Fire on the Horizon (22 page)

But just short of eleven hours after pumping liquid cement into the bottom of the well, BP officials ordered what is called a “positive pressure test” to establish the integrity of their new long string casing. They closed off the well at the BOP in preparation, then pumped mud down the “kill line,” which skirts around the annular preventer and can increase pressure at the bottom of the well even when the annular is closed. They kept pumping until 2,500 pounds per square inch of pressure built up inside the newly cemented casing. They held the pressure at that level for thirty minutes. If the pressure eased in that time, it would mean there were leaks.

The pressure held steady for the full half hour, and the test was deemed a success.

The fact that the positive test was conducted when the cement may not have yet been fully hardened could conceivably have caused a new problem. Pressuring up the casing makes the steel expand slightly. If the cement mix was still semifluid, the expanding casing could have broken the bond between steel and cement, leaving a small but potentially lethal space that gas could pass through on the way to the surface.

The cement job and the testing had gone on through the night, into the morning.

It was Tuesday, April 20, 2010.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

NEGATIVE TEST

0630 Hours, April 20, 2010

Block 252, Mississippi Canyon, Gulf of Mexico

Miles “Randy” Ezell, the Horizon’s senior toolpusher for four years and one of the original crew who brought the rig out of Korea, had his first meeting just as the sun broke the wavering curve of the Gulf. It was 6:30 and uncommonly calm with the promise of a beautiful subtropical spring day. The first meeting was a tele-conference review of the coming day for Transocean management. That meeting rolled into a meeting he attended with the BP company men, conferencing in with their people in Houston to discuss the plan for the day, followed by the Horizon supervisors’ meeting with all the department heads.

The department head meeting got going around 8:30, and it lasted for some time, mostly as they discussed the DROPS program, which was designed to curtail injuries due to one of the bugaboos of rig life—dropped objects. Nobody needed to tell them about the dangers of gravity in such a compact and intense industrial zone as the Horizon. Anything dropped off the 240-foot-tall derrick—
a bolt, a hammer, even a pencil—could became a deadly missile. And a load of steel casing dropped overboard during transfer from a workboat might just take out the riser or even damage the BOP, a multimillion-dollar mistake. Transocean attacked the problem in typical fashion—with an acronym, a set of principles, and an aggressive program of proselytizing to drive those principles home. This included signs, literature, tons of required documentation and forms to fill out, and, of course, meetings. The Horizon had a record and a reputation to protect. The rig had kept serious accidents to an admirable minimum. This very day, four VIPs from Transocean and BP were flying in to deliver an award to the Horizon for controlling the number of “lost time” incidents, defined as any accident resulting in a worker missing time from work beyond the day or shift the accident occurred. In fact, there had been no lost-time incidents on the rig for seven years. And as everyone in the offshore industry knew so well, lost time was lost money.

When the DROPS meeting was finally over, Randy had just enough time to make rounds of the rig floor before yet another meeting, this one the regular “pre-tour safety meeting,” essentially a huddle for the oncoming crew to discuss plans for the day, led by Jimmy Harrell, the driller Dewey Revette, Randy himself, and some others. He walked into the meeting room near the galley as Dewey outlined the order of battle.

Today was the day they would begin closing up the well for “temporary abandonment,” until a production platform was designed and built and installed above it. They had just put in place a cement plug at the bottom of the well. Now all they had to do was set another cement plug near the top. Federal regulations require that “top plugs” be installed no more than a thousand feet below the seafloor. But BP had received approval to put Ma
condo’s top plug deeper than that, 3,300 feet below the mud line. The given rationale was to avoid disturbing the area around the wellhead seal. The unusual depth had an additional advantage: All the very costly mud above the top plug could be pumped to a workboat for transport to another BP project, instead of being left behind.

But not until the well was completely sealed.

Ever since the well had penetrated into the oil and gas deposit, the weight of all that mud had been keeping the hydrocarbons from shooting to the surface. Once the drilling mud was replaced with much lighter seawater, control of the oil and gas would depend on the integrity of the well’s seals and plugs.

