Deepwater Horizon: Movie Review (Spoiler alert!)

You might have heard of the new movie in 2016 called “Deepwater Horizon”, starring Mark Wahlberg.  In April 2010, the offshore oil rig for which the film is titled -- “Deepwater Horizon” -- was drilling the “well from hell” for the oil company British Petroleum (BP) in the Macondo Prospect of the Gulf of Mexico. A few minutes before ten o’clock at night on April 20, a series of shortcuts and bad decisions, coupled with poor safety culture, culminated in the worst accident in the history of the U.S. oil industry (worse, even, than Exxon Valdez).

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In the accident, a “blowout” of natural gas ignited a series of explosions, which killed 11 of the 126 crew on board and seriously injured a number of others. The rig became engulfed in flames before sinking to the ocean floor, never to be recovered. Miraculously, all survivors of the initial blast were able to evacuate. Some did via lifeboat, but others, such as Chief Electronics Technician Mike Williams (portrayed by Wahlberg in the movie), jumped ten stories from the rig into water aflame with burning oil.

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In the 87 days that it took to get the well under control, the wellhead released somewhere more than four million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. To put this in perspective, that’s equivalent to roughly one third of total daily U.S. oil imports.

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To date, BP has paid a total of over $60 billion in costs associated with the accident. That’s by far the largest settlement on record. The company also lost over one quarter of its pre-accident $186 billion value, and has never fully recovered.

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I used to work for an oil services company called Schlumberger, which had a crew on board the Deepwater Horizon (as the movie shows, they departed a few hours before the accident). When I saw previews for the film version, I scoffed. I doubted that Hollywood could deliver an accurate portrayal of events – that is, without relishing in unnecessary drama. Plus...Mark Wahlberg? Really?

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Then I was stuck on an airplane and decided to go ahead and watch it. To my surprise, I found this to be an excellent movie that I would highly recommend to anyone (and that’s not just the airplane boredom speaking). The movie is an accurate, respectful, and yet entertaining means for the layman to understand this important event in U.S. oilfield history.

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Whether you choose to see the movie or not (I hope you do), its debut provides me with an opportunity to revisit what exactly took place and what, if anything, has changed in the industry since the event occurred almost seven years ago. I’ll start by explaining some basics of oil drilling and relate it back to the movie, and we’ll go from there.

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The Blame Game: Oil Companies vs. Service Companies

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First, some context. Most people outside the oil industry don’t realize the crucial difference between oil companies and oil service companies. This aspect of how the oil industry works helps to explain how culpability gets dealt out in the event of an accident.

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“Oil companies” are the big companies you’ve heard of – BP, Exxon Mobil, Chevron, and Royal Dutch Shell, to name a few. Their scope of interest is much broader than drilling. Most oil companies also transport and refine oil, and even sell oil products, such as gasoline.

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When it comes to drilling for oil, the oil company makes all the big decisions. They are ultimately responsible for everything that happens on a rig. But when it comes to the specific, technical steps involved in drilling and the everyday decisions that must be made, some of the liability gets shifted.

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The oil company rents the rig, all the equipment, and a crew from a drilling company. The Deepwater Horizon and its crew came from Transocean. Transocean’s Jimmy Harrell (“Mr. Jimmy”), played by Kurt Russel in the movie, was the company’s most senior person on the Deepwater Horizon and effectively the “rig boss”.

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In addition to the rig and its crew, oil companies contract services (like cementing and “wireline”) that are necessary to complete the well. Some examples of service companies include Halliburton, who did the cement job on Deepwater Horizon, and Schlumberger, who was supposed to (but never did, after BP called them off) check the cement job by performing a cement bond log.

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All rigs also employ a “Company Man” (don’t laugh, that’s the industry lingo). This can be a direct oil company employee or a contractor. The Company Man’s chief responsibility is to ensure that the rig crew and the service companies act in the oil company’s interests. On Deepwater Horizon, the two Company Men were Bob Kaluza (day shift) and Don Vidrine (night shift, played by John Malkovich). Both were BP employees.

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Notice the inherent conflict between the Company Man and the contractors on a rig: the contractors want to complete their jobs in a way that is safe and technically sound – however long that happens to take doesn’t make much difference to them. By contrast, the Company Man represents the oil company that is paying (in Deepwater Horizon’s case, over one million dollars per day!) to rent the rig, its crew, and all the other services. He has every incentive to increase the speed of operations and thereby reduce cost.

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Another point worth noting is that apart from the Company Man, oil company representatives are often not physically present at a rig. As was the case with Deepwater Horizon, for most all Gulf operations, the key decision makers are located remotely -- in Houston, Texas. Thus, although Company Man Don Vidrine is portrayed as the movie’s supervillain, in fact, he was acting at least partly on instructions from off-site supervisors and engineers.

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While the movie version appears to stick it all on BP using Don Vidrine as the scapegoat, as always, the truth is more complex. In the massive litigation following the accident, the courts divvied out the blame: 67% went to BP for creating a poor safety culture and taking too many shortcuts; 30% went to Transocean for poor maintenance of critical safety equipment; and 3% went to Halliburton for the botched cement job that was the start of it all.

