Energy Issues

 Vol. 233 No. 1

In the October 2011 issue, I wrote of the dramatic and highly effective efforts of a group of oilfield professionals to put out the raging fires in Kuwait set by the Iraqi army as it retreated from the country in the first Gulf War. Much to my delight, one of those professionals wrote me and provided more details on the magnificent effort. Much of what Pat O’Shaughnessy told me in his note were things only someone on the ground in Kuwait would know. It was fascinating. With Pat’s approval, I am including most of his notes on some little-known aspects of the efforts to quench the fires and cap the wells. I think you will find it fascinating.

From Pat O’Shaughnessy: “I took the French teams into Kuwait under the name of Horwell Engineering Services, a Paris-based company that was owned by Forasol SA (a drilling contractor, later bought by Pride) and Institut Française de Pétrole (IFP). We had originally gone to Kuwait to offer relief well services to Kuwait Oil Company (KOC), but they decided they would control the wells ‘classically’ to save time, so we changed hats and offered to bring in two fully supported French firefighting teams. When I say ‘fully supported,’ I mean, unlike the others, we brought in wellheads, BOPs, closing units, bulldozers, cranes, forklifts, trucks and everything else we would need, including conventional firefighting equipment. We also built a workshop-warehouse and rebuilt a damaged apartment for accommodation. The only thing KOC provided us was explosive ordinance disposal (EOD) and location clearance, access roads, water pits and water supply. In effect, we did a turnkey job for KOC. Below are some comments on your column:

Relief wells. None were drilled during the firefighting campaign. It would have added years to the effort, and all wells could be capped conventionally.

MIG-21 reactor. Yes, it blew out a few fires and was very popular with the media, but most of us knew it was a joke. Here’s why. Putting out an oilwell fire is not the hard part. First, you need to prepare the wellsite for capping, which means clearing debris, inspecting the damaged tree and deciding on the well kill and capping plan. This requires guys on the ground around the blowing well. It is kind of hard to do all that with a couple of MIG reactors blowing you off your feet. Plus, the MIG reactors weren’t able to blow a fire out with just wind. Water had to be injected through the reactors as well. So, if you are going to use water, which was the most common method anyway, why do you need this contraption? Spectacular yes, but it didn’t add value to the process. We had many means of accomplishing that, including the smokestack that you mentioned (“raising the plume”).

Dynamite. It was rarely used in Kuwait. We tried it one time but, because of the red hot coke mountain (see below) around each wellhead, the well just re-ignited. So we went back to water. Besides, you still need a water shroud covering the guys when they’re working around the wellhead clearing debris, cutting off the wellhead and capping the well.

Stingers. In some cases on low-producing wells, we could sting into the tubing and pump five to six barrels of mud to kill the well. The stinger was mounted on the boom of an Athey wagon, and we pumped mud through lines from the front. Wells like this could be killed and capped in half a day.

KOC. Saud Al-Nashmi was head of firefighting operations for KOC. He made a huge, but ultimately correct, decision when he said the wells could be controlled conventionally and without drilling relief wells. He was under a lot of pressure to ‘try this, try that,’ but he was proven right in the end. You can’t imagine the number of inventors and con men who turned up in Kuwait trying to peddle their wares. His decision saved Kuwait a pile of money and, I suppose, the world a lot of additional pollution.

Two things you didn’t mention were noteworthy problems for us, and their resolution became the deciding factor in closing out the project in eight months when others said it would take years:

Coke accumulations (never seen before). Due to the volume of oil escaping from each well, not all of which could be consumed by the actual fire, unburned oil became mixed with sand and accumulated like a mountain around the wellheads (sometimes meters above the wellhead) and, with the tremendous heat from the fire, became extremely hard. We tried everything to break this coke up. We hacked at it with back hoes, shot tank shells into it (the shells went right through and came out the other side), blew it up with C4 (it just reformed like hot plastic) and lost a lot of time trying to remove it so we could gain access to the wellhead. By accident, we discovered that if you soaked it in water (by building a berm around the wellhead) it became friable and could be easily removed with a rake pinned on the end of the boom on an Athey wagon. Once we figured that out, all the teams made swifter progress capping the wells.

Cutting wellheads. We started using high-pressure water, jet abrasive cutters to remove and replace damaged wellheads. Saddam’s troops had packed the wellheads with explosives that deformed the sealing areas of the flanges, so that most of them had to be removed and replaced to cap the well. This saved a huge amount of time per well. Not everyone employed this technique initially.”

Pat is still in the business, serving as CEO and Advisor to the Chairman of United Gulf Energy Resources LLC, a company that represents Wild Well Control in Oman. But, he says, “I don’t actually do any of that old cowboy stuff in the field anymore.”