Offshore safety in the wake of the Macondo disaster: business as usual or sea change?

• Author: Weaver, Jacqueline L.
• Position: Part 1 - II. Three Changes to Business as Usual B. The Moratorium as a Technology Forcer 2. The Future Vision of Technology through D. Concluding Comments on Three Changes to Business as Usual: Is the Gulf of Mexico Safer Now?, with appendix and footnotes, p. 182-216

2. The future vision of technology

   In the longer term, the industry will replace humans with robots. (137) Norway's Robotic Drilling Systems is designing robots to take over the repeatable tasks now done by roughnecks and pipe handlers. (138) It has contracted with NASA to learn the secrets of the Martian explorer, the Curiosity Rover. (139) The company predicts that fully automated rigs will someday travel to drill sites guided by satellite coordinates and construct a fourteen-story steel tower, drill wells, and then move on to the next job. (140) Wave-powered and solar-powered robots already roam the world's oceans autonomously for as long as a year, acquiring data on ocean currents crucial to deciding where to site an offshore rig. (141) They can also perform seismic monitoring and detect seepage from oil drilling. (142) Shell is developing "flying nodes," small aquatic drones that will swim in schools and collect seismic data from the seafloor. (143) RPSEA, the Research Partnership to Secure Energy for America, is working on a next-generation autonomous robot drone that can spiral around an aging platform and spot anomalies in a mere six days. (144) The head of the new subsea engineering program at the University of Houston envisions "underwater oil cit[ies] overseen by swimming robots" in the not-too-distant future. (145)

   Many in the industry are looking to eliminate human error by eliminating humans in the drilling process. (146) Field tests of Schlumberger's Drilling Advisor System reported that drilling with a computer in control "easily outperformed" human control. (147) Computers can manipulate data on fifteen factors, while a human driller can only handle about five factors. (148) While this technological invention aimed primarily at reducing costs of drilling rather than increasing safety in response to Macondo, the company reported the unexpected benefit of a sharp drop in equipment failures. (149)

   The industry envisions a surge of unmanned facilities by 2030. (150) A company's best technical experts will be working from home base, looking after facilities around the world. (151) Drillers will be like pilots and "manage the flight" rather than actually fly the plane, which is done by the autopilot system. (152) Computer-controlled devices can execute certain procedures better than a person because human reaction times are too slow to make constant, small adjustments. (153) The driller's role will be to accurately program the system, monitor progress, anticipate problems, and intervene in an emergency. (154) Drilling technology will parallel the innovations proceeding apace in self-driving cars. (155)

3. Assessment of technology's role

   Government regulation can play a significant role in spurring the invention and use of better and safer technologies and more effective oil spill response. Many of our pollution-control statutes seek to ratchet up industry performance by requiring more advanced control technologies for new plants than is required for existing ones. (156)

   The current statutory framework for U.S. offshore leasing was constructed in 1978 at a time of great upheaval in the Mideast oil markets that had raised the price of crude oil imports to record levels. (157) The 1978 amendments to the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act (OCSLA) aimed to increase domestic offshore leasing and production, but with strong safeguards, one of which required using the "best available and safest technologies" found by the Secretary of Interior to be "economically feasible wherever failure of equipment would have a significant effect on safety, health or the environment." (158) Only if the Secretary determined that the "incremental benefits are clearly insufficient to justify the incremental costs of utilizing [the best and safest] technologies," was something less than the best to be used. (159)

   The Macondo disaster clearly calls into question whether this provision was being implemented offshore for blowout preventer technology. As already noted, a number of technical studies had questioned the adequacy of BOPs, especially when used in HPHT wells. Yet regulators and the industry alike ignored the warnings that BOPs needed more development, design, and testing for deepwater operations. In addition, while the industry may be lauded for its rapid response in building capping and containment systems, it is clear that had laws or industry's own risk management analyses and performance standards required such systems earlier, the massive Gulf oil spill could have been contained in a far shorter time period. Stopping the Macondo well's flow did not require a breakthrough invention; it, was capped using off-the-shelf technology.

