Fire on the Horizon (8 page)

At any given moment, microscopic ocean life accounts for a larger number of living organisms than there are stars in the universe. It’s been that way for three billion years. Every drop of water in the ocean contains more than a million microscopic organisms. While alive, most of these organisms employ ingenious strategies to keep themselves near the ocean’s surface, where they can transform sunlight into food via photosynthesis. They ride the currents, take advantage of the wind and wave-induced turbulence, propel themselves with tiny whiplike paddles, or even create their own buoyancy by pumping lipids between their cellular membranes. But when they die, the quest for sunlight ends and they drift into the darkness of the deep, to the bottom, where they collect and decay by the trillions of trillions.

The balance between collection and decay is crucial. Certain conditions, the ingredients the Gulf has always offered in abundance, kick the bloom of microscopic ocean life into high gear: warm water, upwelling currents, and the inflow of nutrients. In combination, they spark an orgy of creation and a spike in the microbial population. All that life brings on an avalanche of death. The dead cells rain down in a blizzard—it’s actually called “marine snow”—and accumulate on the bottom faster than they can decay. Compressed and covered by the sediments pouring in from the rivers, the thick mat of sludge is cut off from oxygen, which over time might have burned the biomass away. Instead, the accumulated weight keeps pushing the organic matter deeper into the earth. The heat and pressure of the earth’s core begin to crush and cook
the molecules themselves, squeezing them into a series of ever simpler forms until, after many millennia, they reach their ultimate simplicity. Crude oil. Natural gas. Or methane, whose molecular composition is elegant simplicity itself, a single carbon atom surrounded by a pyramid of four hydrogen atoms.

Now much lighter than everything surrounding them, the liquid hydrocarbon reservoirs exert a powerful upward pressure as they struggle to rise to the surface, a geological version of CO
₂
bubbles in a glass of Coca-Cola. They migrate through tiny cracks and fissures or slide up along the inclines separating layers of rock until they reach the surface. Scientists estimate that every year 500,000 to 1.5 million barrels’ worth of oil and natural gas seep into the Gulf of Mexico—that’s about double the range estimated for the spillage from
Exxon Valdez
.

In geological time, most oil eventually evaporates. Some geologists believe the Ohio River valley may have once had oil deposits as extensive as those in the Middle East. Now, of course, they are long gone.

But as the hydrocarbons slide along the underside of impermeable barriers toward the surface, sometimes they get stuck. They slide up a slope made of nonporous rock or compacted salt deposited by shallow ancient seas, seeking higher ground, only to find the incline has become a trap. These traps are dome-shaped deformations, inverted cups where hydrocarbons slowly collect, eventually forming vast reservoirs of oil and gas. The Gulf of Mexico happens to have a lot of these upside-down cups of oil.

In the past two decades, ships towing three-and-a-half-mile-long cables studded with sensitive underwater microphones (called hydrophones) have made carefully charted sweeps of the North American continental shelf. Periodic bursts into the water with an air gun or a charge of dynamite create seismic waves that penetrate
the sea bottom. As the waves hit each new obstacle—a bank of mud, an outcropping of limestone—a portion of the wave energy is reflected back toward the hydrophones. Mud reflects differently than limestone, and limestone reflects differently than salt deposits or impermeable rock. The techniques are not new. Seismic calculations were first made by engineers during World War I to triangulate the positions of large enemy guns. But the equipment developed thereafter was so sensitive, and the computers analyzing their data so powerful, that they allowed geologists to create three-dimensional maps of structures thousands of feet beneath the earth’s surface.

In 2003, after months of seismographic trolling, the sound shadow of one of these domes appeared on a study of an area forty-one miles off the southeastern coast of Louisiana in the middle of the Mississippi Canyon, a five-mile-wide undersea ravine that runs along the Gulf bottom for seventy-five miles. The resulting charts of the survey looked like a series of Rorschach tests, and what British Petroleum saw in them was profit.

