With an estimated 1,000 to 5,000 barrels of oil still spilling each day into the Gulf of Mexico after a drilling rig exploded and caught fire on April 20, the White House on Thursday took emergency steps toward increasing federal help in responding to the disaster.
The rig, known as the Deepwater Horizon, is owned by Transocean Ltd. and was leased to British Petroleum. The companies and federal authorities have not yet determined what caused the explosion or why a device known as a blowout preventer failed to cut off the flow of oil.
But with the edges of a huge oil slick threatening shorelines in the Mississippi Delta region on Thursday, the White House sent several top officials to Louisiana and made the military ready to join other federal agencies already helping the companies in their response. Efforts under way or under consideration include the placement of booms, the use of chemical dispersants, and the controlled burning of floating oil.
The Chronicle spoke on Thursday with Robert G. Bea, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of California at Berkeley, to gain an understanding of the situation, its challenges, and the role university researchers could play in preventing and responding to such accidents. Mr. Bea, who joined the university in 1989, has more than 55 years of engineering experience with offshore platforms, including 16 years with the Shell Oil Company.
Following are excerpts of the interview.
Q. Are the companies and government agencies taking proper actions in response to the spill?
A. I think the answer to that is yes. Thanks to a long history of dismal messes, the United States has developed a reasonably current system for responding to spills. They effectively used all of the techniques that we are using today, including burning, following the wreck of the Torrey Canyon supertanker in 1967 off the coast of England.
The problem with burning, particularly in the open ocean, is you don’t have pure oil. The oil in the water does some rather nasty things—it spreads out, it disperses, and you end up with this gooey, sticky stuff after burning.
For lighter patches of oil, they can apply dispersants, and it will break the oil up into small droplets. That’s not a free ride either, as that picks up sediment from the water, and that mixture sinks to the sea floor. In essence, you can’t get rid of much of the oil that way, as the water flow eventually brings it to the shoreline.
Q. How much of the spill will eventually contaminate the environment?
A. It’s hard to predict with any certainty. You couldn’t have chosen a much worse location for this. There’s a stream to the mouth of the Mississippi River, and it splits into two flowing streams, one to Florida and the other to Texas and Mexico. The oil is being fed into both of those streams. This oil is likely going to end up on many shores.
Q. What was the fundamental failure here?
A. The class that I just left is a class that deals with the reliability of engineered systems. History clearly shows that human factors are crucial. It’s an interesting combination of engineering and science and social-political science. The blowout, of course, is not a natural thing, and what went on at 10 p.m. that night tells us very, very clearly that there were severe difficulties on the part of the crew. They couldn’t do the blowout preventers on the sea floor, and then the fire followed, and the sinking of the unit. Of course, we don’t have enough information to corroborate, but generally in these situations you can trace 80 percent of the causative elements to the human and organizational factors.
Q. It may not have been an equipment failure at all?
A. At the end of this maddening story—and this is five decades of experience. ... If you have a blowout, you’re going to have pollution, and much of that pollution is not retrievable. About 10 percent is what you are able to get, and that tells you that the solution is to prevent it from happening.
At that point, you shift to proper qualification and training of the crew, and proper motivations coming from the organizations—Transocean, British Petroleum, the Department of the Interior, and the Minerals Management Service. If that is not working, your general equipment-driven attempts to prevent won’t work.
Q. So the oil companies could have paid more attention to preparation and training?
A. The oil and gas industry has been very proactive in addressing blowout prevention. It has also been very proactive in pursuing oil-spill cleanup mitigation. The primary part they have focused on, for blowout prevention, has been on equipment, the pipes and all of that stuff, and similarly on the spill, to mitigate the spills, for example, the chemical dispersants and controlled burns. The part, in general, that has not received the attention it could or should have has been the human part.
The Minerals Management Service tried to come forward with new regulations in this area. The oil and gas industry, including BP, successfully stalemated this, which would have brought more attention to the human elements.
Q. What role if any could universities be playing here?
A. Universities could be helping organizations understand how to prevent these. We can much better separate ourselves from the corporate governmental world and perhaps use a less strong set of biases as we look. Some countries require by regulation that the oil and gas industry fund long-term research in the countries where they operate. We have no such programs.
Q. But British Petroleum is based in the United Kingdom, which you cite for excellence in this area.
A. Excellent question. BP starts out with an interesting first word—British—and they’re in the United States. But the human factors are so crucial to this. Can you transfer directly the British-Norwegian operational culture to the United States? The answer is no.
The equipment is state of the art. Transocean’s equipment is fine—everything we can see at this point is this was a damn good piece of equipment. The crucial issues that still remain unaddressed were the human elements.
