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Control systems, training, both important BSEE blowout preventer forum hears from industry on existing, underdevelopment controls and personnel training and assessment Kristen Nelson Petroleum News
Making information available to the offshore rig — and to onshore experts — and appropriate training on equipment and on emergency procedures are crucial issues in blowout preventer effectiveness.
Those were the topics of the final panels at the technical forum on blowout preventer and control system technology held by the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, BSEE, May 22 in Washington, D.C.
Interior said in a pre-forum statement that the purpose was to highlight “extensive safety reforms taken by the Obama Administration since the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.” (See parts 1 and 2 of this story in the May 27 and June 3 issues of Petroleum News.)
Real-time technologies The panel on real-time technologies available to measure the health of BOPs in service and aid in detection and response to kicks included technical service providers, an operator and an offshore drilling contractor.
Garry Davis, group manager for Moduspec USA’s Center of Excellence Well Control Equipment talked about what industry has been demanding “post-Macondo” to help mitigate industry losses and a model being built to meet those demands.
Davis said industry wanted to be able to assess BOP issues which would require the equipment to come to the surface for repairs.
The challenge, he said, was to develop the capability “to assess risk and reliability instantaneously and communicate to all interested parties effectively,” taking into account redundancies built into the BOP.
“The question was quite simple: When does a failure or failures affect the reliability” of the BOP such that it cannot operate as intended?
Davis said the BOP risk modeling is built on a software package used in the nuclear industry and looks at the BOP component-by-component, shows what has failed, what’s affected, and what remains intact to maintain safe operations.
What BP is doing Fereidoun Abbassian, vice president wells technology for BP, discussed three things BP is doing to enhance the safety of drilling operations through the use of real-time monitoring, two of which are in the pilot stage and one operational.
Over the last 18 months BP has been developing real-time BOP health monitoring, through a pilot program that makes information from the rig available onshore and is currently running in Brazil, in collaboration with rig owner Ensco, he said. The first Gulf of Mexico installation will be later this year and BP is working with other manufacturers on similar systems so it can be expanded to all of the company’s deepwater drilling, Abbassian said.
BP is also doing real-time remote BOP pressure testing; that system is operational on all BP operations in the Gulf of Mexico. Abbassian said the aim of the remote BOP pressure testing “is to provide an independent means of witnessing the BOP pressure test from onshore.” The system was successfully demonstrated in April and a final version of the system will be tested and installed later this year, he said.
Third is BP’s Houston Monitoring Center, or HMC, which has been up and running since July 2011.
The HMC “enables 24/7 monitoring of well parameters from onshore,” Abbassian said, and “essentially the data that is available to the offshore personnel” is available to monitoring center staff.
The HMC “provides an additional pair of eyes to monitor well parameters,” he said, and provides “a constant communication with offshore rig teams,” with control remaining on the rig.
Offshore BOP monitoring Frank Chapman, president of Ashford Technical Services, described offshore BOP monitoring currently in place and what the future holds.
He said Ashford’s system, called Rim Watcher, focuses on proactive maintenance, early identification of problems and providing guidance to workers on the rig from onshore.
Chapman said raw data is collected on the rig, sent onshore, turned “into useful information” and presented back to users on the rig via website, giving “the user the ability to look not only to the current status of the BOP but look at the historical information as well.”
He said that most often the most experienced person is not on the rig, and Ashford’s system gives a person onshore access to current information so “he can help troubleshoot problems that are actually taking place.”
As for the future, Ashford said a common information format is needed between types of rigs and different vendors.
“At the end of the day it’s a BOP and at the end of the day you ought to be able to convert that raw data from any one of those systems into a common format ... (and) be able to take that common information and present it back to the user in a standardized format so that no matter what rig you’re looking at, it looks pretty much the same.”
Live today Tony Hogg, director of subsea engineering for offshore drilling contractor Ensco, said the easiest and best way to monitor BOP health was by the guys on the rig. There are redundant control panels on rigs, “two fully redundant places to function everything.”