Five years later, in March 2008, BP bought the rights to drill in what was officially designated Block 252 of the Mississippi Canyon in the United States’ exclusive economic zone of the Gulf of Mexico—or actually leased them, since all oil rights on the outer continental shelf, which extends two hundred to three hundred miles from the coast, belong in perpetuity to the federal government. For the rights to explore for oil on the 5,760-acre block of ocean bottom under five thousand feet of water, they narrowly outbid five competing companies by offering $34 million.

In order to maintain secrecy about their new lease, and perhaps with a lingering romantic sensibility from the wildcat days, oil companies designate their prospective sites with code names. BP saw an opportunity for taking care of corporate business in the
naming rights. Who hasn’t dreamed of bestowing an everlasting name on a continent, a mountain, a star? Why not an oil well? Naming rights for Block 252 were made the prize in a company United Way fund-raising contest. The winner, a BP employee with a literary bent, came up with the name Macondo, after the fictional town created by Gabriel García Márquez and the setting of his masterpiece of magical realism,
One Hundred Years of Solitude
.

In the novel, Macondo starts out as a speck of a town in the middle of the jungle, then expands physically and culturally until it is a dynamic but deeply flawed city whose citizens fall prey to their own greed and begin to take moral shortcuts. Macondo’s promising beginning succumbs to a series of plagues and wars, until finally it is blown off the face of the planet by an explosive windstorm. In a final irony, the citizens of Macondo have been warned, in writing, of the tragedy to come, but the warning has been written in a language nobody is able interpret until the final moment, when it is already too late.

For those looking for ill omens in retrospect, the name couldn’t have been more tragically apt. Nor could the initial choice of rig to drill the well.

BP chose the Transocean-owned Marianas, a twenty-four-year-old semi-submersible with a long history. The Marianas had been destined to brush up against disaster from her 1979 birth as the MSV Tharos at Mitsubishi Heavy Industries’ shipyard in a city synonymous with catastrophe, Hiroshima, Japan. She was designed to fill what the offshore industry perceived as a worrisome gap in its plan to establish oil-producing platforms ever farther from shore. The Tharos and others like her were built not just for saving lives, but also to save the environment by performing well-kill operations that could
forcefully bring an uncontrolled well blowout to an end. She was outfitted with what was then state-of-the-art technology: a dynamic positioning system to maneuver her into position alongside a burning rig, an enormous gangway that could activate off her side to give survivors a dry means of escape, and monstrous fire cannons capable of shooting 40,000 gallons per minute a distance of 240 feet, powerful enough to blow a man off the deck of a nearby rig or worse. Get too close, and they could cut a man in half.

The Tharos also carried multiple fast rescue boats and its own Sikorsky S–76 helicopter capable of plucking twelve men at a time off a burning rig and transporting them to the Tharos’s ninety-bed hospital outfitted with all the gear needed to sustain life, including an operating room and patient monitoring facilities. She cost a then unheard-of amount, exceeding $100 million. The Duke of Edinburgh called her “the most expensive fire engine in the world.”

Not for long. In July 1988, the Piper Alpha platform was at work in the North Sea doing what she’d been built to do—tapping into existing wells, separating the oil from gas, and pumping both cargos through undersea pipelines to tanks 128 miles away on the Scottish shore. The disaster was set in motion by a series of unlucky coincidences and a mundane human error. The rig was undergoing an upgrade, which its managers decided to complete while pumping continued, rather than absorb the high cost of shutting down. A small part of the work involved replacing an old valve on a backup gas pump with a new one. The technician’s shift ended before the work was finished, and his replacement was busy with something else. The maintenance worker filled out the paperwork that should have warned everyone on the rig not to operate the pump under any circumstances, but it got lost. That evening, the primary pump went down. When the backup
was started, gas poured from the valve vent. A random spark ignited an explosion, which triggered a cascade of increasingly violent secondary explosions, fed by thousands of gallons of crude oil and natural gas.

