bubbling which will clog....sea water weakens the damn cement causing cracks which forces blow-out.

NOPE not really transocean HALLIBURTON