August 25, 2010
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/business/7170050.html
He tells hearing he did good work but his ideas to cut risk were ignored
By BRETT CLANTON
Aug. 24, 2010, 9:31PM
The Halliburton Co. engineer who designed the cement job used in BP’s blown-out Macondo well defended his work Tuesday, saying if he had it to do over he would do it much the same way.
But in testimony at an investigative hearing, he also attempted to distance Halliburton from the accident, stressing that BP did not follow key recommendations of his that could have reduced the risk of a dangerous gas influx into the well.
Jesse Gagliano, a Halliburton technical sales adviser, testified that he first warned BP engineers in Houston five days before the April 20 explosion of potentially severe gas flow problems in the well if BP didn’t take corrective action.
The same warnings, he said, were in an April 18 report showing that the risks could be reduced if BP added 15 devices called centralizers to the six it had in the well to secure a section of pipe-like casing in the middle and ensure cement could be poured evenly around it.
“I never did change my recommendation of 21 centralizers,”îGagliano told a joint investigative panel of the Coast Guard and Bureau of Ocean Energy Management Regulation and Enforcement, which is holding public hearings in Houston this week.
Decisions about the centralizers and other aspects of the cement job have been cited as possible factors in the deadly blowout that killed 11 workers and launched the worst oil spill in U.S. history.
Gagliano stopped short of saying a faulty cement job was to blame for the blowout.
In a statement responding to the testimony, BP said Halliburton was aware of the key elements of the well’s design.
“If Halliburton had significant concerns about its ability to provide a safe and high-quality cement job in the Macondo well, then it had the responsibility and obligation to refuse to perform the job,” BP said. “To do otherwise would have been morally repugnant.”
Idea shot down
Tuesday’s session was the first time Halliburton officials with firsthand knowledge of the situation gave federal investigators their version of events. Gagliano was one of two Halliburton workers who testified Tuesday at the Coast Guard-BOEMRE hearings.
Gagliano said when he first raised alarms about the well on April 15, BP initially treated it with urgency. He and two BP engineers worked late into the night on possible solutions. BP even had a helicopter deliver the additional centralizers to the Deepwater Horizon the following day.
But Brian Morel, a BP drilling engineer, had by that point already shot down the idea.
“As far as changes, it’s too late to get any more product to the rig,”îhe wrote in an April 15 e-mail to Gagliano and several senior BP drilling officials. “Our only option is to rearrange placement of these centralizers.”
Morel, through his attorney, declined to testify at the hearing, invoking his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.
Testimony challenged
Gagliano, however, was challenged by a BP attorney, Richard Godfrey, who accused Halliburton of overstating warnings it provided about the cement job prior to the accident.
Godfrey said nowhere in his April 18 report did Gagliano explicitly say the Macondo well should not have cement poured down it. He noted that a separate report the same day, prepared and signed by Gagliano, called for only seven centralizers.
“You sent BP a job recommendation that you thought would fail?” Godfrey asked.
Gagliano said that the recommendation was based on procedure decisions that came from officials on the rig, which included Halliburton engineers and BP officials.
“This was not my procedure. This procedure came from the rig,” Gagliano said. “My best engineering analysis would be to run 21 centralizers.”
But Godfrey noted that despite those apparent concerns, Gagliano sent a post-job report to BP three days after the accident saying that the cement job was performed as planned and again failed to bring up previous warnings about gas flow potential or other problems.
‘Some confusion’
Earlier Tuesday, Daun Winslow, a Transocean executive who was on board the Deepwater Horizon at the time of the blowout, testified he observed confusion among rig personnel about an important well test just hours before the accident. Transocean owned and operated the rig, under contract with BP.
Winslow, a performance division manager, said he overheard a conversation in the rig’s drill shack late in the afternoon about the results of a procedure called a negative pressure test.
“It appeared there was some confusion about some pressures or volumes circulated,” he said.
During a negative test, the fluid pressure inside the well is reduced and the well is observed to see whether any gas leaks into it through the cement or casing.
Winslow’s account lines up with information BP provided investigators about well tests before the blast at about 10 p.m. The company has said a first negative pressure test around 5 p.m. failed because it showed major pressure discrepancies. A later test also showed elevated pressures in the drill pipe, BP has said. The results could suggest gas had seeped into the well bore.
