Investigators find more abnormalities in BP’s account of Oil Spill Disaster

Transocean’s Offshore installation Manager (OIM) on DWH said bypass well was not a sidetrack

By BK LIM and FASE I | THE REAL AGENDA | MARCH 18, 2013

So when is a “bypass” not a bypass from the same well but from another well location?

That should have been the question to ask Transocean’s OIM (Jimmy Harrel) on the Deepwater Horizon, during his 27 May 2010 testimony in the USCG-MMS investigation hearing.

Jim Harrel was clearly taken aback when asked to elaborate on the specific problems encountered (such as loss circulation, pipe stuck, cementing and other safety issues) throughout the duration of the WELL (@min 5:30). Harrel clearly stumbled when he asked “….you…err…talking….about the well…” as if to ask if he was to detail out the problems on all the 3 wells BP had drilled since 3 Feb. He looked relieved when the counsel corrected himself by stating “the drilling of the well, the BYPASS” from “March to April”. http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/293757-1

The oilfield term “bypass” has the same connotation as common usage, that is “to drive around an obstruction”. There are 2 ways to do this. By drilling a “sidetrack” (deviated well trajectory) from the original wellbore at a vertical angle no greater than 4^o. Alternatively, the “BYPASS” could be drilled from a new surface location which is in effect a new well.

After explaining that the “well” had several loss circulations, couple of kicks and a stuck pipe, Jim Harrel then volunteered the statement “…..actually not a sidetrack.” This significant fact in his testimony was ignored by pro-BP lawyers, industry experts, scientists and main stream media reporting on the BP Gulf Oil Spill Disaster (BPGOSD).

The definition of sidetrack from Schlumberger:

This would immediately prove that BP committed perjury by stating before Congress only one well was drilled on the MC252 lease before 20 April 2010 (not including the 2 relief wells drilled after the “accident”). Confirmed by several enquiries to BP.

It is simply beyond anyone’s comprehension how BP could have spent 115 days (75 days from 3Feb to 20Apr 2010 and another 40 days from 29 Sept- 8Nov 2009) on a single exploratory well which would have normally taken 2- 4 weeks to complete?

Together with the costs of personnel, support and operation, the drilling rig would have cost about $1 million per day to be at well location. No cost-cutting exploration giant could have spent that kind of money on every well and still be a profitable enterprise. The Dept of Interior confirmed that only 1 in 5 is economical in the deep water prospects. With that kind of success, it would have been suicidal for any deep water exploration company to be so stubbornly persistent on every failed well. This proves that the Macondo well was drilled not purely for exploration purpose but to cause a “deep accident”.

What was so special about the Macondo prospect with a known reserve of only 50 million barrels? BP’s other deep water discoveries were all 10 to 60 times larger; with reserves ranging from 0.5- 3 billion barrels. None of the deeper exploratory wells in the Tiber field (discovered in Aug 2009, 0.5 billion barrels, TD 35,055ft), Kaskida field (discovered in 2006, 3 billion barrels, TD 32,500ft) and Thunderhorse (discovered 1999, 1 billion barrels, TD 25,770ft) cost more than the shallower Macondo well at TD 18,360ft.

Tiber and Kaskida were drilled using the Deepwater Horizon (DWH) and Thunderhorse by Discover Enterprise. All had dynamic positioning (DP) capability which is essential for deep water operation. So why was the TransOcean Marianas (TOM) with no DP capability initially used for the Macondo well in 2009? In BP’s exploration plan, 42 days were allocated for the anchor handling operation alone. This would have cost BP almost $30million in unnecessary field operation. Almost the budgeted cost of each Macondo well at $30 million which was very high by any standard.

Detailed costing and exploration are the subject of a new article in preparation but presented here to emphasise the point that more than 1 well was drilled, both time and cost wise. Jim Harrel’s confirmation “…..actually it was not a sidetrack….” struck a chord with most independent experts’ analyses that BP drilled more than 1 well. Our technical analyses since Aug 2010, confirmed BP drilled 3 wells.

Figure 4.1 (by TrialGraphix) shows the Macondo Well Schematic found at page 93 of the National Commission Investigation report on BPGOSD. This vertical well schematic is the accepted final version of the Macondo well design, similar to the original June 2009 well design given by BP (figure 2, above) of their investigation report dated 8 Sept 2010.