The blasts took out the main control room, the generator, and the power distribution system, and also destroyed the one chance of fighting the fire—the deluge system, a curtain of lifesaving water. The raging fuel-fed fires made launching lifeboats impossible. Some risked the hundred-foot plunge into the fire and ice hell of the frigid North Sea, now covered with flaming oil slicks. But almost half the crew mustered in the large accommodation area to await evacuation by the Tharos’s helicopter then located only a thousand feet way. The helicopter never came. The fire and smoke made landings impossible. Most of the crew burned to death or were overcome by smoke and toxic fumes. Nor did the Tharos’s water cannons do much good. The continual replenishment of explosive fuel made fighting the fire a losing battle. And the Tharos’s huge gangway failed at the critical moment, just as it started to extend its arm of safety. The rig’s crew was close enough to choke on the smoke and feel the heat of the huge fireball, to see the burned faces and charred bodies. Some worked for thirty-two hours without a break, only to watch helplessly as the platform disintegrated.

So confused was the Tharos’s crew that the first man it saved swam unassisted to her pontoons and climbed an external ladder to safety. It was only after he told Tharos hospital staff who he was and where he came from that they realized an actual survivor was on board. Of the 226 men aboard the Piper Alpha that day, only fifty-nine survived, many with severe burns. Few of those had been rescued due to direct assistance of the Tharos.

While vessels like the Tharos often did save lives offshore, the Tharos would be remembered mostly for her failure. The industry could have taken the lesson as an opportunity to improve MSV design. Simple improvements, like adding a winch on the helicopter capable of dropping a basket down to a burning rig’s deck without the helicopter having to land itself, could have had a sizable impact in the response to future emergencies. Instead, the rig’s failure killed the idea of prepositioning emergency support vessels near offshore oil fields, making all future offshore oil workers reliant on distant helicopters and hospitals. And the residents of nearby shores would have to resign themselves to waiting precious days for the arrival of equipment capable of fighting blowouts and stopping the uncontrolled flow of oil into surrounding waters.

The Tharos had changed owners as well as names and seemed destined to take a final voyage to the shipbreakers when, in 1996, she was bought by Transocean Sedco Forex for conversion to a semi-submersible drilling rig capable of being moored in seven thousand feet of water. The company removed the hospital, firefighting equipment, helicopter hangar bay, and even the thrusters to prepare her for her new life. All she needed was a new name to go with it, one appropriate to her role in the company’s bold move into ever deeper waters. Transocean sponsored a “name the rig” contest among its employees, and twenty-one-year-old Nora Dossett claimed the honors by coming up with Marianas, in honor of the world’s deepest ocean trench.

If BP executives were even aware of the macabre portents of their choice of code name or drilling rig for their new lease in Mississippi Canyon, there was no particular reason for them to fear they were tempting fate. The Piper Alpha disaster was two
decades in the past, while the Tharos had been remade and renamed. And the town of Macondo was just a fiction, after all. Plus, by the daunting standards of deepwater oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, the Macondo Prospect was not especially challenging. The plan called for the prospect to be drilled in 4,992 feet of water, to a depth 14,569 feet below the ocean floor. BP geologists had identified two likely hydrocarbon reservoirs in sandstone formations, the most promising at 13,319 feet and one a thousand feet farther down, close to the bottom of the proposed well. At 5,000 feet, the ocean depth would be only half that of the record 10,000 feet in which Chevron and the Transocean rig Discoverer Deep Seas teamed up to successfully drill a well in 2003. Likewise, the 14,569-foot penetration beneath the ocean floor was less than half of the 35,000-foot record drilled by BP just a month before the first drill bit hit Macondo. For the record-breaking effort, BP had also used a Transocean rig: the Deepwater Horizon.

Along with its relatively modest depth, Macondo Prospect would be a straight shot from the seafloor to the oil deposit directly beneath, an easier proposition than taking the circuitous, slanting route from the wellhead to the oil, referred to as directional drilling, as some wells required.

Easier, perhaps, but definitely not easy.

The Macondo well would be far more than a hole in the ground. It would be an inverted skyscraper, a towering structure of steel and cement, telescoping downward ten times the length of the Empire State Building. That would be impressive enough, even if you ignored the most salient fact about what BP and its Transocean partners intended to do: The drilling would begin at the bottom of the ocean, where not a single worker could venture. Every bit of the construction of this hanging tower, the penetration of the rock,
removal of debris, installation and sealing of the walls, had to be accomplished at the end of what was essentially a five-thousand-foot pole.