Using aerial dispersants was an approved method for limiting shoreline impacts, but an idea was floated to apply dispersants directly into the wellhead at 5,000 feet and disperse the oil at depth, a method rarely tested before, and never used operationally. While on station, the DD3 utilized an Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler (ADCP) that used sonar to measure and record water current velocities, distribution of suspended material over a range of depths, and help predict Loop Eddy current interactions and forces on the platform. First, several decisions about the design and execution of the primary cementing job were made which increased the risk of problems. They worked with OR&R leadership to develop a vision for how the mission of the Disaster Response Center could be the foundation for an entire program. Deepwater Horizon Incident The 2010 Deepwater Horizon rig explosion and fire resulted in the most significant offshore oil spill in U.S. history, when an estimated 3.2 million barrels of oil escaped into the Gulf of Mexico over 87 days from a damaged wellhead a mile below the surface. “We were already talking about how to boost the Disaster Response Center, and find that broader national voice for it. This was the moment that the Macondo well was lost.Johnson Matthey, England, United Kingdom,It was possible eventually to siphon off some of the oil through a tube inserted into the broken riser connected to a drill ship. The drillers did notice that there was an unexpected difference between the drillpipe and kill line pressures at 21:30 and shut off the pumps to investigate, delaying the setting of the cement plug. Whether this helped contain the environmental impact is uncertain, and there has been much debate over the extent to which this increased the persistence of oil within the Gulf waters and perhaps worsened the impact on marine life and the ecological damage.It was a tragedy that could have been avoided, for this accident was eminently avoidable. Robert has 20 streets and one stop light. In the end the riser pipe was cut off close to the BOP so that better-fitting caps could be installed. This could improve collection but also was capable of sealing the well in. With no flowmeters to measure the amount, estimates of the released hydrocarbons varied: at first BP said it was a few hundred bbl/d, maybe 1,000. So all these factors meant that extra vigilance would have been expected to check that none of these changes from normal or best practice had compromised the goal of the primary cementing job, to ensure complete sealing off of the high pressure hydrocarbon zones delivering “well integrity”, from being achieved.© 2020 Institution of Chemical EngineersThis article has been featured in:Well, as it turned out, quite a lot in fact could, and did, go wrong. There is also an array of sensors mounted on the instrument frame that relays water conditions up to the ship in real time, typically including CTD, PAR (photosynthetically available light), transmissometry and fluorescence sensors. NCEI played a pivotal role in the response by capturing and providing public access to this data in near-real time. The 2010 Deepwater Horizon rig explosion and fire resulted in the most significant offshore oil spill in U.S. history, when an estimated 3.2 million barrels of oil escaped into the Gulf of Mexico over 87 days from a damaged wellhead a mile below the surface.
During the displacement procedure, the drillers and mud engineers should have been on the lookout for evidence of a “kick”– the unplanned entry of gas or oil into the well – if by chance the bottomhole cementing had not done its job.