Dewey outlined the final test they would perform to ensure that Macondo was safe, and ready for mud displacement. The procedure was called a “negative test.” In the “positive test” that had been run that morning, pressure had been inserted inside the well casing to see if anything leaked out. The negative test would take pressure off the well, to see if anything leaked
in
. The test was somewhat complicated and would take some time.

The consumption of time was apparently a sticking point. The first plan that BP company man Bob Kaluza presented for the day consisted of displacing the mud in the riser with seawater and setting the top plug. A negative test was not in the plan.

Jimmy and Randy had some words with Bob. Skipping the negative test “is not my policy,” Jimmy said. He alluded to a bad experience he’d had years ago, but he didn’t go into detail. “It taught me a lesson,” he said. On the Horizon, Jimmy insisted, a negative test was standard until he heard differently.

Well, I’m the company man, Kaluza told him in effect, and you’re hearing it from me. If the well passed the positive test, he said, the negative test was overkill.

Jimmy was adamant. He’d given in on the nitrogen foamed cement. He wasn’t giving in this time. They were running that test.

The helicopter carrying the VIPs arrived on the rig at 2:30. It was one of those wave-the-flag, check-in-with-the-little-people management exercises. Two senior execs from Transocean, Daun Winslow and Buddy Trahan, had joined up with two BP counterparts, David Sims and Pat O’Bryan. They met in Houma and got lunch together before the 12:30 check-in for the helicopter shuttle out to the rig.

Daun was the ranking Transocean exec, officially the operations manager, performance, for the North American Division. Like many top Transocean officials he’d come up from the rig floor—he’d been an OIM for a decade, then stepped up to be a shore-based rig manager, the OIM’s boss, and now he oversaw a vast swath of Transocean’s operations. His job description was to oversee “safe and efficient operation, maintenance and equipment on rigs in Gulf of Mexico”—all without a four-year college degree to his name. His highest academic attainment was technical college and an auto body apprenticeship. He had a slightly unkempt look, thinning brown hair swept back like it had frozen in a strong wind. His lean build and smoker’s pallor was underlined by physical confidence that conveyed the habit of command.

Buddy Trahan, forty-three, was the rig veteran who had flown in to help set the Horizon right after its near capsizing in 2008. He’d come from a large family that had run shrimp boats in the Gulf, and now he supervised six Gulf oil rigs worth more than an entire fleet of shrimp boats.

Together, Daun and Buddy hoped to use the visit to enhance the relationship with their biggest client, wave the flag, and show
O’Bryan, BP’s vice president for drilling and completions, and Sims, the company’s drilling operations manager, the in-the-field spirit of one of their most exemplary rigs.

These VIP trips had another purpose as well. The people who ran both BP and Transocean understood that an us-versus-them dynamic would inevitably arise between the workers on the rigs and the folks on “the beach,” as the Houston headquarters were called. Mostly, the rig tours were an attempt to close the gap, at least a little. For those making the big decisions it was important not to lose touch, to see with their own eyes and hear with their own ears how their policies translated into the tough and dangerous work of pulling oil from the Gulf.

Even so, it wasn’t in them to pass up a chance to proselytize. They went over a few points they wanted to address—the hazard of dropped objects, of course. Also, and they wrote this down, “Slips, Trips, Falls.”

They saw a chance to reinforce the values that had served the Horizon so well. The “No blame, ‘can do’ culture—fix the problem, learn, move on.” Also, “prudent risk-taking—freedom to fail, no fear of second guessing.”

The intense concentration of Transocean and BP on relatively minor “slips, trips, and falls” had struck some as odd. They were, after all, sitting directly above a cavern of highly pressurized, highly flammable material that could erupt, with horrific consequences. But few questioned the motives of executives who were, after all, looking out for their safety.

The VIPs arrived at 2:30 p.m., signed in, and were handed the standard issue of rig life: hard hats, gloves, safety glasses, and earplugs.

BP’s O’Bryan had never been on the Horizon before, so had to sit through a one-hour safety briefing. Transocean’s Winslow,
who’d had the briefing before, decided to sit in on it again—he wanted to see if the medic who conducted it had picked up on any of the “improvement opportunities” Daun had given him on his previous visit.