The final well trajectory as a single vertical well bore illustrated in figure 4.1 (above) is consistent with Jim Harrel’s testimony that the BYPASS was not a sidetrack. If it were then the deviated trajectory and well schematic would have looked like the following “fake BYPASS” schematic in the next figure.

This deviated well trajectory (bypass by sidetrack) was never found in all the official investigation reports. Like all the fake information (dis-info) given to us, we were not sure of the reason and source initially. The last person to have passed this to us, could have been an “innocent layman messenger”. To know the reasons and source, we of course, dangled the “carrot” as one of the “physics of impossibility” lies in the previous articles. There are many technical reasons why the “sidetrack bypass” could not have been successfully executed. Details are given in a book to follow. As we had been saying; “they don’t play HAARP for fun”.

The reasons (for the planted dis-info) would show at the right time and right place. It is for the same reason we do not reveal what we knew of Jim Harrel’s testimony until necessary. The way the counsels skirted the 3 wells issue and the conspicuous absence of any deeper enquiry into the 2 significant well control events (shallow gas blow-out essentially) on or about 13 Feb and 10 March 2010, confirmed these were more sensitive than BP were prepared to admit. Corroboration with other facts, confirm BP could not have designed and orchestrated this “murderous plot disguised as an accident (MPDAA)” alone. They have had “assistance” from higher authorities in the orchestration and continue to have “assistance” in the massive cover-up.

The facts also confirmed that the present show trials will never go beyond giving BP a “slap on the wrist” for an “accident caused by gross negligence”. This is despite the fact that all documented evidence point to a MPDAA planned in concert with several similar Blow-out-Oil Spills (BOS) that had happened or failed to happen in the 2008 – 2011 period. There are global Oil Mafia agenda to all these BOS. Never in the history of industrial accidents have so many mega BOS occurred in the most advanced countries with the most stringent offshore regulations within such a short period of time.

Unfortunately the corporate crooks in collusion with criminal agents in the regulating authorities, continue to enjoy impunities for their crimes of mass destruction and mass deception. Similarly, the sink hole-salt cavern crisis in Louisiana were manufactured and had been planned to happen immediately after the BPGOSD. Although the rate of erosion by the salt mining operation could be accurately estimated, Nature refused to cooperate by collapsing the sink hole at the “predicted time”. If BP and their cabal masters were smart enough to plan and orchestrate BPGOSD, they would have been smart enough to plan their escape. An open trial was never part of their escape plan. They never thought all of their PMDs could have failed so badly (in achieving their sinister objectives) in the last 3 years.

They had hoped BPGOSD (aided with multiple deliberate explosive events) would be the trigger to unleash the natural pent-up stress along the North American Intra-plate Boundary (NAIB, encompasses the New Madrid fault zone) to create a doomsday Armageddon, all the way from the Gulf coast to the St Lawrence Seaway in North-East Canada.

The catastrophe that followed BPGOSD would have been so great, no one would even bother with micro-faulting BP as we have seen in the current trial, 3 years later. The Great NAIB Catastrophe of 2009-2010 was intended to be the “reset button” for many of the Banksters’ financial woes. Evidently there were Divine Intervention. Instead of a cascading chain of catastrophic disasters as the evil master planners had hoped for, the great quakes all along the New Madrid which FEMA had planned for, failed to materialise. Instead there were abnormal occurrences of hundreds of quake swarms and rumbling tremors following the 1Aug2010 nuke event. Imagine the cumulative amount of energy that had been released since then. And many still asked why GOD allowed these disasters to happen?

If we are not yet awaken to see these miracles of Nature, to see the murderous plots behind these MPDAA and be bold enough to demand justice for these crimes of mass destruction & deception, do we deserve to ask GOD for more?

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BP to blame in explosion, internal documents show

AP

The secret we all knew: BP cut corners days before platform explosion.

BP made a series of money-saving shortcuts and blunders that dramatically increased the danger of a destructive oil spill in a well that an engineer ominously described as a “nightmare” just six days before the blowout, according to documents released Monday that provide new insight into the causes of the disaster.

The House Energy and Commerce Committee released dozens of internal documents that outline several problems on the deep-sea rig in the days and weeks before the April 20 explosion that set in motion the largest environmental disaster in U.S. history. Investigators found that BP was badly behind schedule on the project and losing hundreds of thousands of dollars with each passing day, and responded by cutting corners in the well design, cementing and drilling mud efforts and the installation of key safety devices.

