Drilling advances

	Vol. 231 No. 6
JIM REDDEN, CONTRIBUTING EDITOR

The oh-so-high cost of producing energy

Over the past couple of months, we’ve been reminded, ever so painfully, of the very high costs that often accompany our ability to keep the lights on and our automobiles motoring along.

The first reminder came on April 5, when the Upper Big Branch coal mine exploded in southern West Virginia, killing 29 underground miners. That disaster hit home, literally. I grew up in no-stoplight Shady Spring, W.Va., “just down the hollow,” as they say back there, from where the mine exploded. I knew those people—well, not them personally, but I knew them. I was raised in a time and a place where many of the boys went straight from high school to the coal mines—that is, if they even bothered to finish high school.

The mine was their destiny as it was my father’s, who spent the better part of my early life underground, until the dust physically took away his capacity to breathe. I remember as a very young child my father coming home exhausted and covered in the after-effects of what the mine owners asked him to produce from thousands of feet below the earth. I remember him telling stories about how the miners knew they were in the presence of methane, or “damp gas” as they called it, when they saw the rats running. Back then, the HSE policy stipulated that they move in the same direction as the rats, as quickly as possible. When I look back on it, here was a man who served in the second wave of the invasion at Normandy and, yet, he spoke of the dangers in the mines as if D-Day, by comparison, was nothing more than a little scuffle that got out of hand.

Now, we have the Deepwater Horizon, which exploded on April 20 in nearly 5,000 ft of water on Mississippi Canyon Block 252 in the Gulf of Mexico, taking the lives of 11 workers. This one hits home with all of us. My former employer, where I have a number of close friends, lost two engineers in the explosion. And, like those ill-fated miners, I was not personally acquainted with those gentlemen—but I knew them.

As of this writing, BP hopefully is getting closer to stopping the subsea gusher on the Macondo well. In the meantime, crude continues to spread across the Gulf of Mexico, the folks who depend on fishing for their livelihood have nothing to harvest, and fingers are being pointed at everyone except the rig caterers and housekeepers. Right now, that serves no purpose other than to erode, even further, the public’s opinion of our industry—which has never been, shall we say, warm and fuzzy—while giving a clear opening to those with the clout to make the industry pay, and pay dearly.

The best we can hope for is that the new standards, practices and, yes, regulations that most surely will arise from this tragedy will be based on engineering, science and logic, rather than overheated emotion. But that may be too much to ask. We are already seeing it with the “temporary” suspension of all new drilling permits in the Gulf until a thorough investigation is completed. And, that includes proposed wells on the shelf, where I dare say that controlling a situation in 20 ft of water does not quite have the same technical drawbacks as in 5,000-ft waters. IADC President Dr. Lee Hunt perhaps best put the suspension of shallow-water permits in perspective when he said in a recent Houston Chronicle article, “A Concorde crashes, it makes sense to ground the Concorde fleet and examine what happened, but you don’t ban general aviation. That’s what’s happened here.”

Of course, there will be a hue and cry in some corners to put the brakes on all offshore drilling, although those doing the huing and crying will have no viable alternatives to offer. We have heard it before and we’ll surely hear it again. Even with the deadly scale of an underground mine explosion, I can just imagine the outrage if someone threatened to disallow all coal mining in the states that depend on it the most. Guess it’s true what they say: “Out of sight, out of mind.”

As long as many of us can remember, amateur soothsayers have been fond of saying that disasters always come in threes. If that’s true, coal mines have already met their quota for the time being. In early May, the Upper Big Branch catastrophe was repeated when 56 miners were killed in a mine explosion in Siberia, while two weeks later as many as 25 miners, at last count, were missing after a similar explosion in northern Turkey.

More recently, a PDVSA platform sank off the Paria Peninsula of eastern Venezuela, but, fortunately, this one had no human or environmental casualties. We can all hope that the pseudo-clairvoyants have some dust on their crystal balls and it stops at two.

Everyone in the industry has their thoughts on what happened that tragic night in the deepwater Gulf of Mexico. Most definitely, we all need to know what happened and then take whatever measures must be taken to ensure, as best we possibly can, that it does not happen again. But even the most optimistic of us has to realize that anytime you are burrowing for minerals far below the earth’s surface or sinking a bit in thousands of feet of water, accidents will happen, and unfortunately some dreadful. Certainly, the industry’s track record has been sound for the most part, even though we continually push the boundaries of technology. Forgive the time-worn cliché, but even one accident is one too many.

Testifying before two Senate panels on May 18, US Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said, “There will be tremendous lessons to be learned here.” Indeed, there will be, but let’s keep our fingers crossed that those lessons form the basis for sensible modifications and not measures designed solely to penalize rather than to improve. Everything will eventually come out in the wash, but right now, the important thing is to stop the underwater flow and pool all our resources and expertise—industry and government alike—to limiting the environmental impact, while not losing sight of the fact that 11 hard-working people lost their lives. There are myriad uncertainties surrounding the Deepwater Horizon, but one thing is abundantly clear: The industry must do everything within its power now to begin cleaning up the damage, environmental and otherwise.