It’s What They Do
Wikipedia on A.B. “Tony” Hayward, CEO of BP:
Hayward has stated that his job might be at risk as a result of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, admitting that “We made a few little mistakes early on.” Hayward also called the oil spill “relatively tiny” in comparison with the size of the Gulf of Mexico. During an interview with UK based satellite news television channel Sky News, broadcast on May 17th, 2010 Hayward stated that the environmental impact of the gulf spill will likely be “very very modest.”
McClatchy notes that BP has a long record of legal, ethical violations. [When did corporations have ethics to violate?]
Even the AP is taking notice that BP had a key role in the Exxon Valdez disaster. BP’s role was to screw up so badly in the first 24 hours that Exxon felt compelled to get involved before things got any worse. BP brought the same level of “expertise” to the Gulf.
McClatchy notes that BP’s plans were so bad that Jindal sounding alarm as oil bypasses booms in Louisiana. The oil got to the Louisiana wetlands because the booms weren’t deployed where they were needed, and weren’t maintained. Booms actually will stop floating oil, so they obviously weren’t in place.
The Orlando Sentinel looks at the “why”: Documents show BP chose a less-expensive, less-reliable method for completing well in Gulf oil spill. The key words are “BP chose”. BP was the one making the decisions that others carried out.
If you read the material at the links, this should come as no surprise: BP internal probe focuses on other companies’ work as cause of explosion, oil spill. Halliburton knew it was going to happen and has been covering itself from the beginning which is why they had data recorders on that well. That would indicate that they expected trouble and wanted proof to back up their testimony.
14 comments
What has baffled me from the day the tophat failed, when BP’s incompetence was clear to see, is why BP is still prime contractor for this gusher situation. It isn’t as if BP has any actual oilwell people or equipment on staff, those are all contractors or leased equipment. The people on staff are the geologists and computer programmers who model the reservoirs to decide where to drill, and the accountants who move massive amounts of money around to the contractors who actually do the work, and the only actual equipment BP owns other than the pipe strand and well casing is the giant supercomputers they use to model the reservoirs. BP doesn’t even have any thumper trucks or ships to gather the data fed into the supercomputers — those are all contractors. (Yes, I know this for a fact, because my land has been thumped by BP, or, rather, by their contractor, who I actually signed the contract with to allow them access to my land).
BP has an inherent motivation to do the capping as cheaply as possible — thus the laughable failures of the top hat and the sippy straw. The U.S. government has the authority to declare a state of emergency and contract a new prime contractor to handle getting the gusher stopped, and then bill BP for the expense, but instead we get President Obama wringing his hands and saying “oh what a shame” basically wringing his hands at the horror of it all but doing nothing effective. This notion that BP is the “only” company with the expertise to do this is nonsense — any one of the top five oilfield service companies has the expertise and equipment to do this. Yes, Halliburton and Schlumberger aren’t exactly popular in D.C. because of their ties to the previous administration or to France, but they have the people and the equipment to do shit like this, and certainly couldn’t do a worse job than BP. Give’em a bonus if they get it capped off early, and I bet you it’d be capped off within a week.
– Badtux the Oilfield Service Penguin
The only *bonus* I’d offer them, is that all the exec’s won’t be put up against a wall and shot if they fix and pay for it all in a week! That’s the only incentive they would understand at this point.
Kryten, Halliburton or Schlumberger didn’t cause this problem, and we have experience here in Kah-lee-foh-nee-ah that giving a gigantic bonus for early completion leads to, err, early completion. On April 29, 2007, a tanker truck tumped over and exploded and melted one of the approach ramps to the main SF-Oakland bridge, instantly requiring approximately 120,000 people to find another way to get to work (and BART is good, but not *THAT* good). And when I say melted, I mean *melted* — the wind tunnel effect through that double-decker structure turned the gas from the truck into a blowtorch, with same general effect as the WTC in 2001, over 120 feet of roadway was just *gone*. Clearly this main approach ramp to the Bay Bridge would be out of commission for months, right?