“Time after time, it appears that BP made decisions that increased the risk of a blowout to save the company time or expense. If this is what happened, BP’s carelessness and complacency have inflicted a heavy toll on the Gulf, its inhabitants, and the workers on the rig,” said Democratic Reps. Henry A. Waxman and Bart Stupak.

The missteps emerged on the same day that President Barack Obama made his fourth visit to the Gulf, where he sought to assure beleaguered residents that the government will “leave the Gulf Coast in better shape than it was before.”

Obama’s two-day trip to Mississippi, Alabama and Florida represents his latest attempt to persevere through a crisis that has served as an important early test of his presidency. The visit coincides with a national address from the Oval Office on Tuesday night in which he will announce new steps to restore the Gulf Coast ecosystem, according to a senior administration official who spoke on condition of anonymity so as not to upstage the president’s announcements.

“I can’t promise folks … that the oil will be cleaned up overnight. It will not be,” Obama said after encouraging workers in hard hats as they hosed off and repaired oil-blocking boom. “It’s going to be painful for a lot of folks.”

But, he said, “things are going to return to normal.”

The breached well has dumped as much as 114 million gallons of oil into the Gulf under the worst-case scenario described by scientists — a rate of more than 2 million a day. BP has collected 5.6 million gallons of oil through its latest containment cap on top of the well, or about 630,000 gallons per day.

But BP believes it will see considerable improvements in the next two weeks. The company said Monday that it could trap a maximum of roughly 2.2 million gallons of oil each day by the end of June as it deploys additional containment efforts, including a system that could start burning off vast quantities as early as Tuesday. That would more than triple the amount of oil it is currently capturing — and be a huge relief for those trying to keep it from hitting the shore.

“It would be a game changer,” said Coast Guard Chief Petty Officer Mark Boivin, deputy director for near-shore operations at a command center in Mobile. He works with a team that coordinates the efforts of roughly 80 skimming boats gathering oil off the coast.

Still, BP warned its containment efforts could face problems if hoses or pipes clog and engineers struggle to run the complicated collection system. Early efforts at the bottom of the Gulf failed to capture oil.

Meanwhile, congressional investigators have identified several mistakes by BP in the weeks leading up to the disaster as it fell way behind on drilling the well.

BP started drilling in October, only to have the rig damaged by Hurricane Ida in early November. The company switched to a new rig, the Deepwater Horizon, and resumed drilling on Feb. 6. The rig was 43 days late for its next drilling location by the time it exploded April 20, costing BP at least $500,000 each day it was overdue, congressional documents show.

As BP found itself in a frantic race against time to get the job done, engineers took several time-saving measures, according to congressional investigators.

In the design of the well, the company apparently chose a riskier option among two possibilities to provide a barrier to the flow of gas in space surrounding steel tubes in the well, documents and internal e-mails show. The decision saved BP $7 million to $10 million; the original cost estimate for the well was about $96 million.

In an e-mail, BP engineer Brian Morel told a fellow employee that the company is likely to make last-minute changes in the well.

“We could be running it in 2-3 days, so need a relative quick response. Sorry for the late notice, this has been nightmare well which has everyone all over the place,” Morel wrote.

The e-mail chain culminated with the following message by another worker: “This has been a crazy well for sure.”

BP also apparently rejected advice of a subcontractor, Halliburton Inc., in preparing for a cementing job to close up the well. BP rejected Halliburton’s recommendation to use 21 “centralizers” to make sure the casing ran down the center of the well bore. Instead, BP used six centralizers.

In an e-mail on April 16, a BP official involved in the decision explained: “It will take 10 hours to install them. I do not like this.” Later that day, another official recognized the risks of proceeding with insufficient centralizers but commented: “Who cares, it’s done, end of story, will probably be fine.”

The lawmakers also said BP also decided against a nine- to 12-hour procedure known as a “cement bond log” that would have tested the integrity of the cement. A team from Schlumberger, an oil services firm, was on board the rig, but BP sent the team home on a regularly scheduled helicopter flight the morning of April 20.

Less than 12 hours later, the rig exploded.