At the end, all four executives were assigned a lifeboat—a formality, obviously, but it was a requirement, even though they were going to be on the Horizon for less than forty-eight hours.

Throughout drilling, the well had been maintained in a condition called “overbalanced.”

This meant that the pressure going down the well, in the form of the weight of the fluids that filled it, was greater than whatever pressure was pushing up from the formation toward the surface. The cement job that had just been completed should have meant that the formation pressure was now sealed off at the bottom of the well. Another seal, this one at the wellhead, had also been installed and pressure-tested that morning. The wellhead seal was a second barrier in case the seal at the bottom failed, but it wasn’t designed to stop a high-pressure event, like a blowout. So it was critical that the cement job at the bottom, the bottom plug, be secure.

This is what the negative test Jimmy Harrell had insisted on would confirm. Before they removed
all
the mud that had kept the well safe through the drilling process, they would replace some of it with lighter seawater. Now the well would be “underbalanced”—the downward pressure caused by the weight of fluids in the well would be less than the pressure pushing up from the formation. If the cement job had worked, even in an underbalanced state there would be no pressure coming into the well.

To save time, Kaluza and the day toolpusher, Wyman Wheeler, decided the negative test would be done in lockstep with the other
chores that remained before hauling the riser and BOP back up on deck and leaving Macondo behind. In one drill string’s trip down the well—important because just getting everything down there took hours—they would do the negative test, replace the mud remaining in the riser by seawater, then install the top cement plug regulations required before temporary abandonment.

Wyman, forty, lived in Monterey, a tiny Louisiana town with no stoplights, no pizza delivery, one school that ran all the way from pre-K through twelfth grade, but more than half a dozen churches. Wyman and his wife Rebecca’s eight- and ten-year-olds attended the town school, as had Wyman a quarter century earlier. Instead of going on to college he went right to work, ending up in the oil fields, and rising to toolpusher on the Horizon.

Wyman was thoughtful and cautious in his approach. He appreciated the complexity of testing in a well where the only information on what was happening thousands of feet down a black hole had to be deduced from meters, dials, and gauges on the rig.

To begin the test, the crew lowered the stinger tube into the well to the 3,300-foot depth where they intended to set the top cement plug. The stinger would start spraying spacer, the thick fluid used to prevent the mud from mixing with the seawater that was to follow. As it sprayed into the well, the mud below it compressed, having nowhere to go, and forced the spacer to make a U-turn and head back toward the surface.

The spacer was gray, dense, and sticky. And there was a lot of it.

It was actually leftovers from the long war against the crumbling walls of the well: two 200-barrel batches of different types of “lost circulation material,” known, like everything else in the industry, by an acronym. LCM was the thick and pulpy patching material they’d needed from the start in Macondo. When they had finally stopped the bleeding at the bottom of the hole a few days
earlier, these two batches—charmingly trade-named Form-A-Set and Form-A-Squeeze—were all that was left.

Leo Lindner, the Horizon’s drilling fluids specialist, had been told by the BP company man to mix the two together for use as a spacer for the negative test. He’d never seen LCM used that way, and it was more than they needed, about twice as much. But Lindner could understand why BP wanted to use it. Any LCM left over would have to be shipped back to shore. With the workboat filling up on all the displaced mud, another service boat would have to come out to haul it away—more time and money. On the other hand, if it went into the well as spacer, when it came out, federal regulations said it could simply be dumped overboard.

But Lindner was still unsure about mixing Form-A-Set and Form-A-Squeeze together. Monday night, he poured a gallon of one into a gallon of the other to see if anything strange happened. Nothing really did. So the next day, the 454 barrels of the Set-Squeeze mix was fed into the stinger. As planned, the spacer U-turned and went back up the well, pushing the regular mud ahead of it, out the top of the riser, into the mud pits, from where it was eventually offloaded in a thick hose to the 260-foot-long workboat, the
Damon B. Bankston
, which had tied up to the side of the rig that morning.