Uhm, no. Total time to fix? A little over three weeks — it re-opened on May 24. Which included straightening the lower ramp (the one that the truck had caught fire on) and completely replacing the upper ramp (the one the blowtorch had melted). The lower ramp was open by the end of the first week after being jacked back up into place while girder straightening work was underway underneath it. The upper ramp was an interesting story. The bid for the upper ramp was $867,075. Caltrans had estimated the cost of the project to be about $5.2 million. How on earth could Myers build the new ramp for less than a million? The steel itself would cost at least that much. Well, the contract called for a work schedule of fifty days. However, for every day the project finished early, the contractor would earn a bonus of $200,000, with a cap of $5 million. The contractor happened to have equipment nearby to do the job due to it being in use on another Caltrans job nearby, and intended to earn every single one of those $5 million in bonus dollars, i.e., roughly $600K profit. And he did. And he didn’t do it by taking shortcuts. The steel he used was actually *stronger* than the steel that melted, because he didn’t have time to procure the spec’ed steel, thus used steel he’d already purchased for another project — steel that was stronger than spec’ed. And he used an ultra-high-strength early-set concrete, much higher strength than typically used for roadways, so that it could be opened to traffic while still not at top strength with only three days of curing rather than the typical week and still be stronger than the fully-cured concrete typically used for this sort of thing.
So yes, money motivation to get things done quickly works, if you have a government agency that has the expertise on staff (CalTrans does) and a prime contractor that has the competence and ability to make it happen. And as BP proves, money UN-motivation (their motivation is to spend as little money as possible dealing with this) works too — works to make sure that it’s not going to happen for a good, long while, that is.
– Badtux the Motivational Penguin
There first clue should have been that BP doesn’t own any drilling rigs. If you don’t own the equipment, it is highly unlikely that you have a lot of people around who know how to use it, much less fix it.
All of the “expertise” is rented, and the contractors don’t care who pays the bill, as long as they are going to get paid. If my town gets annoyed because someone’s vacant lot is too “weedy”, they have the weeds cuts and assess a fine. If the fine isn’t paid they put a lien on the property.
What they need are some pipefitters, and the last I knew, the Navy has a lot of them working on aircraft carriers and submarines, not to mention the shipyards around the Gulf.
Alvin is sitting in Massachusetts waiting to be used and it doesn’t need cables to the surface.
All the government really needs is the willingness to take charge.
The problem with using money as a motivator to do *the right thing* is that it won’t have the desired effect. As with your banks, they will simply take the money and continue on as normal. Nothing will change. The Banks posted massive profits every Qtr, even while your Gov was giving them billions of your money. I guarantee the only effect it has was the bank exec’s pissed themselves laughing at how easy is is to con the sheeple into giving them the shirts off their backs. And it’s the same with the oil companies and every other corp you have. They know how easy it is to get money out of you all, they’ve had decades to perfect it.
The only way to fix all your problems is to change everything. That’s not going to happen. The only *failure standards* these criminals would understand now is that if they fail their own lives will be at stake. They have their wealth stashed all over the World, you couldn’t even get most of it back if you tried, and it would probably cost you as much to get it as they have. They control the money, and the laws. There is no other incentive you can offer them. They have all the money they want, and can get all they ever want, and *you* will happily give it to them. 🙂
The only way things are going to change now, is that the sheeple will have to force things to change. And good luck with that.
Kryten, oil services companies don’t make their money from oil, they make their money from working for oil companies. In this case, Halliburton would be motivated to take the job to screw BP. BP questioned Halliburton’s professional competence. That is what Halliburton is really selling in its oil services division.
There are a lot of companies that would love a chance to cap this sucker, because it would be a major “résumé” item and a reason to jack up their fees. It’s the kind of job that would bring out the heavy hitters and the little guys with new ideas.
You don;t make your profits on the standard government contract, you make it on the change orders and bonuses. This is why the big guys always get the bid, because they bid below cost, knowing the changes are coming, or that they can max the bonuses.
I doubt Haliburton are motivated to bite one of their major feeders. This would be the same Haliburton that has amply proven that the past decade. These companies make money no matter what. It’s the small companies that will get screwed as always. They can’t take on BP or Haliburton, and your Gov has no interest or incentive to help the little guys. They are owned by the big Biz interests. It used to be that the only rule Big Biz had was that’s it’s only a crime if you get caught. Now they couldn’t care less if they get caught or not.
Dream on.
Humans never learn. After the disaster there, our fed & State Gov made this announcement:
Australia to open up seabed for oil exploration
And this from a Conservation Group:
Now there’s a truly novel idea… Prior thinking about consequences! It’ll never happen…
And just to change the subject to something actually amazing…
Kitten survives washing machine terror
And… The Royal Commission into the Black Saturday bushfires has ended:
Leadership ‘absent’ on Black Saturday
Just to prove that the *top job seat warmers* here are no different to yours or anyone else’s.
I doubt Haliburton are motivated to bite one of their major feeders.