BP also failed to fully circulate drilling mud, a 12-hour procedure that could have helped detect gas pockets that later shot up the well and exploded on the drilling rig.

Asked about the details disclosed from the investigation, BP spokesman Mark Proegler said the company’s main focus right now is on the response and stopping the flow of oil. “It would be inappropriate for us to comment while an investigation is ongoing,” Proegler told AP. BP executives including CEO Tony Hayward will be questioned by Congress on Thursday.

The letter from Waxman and Stupak noted at least five questionable decisions BP made before the explosion, and was supplemented by 61 footnotes and dozens of documents.

“The common feature of these five decisions is that they posed a trade-off between cost and well safety,” said Waxman and Stupak. Waxman, D-Calif., chairs the energy panel while Stupak, D-Mich., heads a subcommittee on oversight and investigations.

British Petroleum Disaster: An Insider’s Account

By LUIS MIRANDA | THE REAL AGENDA | JUNE 13, 2010

As The Real Agenda has reported, the Gulf of Mexico’s oil spill goes beyond a few thousand gallons a day and chemical dispersants.

Oil industry insiders who have revealed first-hand information that could make the manliest human being tremble like jello.  The most prominent of these insiders, Pastor Lindsey Williams, who worked closely with heads of the oil industry for several years, appeared on talk radio to share his testimony on what is really going on in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico.  The details are neither easy nor pleasant to understand.

Williams’ account begins with what a former oil industry CEO told him with regard to the Deep Water Horizon disaster.  According to him, the reason for the oil disaster was that BP may have drilled into something known as a batholith, which is a gigantic well usually filled with magma, but that this time seemed to be full of crude.  After drilling into the chamber, the pressure was so high that the Deepwater Horizon’s platform and its structure, weren’t able to withstand it causing the explosion and the consequent disaster.  Why didn’t the platform sustain the pressure generated from the crude coming out?  Pressures experienced after drilling an oil well vary, but maximum numbers usually hit 1500 pounds of pressure per square inch.  In the case of the oil well in the Gulf of Mexico, the pressure reached up to 70,000 pounds of natural pressure per square inch.  Williams said: “No structure built by man could have withstood such force.”  Does this mean the explosion was an accident?  Not necessarily.  As we have reported, Deepwater Horizon workers said in their testimony that BP’s heads knew of the lack of capacity the platform had to take on the well’s pressure, but forced the workers to continue the drilling process.  He added that the kind of oil contained in the gigantic well is not of the fossil type, but of another one known as Abiotic oil.  This oil is produced during chemical processes, deep down into the Earth’s core.  Williams said some of the most important oil deposits in the world are replenishing themselves through this process and therefore the peak oil idea is false.  On this side topic, Pastor Williams is supported by what can be called the Russian oil rush.  In the last few years, Russia has dug at least three oil wells such as the one apparently found in the Gulf of Mexico down to depths of 20,000 to 30,000 feet into the ground.  Other projects of the sort are located closer to the United States than anyone could think.  Just as Russia dug such deep wells on land, the United States granted BP permission to dig a 5,000 feet deep well in the waters of the Gulf of Mexico.  Big mistake says Williams.  The fact the drilling was being done from a floating platform, only stabilized by propellers, may have played a determinant role on what happened next.

During the interview, Williams said that two sources from British Petroleum confirmed that not only had the company gone down 5,000 feet to the sea floor through sea water, but had drilled 25,000 feet into the sea bed down to the Earth’s crust.  His sources also confirmed that 3 hours before the explosion, BP had sent executives, geologists and other personnel to the region in order to witnessed what the result of the drilling would be.  Williams emphasized that the explosion was not done on purpose, but that it was all an accident due to the unexpected pressure that came together with the abiotic oil.  “The pressure was so great that no human manufactured device could have stopped the flow,” said Williams.  He also confirmed through his BP sources the allegation that BP high-ups collaborated in a way with the accident.  “A platform worker told the foreman that the fail safe valve was broken and needed to be replaced, but the foreman replied there was no time for that.”