   The Secretary of Interior has the statutory authority needed to push the industry to use the "best and safest" technology. Indeed, the Macondo incident has opened up profitable markets for safer equipment. Still, one can expect the industry to oppose the required use of technologies that may cost more but offer greater redundancy or safety. Sparkless tools are commonly used in Norwegian waters, but have been slow to cross the Atlantic because of their higher costs, despite the many fires on offshore facilities and the significant fatality rates among workers in the Gulf. (160) Acoustic transponders that can activate a BOP from an offsite location are also used in the North Sea, but have been opposed by the industry in the United States. (161)

   BSEE's role as a safety regulator is critical to assuring that the statutory mandate of "best and safest" is honored, both in the Gulf and in the Arctic, where huge equipment challenges face operators in the sub-zero temperatures and darkness of the north. Part Two of this Article discusses this critical role for BSEE and recommends actions that must be taken to assure that new performance standards for industry equipment are adopted with proper regulatory review.

   Two major cautions arise in assessing the role of technology, even if the best and safest equipment is used offshore. First, a focus on fool-proof hardware and software can lull the industry into the very complacency that is a root cause of high-consequence accidents. It is easier for an industry steeped in engineering, math, and technical prowess to manufacture a gizmo or develop an algorithm than it is to embed a safety culture into the minds of thousands of individual workers and to implement the training and procedures that will result in ever-mindful decision-making by every person at every level of daily work activity. A process safety management system can exist on paper, but it will accomplish little unless it is used by managers and workers alike. A safety system is not like an autonomous drone that can be turned on at the switch of a button. In fact, the more that automated systems are used, the less experience a worker has in actually responding to an emergency situation, except in simulated training sessions.

   Second, both hardware and software malfunction. Relying on more complex technical and automated systems demands better and more frequent testing protocols as part of safety management. (162) The systems can malfunction because of design flaws that go undetected until the equipment is used for a period of time. (163) The "impossible" fires that developed in the Boeing Dreamliner's new lithium batteries are an example. (164) The executive vice president of Shell Oil in charge of large projects and technology stated in May 2013 that the four-fold increase in petroleum mega-projects in the last decade had seriously challenged the engineering industry. (165) Their scale and complexity created "potential safety problems" that forced companies to delay completion and incur increased costs. (166) The projects' "large and demanding" strains on engineers resulted in poorly designed components and lack of quality in contractors' assigned work. (167)

   Systems can also go haywire because of cyber-security attacks from hostile intruders. Already, the malicious installation of malware into Saudi Aramco's 30,000 computers disrupted its operations.168 Individual offshore rigs have also been attacked by cyber-terrorists, causing shutdowns of the targeted facilities. (169) While federal regulations appear to require that companies ensure that their safety systems are secure against malware, many rig operators do not seem to have checked their digital files, and most companies that perform independent certifications of safety systems do not address computer viruses or information technology (IT) security protocols, reports a manager for Lloyd's Register Drilling Integrity Services. (170) In his view, the biggest risk to offshore operators is now their information technology systems, not their mechanical systems. (171)

   Thus, all the booths showing new equipment and software at the Offshore Technology Conference in Houston every May are not a substitute for implementing better safety practices by changing human behavior. (172) Organizational and human factors constitute up to eighty percent of the causes of major accidents. (173) Dazzling as the new capping stack equipment may be, the most difficult stages of capping and containment are training workers in response protocols, maintaining their readiness, and coordinating the logistics of assembling response crews and equipment to the site of a blowout. A "sculpture in steel" sitting in the Houston Ship Channel is just an interesting piece of metal.

   Once again, as the previous section on complacency concluded, changing human patterns of behavior and implementing new procedures are the most important factors in improving offshore safety. The work of the JITF task forces on offshore procedures is critical to greater safety offshore, perhaps even more critical than the work of the task forces on equipment. In proposing adoption of the SEMS rule, BOEMRE (now BSEE) pointed to an analysis of ten years of data from 2000 to 2009 showing that...