Sharon Hong contributed to this story.
brett.clanton@chron.com
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http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/business/7170114.html
Former top drilling regulator set to testify
She resigned under pressure in aftermath of April 20 blowout
By JENNIFER A. DLOUHY
Aug. 24, 2010, 10:25PM
WASHINGTON When the presidential commission investigating the Deepwater Horizon disaster convenes its second hearing today, the panel plans to examine regulatory lapses that may have paved the way for the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.
Witnesses before the seven-member panel include Elizabeth Birnbaum, formerly the nation’s top drilling regulator, who will be speaking publicly for the first time since she resigned under pressure five weeks after the April 20 blowout at BP’s Macondo well. Two other previous drilling overseers are scheduled to join Birnbaum in fielding questions about whether the government has been too lax in regulating the industry.
But the panel’s attention instead could be diverted to debate over the administration’s six-month moratorium on deep-water drilling, which has been challenged by oil industry leaders and Gulf Coast officials, who say the ban will devastate the region’s already hard-hit economy.
Environmentalists and the Obama administration contend that the ban – set to expire Nov. 30 – is a necessary timeout while the industry and government boost drilling safety standards, improve spill containment techniques, and ensure there is enough available cleanup equipment in case of another spill.
The drilling ban dominated the commission’s first round of meetings in New Orleans last month, as rig workers and offshore service industry representatives complained that the policy has idled roughly two dozen floating rigs in the Gulf of Mexico.
The commission’s co- chairmen, former Environmental Protection Agency head William Reilly, and former Florida Gov. Bob Graham, also have raised concerns about the ban and questioned whether the moratorium could be lifted for some operations that pass rigorous new safety inspections.
“We are particularly interested in whether individual rigs – or categories of rigs – subject to the moratorium are sufficiently safe to allow the moratorium to be lifted with respect to those rigs,” the commission’s executive director, Richard Lazarus, said in an Aug. 6 letter to Michael Bromwich, the head of the Bureau of Offshore Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement.
Interior Secretary Ken Salazar created that bureau in June as part of a broad overhaul of the now-disbanded Mineral Management Service, the unit formerly headed by Birnbaum.
Low-risk operations
Although Bromwich opposes a rig-based approach to lifting the ban, he told the commission in a letter Monday that the moratorium could be partially lifted before its scheduled expiration for certain low-risk operations.
The national commission, which President Barack Obama authorized in May, is tasked with pinpointing the causes of the explosion at the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig and suggesting new regulations and other changes that could prevent a repeat. The panel is expected to detail its findings in January.
Its work dovetails with a series of other oil spill investigations under way – including a joint inquiry by the U.S. Coast Guard and Bromwich’s bureau that is conducting hearings this week in Houston.
Broader issues
So far, the national commission has dealt publicly with broader issues surrounding offshore drilling. For example, today’s hearing will include an 80-minute primer on the history of the industry by a Shell Exploration and Production manager, an energy consultant and the head of the World Wildlife Fund. The panel is also scheduled to hear from University of Houston business professor Tyler Priest, and officials with the American Petroleum Institute.
But the commission now is building the framework for a more focused examination about what went wrong on the Deepwater Horizon rig, spokesman Dave Cohen said. It has hired 40 researchers to investigate the disaster.
At the helm of the investigative team is Fred Bartlit, a trial lawyer who represented former President George W. Bush in the legal battles in Florida over the disputed 2000 election. Bartlit also is a veteran of another oil disaster investigation – he was chief counsel during a yearlong probe of the 1988 explosion of the Piper Alpha oil platform in the North Sea that killed 167.
Lacks subpoena power
So far, the panel has been operating without the power to subpoena documents and compel testimony from reluctant witnesses.
Lawmakers, led by Rep. Lois Capps, D-Calif., and Ed Markey, D-Mass., have pushed legislation to give subpoena power to the commission, but their proposal has stalled on Capitol Hill amid other disputes over energy policy and how to boost companies’ liability for oil spills.
The panel’s findings could dictate the future of oil and gas drilling off the nation’s shores for decades. Interior Department officials also have signaled the commission’s work could help influence whether the department will modify its deep-water drilling ban in coming months.
jennifer.dlouhy@chron.com
Special thanks to Richard Charter