“Competent crews — there’s no substitute for competent crews, not in any discipline,” he said.
The industry has lost a lot of experience in the last few years, and Hogg said there’s no substitute for experience. But with new guys coming along, “any support we can give the guys on the rig ... improves the benefit for everybody.”
The ability to display information on the rig is crucial, he said, and discussed the information display available on a rig.
There are layers to the information shown, he said, and when something is flagged, rig crews can page through the levels of available information to see what the problem was.
Hogg said assistance is available: If a crew member on a rig sees something he doesn’t understand, he can call someone onshore who can look “at exactly the same information he’s looking at and help him to fully understand and deal with it.”
He said the beauty of the Ensco system “is that it’s live today; we know this works. The screens I’m showing you are actual screens from this rig. ... It does work; and it’s going to get better.”
Training crucial The most compelling of the training talks was by Donald Winter of the University of Michigan, a member of the National Academy of Engineers, who chaired the academy’s committee responsible for investigating Deepwater Horizon for the Department of the Interior.
Winter said the committee found training shortfalls “evidenced by the response of personnel onboard the Deepwater Horizon.” He said the report concluded that “alarm and indication systems, procedures and training were insufficient to ensure timely and effective actions to prevent the explosions or respond to save the rig.”
In particular, Winter said the committee found “the crew was ill prepared for the scale of the disaster. ... Watch officers were not adequately trained. (And) ... emergency procedures were inadequate to minimize damage and loss of life.”
Winter is a former secretary of the Navy and said there were two admirals on the committee, so the report has somewhat of a Navy perspective, he said, and cited training the Navy instituted after the 1967 USS Forrestal tragedy off the coast of Vietnam, in which 137 sailors lost their lives.
He said the Forrestal tragedy “led to the decision that all sailors needed to be trained at least to a basic level in such matters as damage control, medical assistance and evacuations.”
“Fundamentally, major emergencies affect all onboard and they require the assistance of all onboard to mitigate the damage and to be able to save both lives and the vessel,” Winter said.
Training for all sailors starts in boot camp at the Great Lakes Training Center, and the current graduation exercise is a drill called “Battle Stations 21,” an emulation of the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole which takes place on a “near real-sized ship that has the ability to simulate much of what transpired that evening,” with “a truly realistic simulation which includes explosions, gas-fed fires, compartment flooding, serious injuries with dummies that are fixed up to simulate the serious injuries, including bleeding and moaning and groaning.”
All the boot camp training sailors have received is tested in that one exercise, he said.
Realistic, effective training needed Winter said that in evaluating the Deepwater Horizon tragedy, the committee “identified the need for realistic and effective training, formal qualifications and periodic re-examinations,” for “major drills at sea” and for “the need to have all personnel qualified on damage control and personnel evacuations.”
Winter also discussed the Navy’s SUBSAFE program, initiated after the 1963 loss of a submarine, the USS Thresher. Prior to implementation of SUBSAFE, the Navy lost an average of one submarine every three years, but no SUBSAFE-certified submarine has been lost since the program was initiated, he said.
“This industry can do similar good things and we do believe it should,” Winter said.
Asked about implementation of Navy-type programs, Winter said SUBSAFE has been effective for two reasons — its focus on two issues, can a submarine submerge to depth without being crushed and once submerged can it resurface — and because it’s the military, and personnel can be and are removed “all the time.”
Winter said he thinks the strict focus of the SUBSAFE program could be transferred to private industry, but doesn’t believe the Navy’s strict personal responsibility and ability to terminate personnel would transfer to private industry.
He said his experience in private industry “and having more than my share of wrongful discharge litigation,” leaves him wondering whether industry would put up with that aspect of SUBSAFE, where “the needs of safe operation take principle priority.”
Editor’s note: See part 1 of this story in the May 27 issue of Petroleum News and part 2 in the June 3 issue.
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