One thing to remember is that this is a different Halliburton from the one that electrocuted our troops in Iraq (which was the since-spun-off KBR division), this is the oilfield services division, which is run far more professionally. BP is going down, so yes, Halliburton would have every motivation to not go down with them and preserve the remainder of its business by making sure BP, not them, gets stuck with the blame. Yes, they’re not going to release a press release saying explicitly “BP is a bunch of lying scumbags!” (though some of their releases have certainly implied such), but they (or rather someone close but far enough for deniability) are decidedly running a leak campaign right now — these un-named “oilfield workers” who are stepping forward to talk to newspapers on condition of anonymity are being provided to the newspapers by *somebody*, and it ain’t by BP :).
And it makes sense for Halliburton to be doing this. If BP is 10% of their business, what good is it to keep BP but lose the other 90% because BP has painted them as incompetent? Sometimes you have to just cut your loses and recognize that one of your customers is just too much risk and headache to be worth the money. Back in my consulting days there was at least one customer we simply said, “we don’t want your business anymore”, because they were nothing but trouble, they were always issuing contracts to subs who were idiots then blaming us when our computers were hooked up to the infrastructure and (duh) didn’t work (because the wiring was wrong, doh, as they would have known if they’d hired *us* to do the wiring as well as the computers rather than saying “Cousin Billybob knows how to string Christmas lights, let’s hire HIM to do the wiring!”). Unlike Janet “the moron” Napolitano who somehow thinks BP is the only oil company in the world, Halliburton recognizes that BP ain’t the only company that needs their expertise, and at this point isn’t worth keeping as a customer.Who needs a customer who’s going to bad-mouth you and try to get you sued for their own incompetence?
Talking about which, a lot of other contractors are going to make that same decision as soon as this gusher is stopped, and BP is going to find themselves having a really hard time finding drilling rigs to lease and contractors to put on it… I mean, they sunk a billion dollar boat. How many people want their billion dollar boat sunk by BP when there are oil companies all over the world clamoring for every one of these things that comes off the slips? BP is toast…. they just don’t know it yet.
.-= last blog ..Cooking =-.
You do what you have to to survive, Kryten. You can’t let a client, even your biggest client, destroy you. Like Badtux says, no one is going to want BP for a client after this.
You would be amazed at the problems that “active” law firms have getting anyone to do anything for them. The money isn’t worth the risk.
There are a lot of companies that would love a chance to cap this sucker, because it would be a major “résumé” item and a reason to jack up their fees.
you bet.
Hmmm. OK, I hope you guys are right. 🙂 You would have a better idea about it as insiders than I as essentially an outsider (though I have also worked in that industry, albeit over 20 years ago, for ARAMCO). For myself, it’s not any particular company I have issue with, it’s the way the systems and processes in the USA have been corrupted over the last few decades, the past decade especially, and the attitudes and even the understanding of these things the average people have. The Capitalist ideal brainwashing has been rather thorough. We all know it should have been fixed within a week, and we also know it is possible to do so. Too many people don’t understand that. The very fact that this has been allowed to continue, is rather troubling. I honestly see no end in the near future.
That’s just my opinion, for whatever it’s worth. It’s not just the USA BTW, I see it here too. The findings of our ‘Black Saturday’ Royal commission were no surprise to almost everyone here. The so-called *leadership * was abysmal and failed completely, and hundreds died as a result. You have the same problem now, the only real difference is the death toll from the BP disaster has only just begun, and is not going to be all over in a few days.
… it’s the way the systems and processes in the USA have been corrupted over the last few decades, the past decade especially, …
you won’t get any argument from me on this.
We all know it should have been fixed within a week, and we also know it is possible to do so.
I’m not sure whether “fixed” is a good word, it’s not really going to be “fixed” until the relief wells get down deep enough to inject mud into the borehole and do a bottom-kill (the reason you need relief wells to do that is because otherwise you can’t get enough head on the mud to overcome the pressure via weight of mud alone, and you need the mud to overcome the pressure because otherwise the pressure will just push the concrete for the final plug out of the bore before it cures enough to stop up the bore). But certainly there are a large number of things that can be done in the meantime to stop the flow of oil, and BP’s clumsy attempts at doing so appear aimed more at PR rather than actually spending the money necessary to do it.
.-= last blog ..Buried ledes =-.
If they had set the goal to stop the oil, and not to cover their butts, they would have been putting pressure on a system that hadn’t been eroded by the grit in the oil for over a month.
I’m not very confident in the BOP or the riser standing up to the pressure at this point.