Disaster Inspires Brilliant Answers
Thursday, May 05, 2011
Houston Chronicle
by Tom Fowler
A possible tool for preventing oil spills like last year's Gulf disaster arrived on the floor of Houston's Reliant Center this week, courtesy of an auto industry refugee and a jackknife can opener.
T-3 Energy Service unveiled a new kind of pipe-cutting device at the Offshore Technology Conference, running through Thursday at Reliant Park. The design came from some late-night thinking by Doug Jahnke, a company engineer who came to Houston after the automotive industry took a dive several years ago.
The design is just one of many products unveiled this week at the annual Offshore Technology Conference that were developed in response to last year's deadly blowout of BP's Macondo well.
Most blowout preventers, including the one that failed to keep Macondo under control, use a pair of V-shaped blades to crimp and cut drill pipe in an emergency. But the blades may not do the job if the pipe has been knocked off-center in the wellhole, as investigators believe occurred at Macondo.
"I didn't have a lot of set ideas about how things should work in the energy industry," Jahnke said. "So I thought 'Why can't we try a curved blade?' like the curved hook on a Swiss Army Knife can opener."
Since January, T-3 has been testing Jahnke's design, slicing through just about every size of drill pipe and casing used in the Gulf.
From improvements in blowout preventers to improved systems for skimming oil if it does get out of a deep-water well, the offshore industry has spent the past year trying to avoid a repeat of the accident that killed 11 men and triggered the nation's largest offshore oil spill.
National Oilwell Varco is showing customers its new shear rams -- a pair of trident-like blades that puncture a drill pipe before cutting it to shreds. The ShearMax Low Force Casing Shear Rams are aimed at cutting through tool joints -- the thickest section of a drill pipe where it screws into another section of pipe.
GE Oil & Gas' Hydril line of blowout preventers include a hardware and software system that allows an operator to know exactly how far shear rams close within the blowout preventer.
Another new Hydril product captures the natural pressure thousands of feet underwater to help activate a shear ram.
Weatherford International has touted its new "closed-loop" drilling system, which allows for better monitoring for gas as mud comes back from a well during drilling.
Investigations suggest the crew on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, which was working on the Macondo well, missed early signs of gas coming back to the rig through the drilling mud.
The sales staff at Houston-based Titan Specialties says OTC attendees are showing strong interest in its cement bond logging equipment -- used to test the integrity of a well's cement job. A government report on the Macondo accident says a failed cement job was a factor.
"Some states are mandating cement bond logs now, so it's a big item in the past year," Titan's Tim Johnson said.
Today, German equipment maker Bornemann Pumps is formally rolling out plans for a variation of the "top hat," a giant steel cone that BP lowered onto the Macondo leak early on after last year's spill in a futile attempt to funnel oil up to a surface ship.
That effort was doomed by the formation of natural gas hydrates -- a sort of icy slush that clogged the top hat's piping.
Bornemann's version includes pumps within the cone capable of handling up to 300,000 barrels per day of oil and gas flow -- five times the flow government officials believe was coming out of the Macondo.
The high pumping velocity and heat from the unit's electric motor prevent hydrates from forming, the company says.
"This system can buy companies time as they work on the final solution to stop a leaking deep-water well," said Axel J äschke, head of Bornemann's subsea division.
Some of the ideas in the technology on display have been in the works for many years.
For example, parts of Weatherford's system were recognized with OTC technical awards a few years ago when they were first unveiled by another company, but Weatherford has since acquired that firm and bundled the technology with some other systems it had developed.
Other devices resulted from brainstorming in response to new developments.
"Engineering is a strange profession," said Gary Schaeper, vice president of engineering for T-3. "Some days you come to work and you're just pushing papers around like a clerk, others you're working on an idea that you know is something new. You just can't schedule when you're going to have a breakthrough."
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