Drilling Technology in Nontechnical Language Book

Cutting corners and lack of concern for safety by operators and poor regulatory oversight were apparently the two primary factors responsible for Deepwater Horizon disaster on April 20, 2010. The accident killed 11 personal on board of the oil rig and injured 17 others. When the leak was finally capped after three months on July 15, it had spewed about 5 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. Inadequate cleanup efforts will ensure that most of the oil will remain in the sea. The actual damage to marine and wildlife habitats and the impact on fishing and tourism will take years to be assessed, and the damage will continue for centuries. Freudenburg and Gramling, who have studied this overtly greedy enterprise for more than 30 years, gives a graphic account of the high risk game that is being played in some of the most dangerous places on the planet.

The oil industry over years has made profit the prime motive and made a whole series of cutbacks to further increase profits. Safety and regulatory compliance were given short shrift. The book traces the events leading to this major disaster, where the operators have defaulted many times in past. The authors however focuses on the four major fateful decisions: 1. improper installation of the final section of the casing; 2. using only six centralizers instead of the recommended 21 for cementing the final casing; 3. shorter time period over which mud was circulated in the well prior to cementing and; 4. canceling the test to test the integrity of the cement. All these deviations were purportedly made to save time and money. Poor management culture, especially where safety was concerned, both top-down and bottom-up was ultimately the root cause of this costly disaster.

While tracing the history of oil industry in the US and its moving from land to off-shore and then to deep off-shore the authors carefully document the perils of this endeavor and the factors that exacerbate them. The government regulators were pointedly lax with inspections and risk assessments. Money, sex and drugs figure in many of the controversies the concerned agency has courted in recent years. This was compounded by a situation where it was long known that officials, law-makers and even judiciary have strong oil interests at stake.

USA from being a major producer of oil in the 50s, continues to be a major consumer today though with only 7% stake in the world production and less than 2% of the remaining global resources. Even though warning signs were sounded as back as 1900s, the political games that were played in the aftermath of World War II made the country more and more depended on oil by destroying its public transport systems, discouraging multi-family housing and building inter-state highways. Instead of conserving this finite resource and using them judiciously, the country's policies rapidly decimated it in over a century. In return the country receives the lowest royalty rates in the world for its oil, and doles out maximum tax holidays and subsidies.

The attended risks in venturing into the deep sea with was well demonstrated by Santa Babara oil spill, Exxon Valdez and the now the Deepwater Horizon disaster. All have also equally shown the inadequacy and low technology of clean-up efforts, usually employing paper towels and such, which leaves behind more than 90% of the spilled oil in the seas. Learning from the past and preventing such costly mistakes involves improvements in safety techniques and having multiple checks in place - rather than one blow out preventer - and improving the odds by placing attention to each step of the procedures and assuring better corporate safety and public accountability culture. The authors call for exclusion - excluding errant companies -; regulation and refocusing to address these issues.

The books examines the myth of energy independence initiatives promoted for decades that has made the US more and more depended on foreign oil. The authors conclude with a call to rational thinking and policies that promote conservation to maximize life of the remaining oil; finding substitutes and alternate energy sources for the future; and end all policies that subsidizes and make oil cheap.