Another of Mr. Williams’ revelations was that the leak of crude oil from the sea bed of the Gulf of Mexico is not spewing thousands or hundreds of thousands of gallons a day, but millions of gallons a day.  He said his oil industry source confirm what other independent sources have claimed: “that the oil spill is letting out between 4 and 5 million gallons of crude a day.”  The explosion the Pastor said during an interview on the Alex Jones Show, caused the sea bed to turn unstable, and that is why there are more than a few leaks down there.  Williams was told there were oil leaks as far as 20 miles away from the location where the Deepwater Horizon structure once stood.  He was fast to address one of the options some people have suggested as a solution to end the oil leak: To nuke the place in order to stop the crude from coming into the Gulf’s waters.  He said his source confessed this may be the only option to stop the disaster once and for all, but that given the degree of difficulty of such operation, there was a big enough chance the explosion of a nuclear device would make the problem worse.  If not done correctly and precisely, the explosion could further destabilize the well and cause a major collapse that would release greater amounts of oil which could not be stopped.

How does Mr. Williams knows this?  As mentioned before, his source, a former oil industry Chief Executive Officer, provided him with this and other information for the past few years.  Why should we believe what he says?  His track record has been immaculate so far.  Pastor Williams appeared on radio shows several times detailing -beforehand- the rise and fall of oil prices, the devaluation of the dollar, the food crisis, and the fake oil scarcity agenda the oil industry has planted in the public’s mind.  All of this before it happened.

Marine life, birds and humans will have to live with the consequences of the spill for years to come.

One of the questions raised during the interview was what else besides the oil is coming out of the oil gushers?  At the beginning of the disaster, it was thought the oil was accompanied by mud only, but now, just as the numbers of the leak have changed, the account of what is flowing into the ocean along with the crude has also changed.  It seems the oil leak is not the biggest problem at hand.  The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) confirmed the existence of multiple plumes on the sea floor and these very plumes are releasing toxic gases that are ultimately the greatest danger for marine and human life.  The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) confirmed NOAA’s findings after carrying out independent tests of the underwater plumes.

According to the EPA report, Volatile Organic Compounds (VOC’s)are being emitted from the bottom of the ocean in amounts never seen before.  Below is the transcript of the report where it cites the VOC’s present, the levels at which they are safe for humans, and the amounts that were detected in the studies the EPA performed.  The

1. Hydrogen Sulfide (H2S) emitted at a rate of 1,200 parts per billion(ppb) into the water and the air afterwards, once it surfaces.  Levels considered “safe” for humans round 5-10 ppb;

2. Benzene (C6H6) emitted at a rate of 3,000 ppb.  Human “safe” levels are said to be around 0-4 ppb

3. Methylene Chloride or dichloromethane CH2Cl2, emitted at a rate of 3,400 ppb.  Human tolerance is established to levels below 61 ppb.

Other gases cited during the interview as being emitted from the spill include vanadium, which according to our research is, in its pure form, a greyish silvery, soft and ductile metal used as an alloy in the manufacturing of cars.  According to the Mineral Information Institute, “it is found in magnetite (iron oxide) deposits that are also very rich in the element titanium. It is also found in bauxite (aluminum ore), rocks with high concentrations of phosphorous-containing minerals, and sandstones that have high uranium content.” It has 2 isotopes that occur naturally.  One of the isotopes is stable and one is radioactive.

The emission of these gases into the water and later into the air people breathe indeed confirms a nefarious slow-paced genocide of marine life and human life.  If exposure to low levels of benzene causes dizziness, and organ failure, imagine what it is doing and what it will do to people exposed to it at the concentration levels read by the studies made by the EPA.  Deformities, cancer, respiratory problems are just a few of the problems people will face in the short and long run due to exposure to benzene, hydrogen sulfide, methylene chloride and who knows what else is coming out of deep beneath the sea floor.  Suddenly, the disaster seems to move from ecological and marine  to the very survival of the people who leave on the coast of Louisiana, Florida, and possibly the whole East Coast of the United States.

To all this we can add, as the media has reported, that Goldman Sachs sold 44 percent of its BP stock just three days before the explosion at the Deepwater Horizon platform.  Additionally, Tony Hayward -BP’s CEO- also sold a third of his own shares right before the accident occurred for a total of 1.4 million pounds.  In the meantime, fishers and other workers who are now helping with the cleaning efforts reported sickness after being in and on the waters of the Gulf of Mexico.  As channel 6, WSDU, reported, workers are experiencing illness, strong stomachache, respiratory problems, coughing and other symptoms of intoxication due to the inhalation of fumes from both the chemicals and the gases emanating from the waters.