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Watching the movie will make you angry, and you’ll want to blame someone. But you’ll be making the same mistake as the courts. While both Company Men were charged with 22 counts of manslaughter (two per casualty), neither was found guilty. In fact, apart form a few misdemeanors, no individual was actually convicted of causing the accident or its deaths.

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That’s because in such a complex series of events in which so many people made so many poor decisions, it’s virtually impossible to prove that any individual should shoulder that amount of guilt.

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Don’t believe me? Well, what about the U.S. Interior Department, that pencil-whipped multiple well designs that were clearly unsafe and went against standard industry practice? What about the Halliburton cement engineer that failed to adequately warn BP their cementing plan ran a “severe risk of gas flow”?  What about the rig supervisors who, despite having a combined several hundred years of rig experience, fatally misread a critical safety test? Or twenty-three year old Andrea Fleytas (played by Gina Rodriguez) that panicked when she saw every single emergency rig alarm go off at once and failed to warn to the men on the rig floor that the room was filling with gas, nine minutes before they lost their lives in the explosion?

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The list goes on. There is no excuse for what happened, but no one person on the rig that day expected their decisions to turn out the way they did, or had anything to gain from what did happen. The true source of the problem was bigger than that, and had to do with something less tangible – namely, the safety culture of BP and of the other companies involved.

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Pulling dragons from the ground

(Check out “Roughest Neck Around” by Corb Lund for a half-decent oilfield tune)

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Before I discuss the accident and how this plays out in the movie, I’d like to explain some basics about drilling for oil. On its face, the concept is relatively simple. You drill with a drill bit (a big one) and continuously add long pipes made of steel called “drill pipe” to the end of it as the well gets deeper and deeper.

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In the case of Deepwater Horizon, the rig was in water about one mile deep, and the total depth of the well was about 20,000 feet. In fact, prior to arriving at the Macondo Prospect, Deepwater Horizon had just finished drilling what was at the time the deepest well in history: at 35,055 feet, in a water depth of over three miles.

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Think about it: that’s how high an airplane flies. That explains why the technical complexity involved in offshore drilling is rival only to space exploration.

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Oil, as you may know, is trapped in rocks somewhere beneath the surface of the earth. When it’s that far underground, it’s under an enormous amount of pressure. You can think of drilling an oil well as akin to poking a hole in a highly pressurized sponge containing oil in its pores.

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It turns out that a vast array of technologies go into keeping all that pressure under control. Numerous primary and secondary mechanisms are needed to prevent both a “kick” -- a small release of pressure – or a “blowout”, a full-out loss of pressure control over the well, as occurred on Deepwater Horizon.

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What does that entail? First and foremost, in every oil well, there is a material called “mud”. Mud gets pumped down through the drill pipe and circulated back up outside of it. The mud is thick and viscous, and helps to push back on the pressure of the oil and the underground formation.

 

But mud is far from the only thing used for pressure control.

 

Once the oil well is drilled, steel casing is put in place to stabilize the walls of the oil well. Otherwise, the earthen walls of the deep, deep hole in the ground could collapse.

 

If you can imagine, when you put a straight steel pipe into a rugged hole in the ground, the pipe isn’t going to match up perfectly with the walls of the well. There’s bound to be a bit of space in between. This space is called the “annulus” or the “annular region” of the well.

 

The annulus is an avenue for pressure release, and it needs to be plugged. To prevent oil or gas from flowing through, it is filled with cement. Wet cement is pumped down through the drill pipe all the way to the bottom of the well and then back up through the annular region (When I first learned about this, I found it extremely helpful to watch a video, and I recommend that you do so as well).

 

After the cement is poured, it is allowed to dry. Then, a wireline crew will typically come to the rig with equipment to verify the integrity of the cement barrier throughout the length of the well.

 

When all else fails, there is still one final mechanism that can save the day – a “blowout preventer”.  A blowout preventer is a very strong kind of plug -- in reality, a system of powerful, redundant valves -- that can close over the wellhead if the pressure gets out of control.

 

The blowout preventer on Deepwater Horizon was a sight to behold. It was over five stories tall and weighed 400 tons. It sat clamped around the drill pipe, resting on the sea floor thousands of feet under water. The amount of pressure it would have taken to overcome this beast sends a shiver down my spine.

 

The blowout preventer is capable of reversible decisions, like closing a valve over the well. But it also has powerful “shear rams” that are capable of “cutting the pipe”, which will permanently seal the well. This is a very big decision to make because it forgoes all future possibility of production – in other words, a LOT of money down the drain. For this reason, very few people on a rig have the authority to make that call.

 

From Deepwater Horizon to the “Well from Hell”

 

When the movie opens, the rig is already halfway on its way to disaster. It’s 43 days and $50 million behind target, after a first attempt at drilling caused the well to collapse on itself. Needless to say, tensions are running high.

 

In the second attempt at drilling, to save time and money, BP decided not to use centralizers on the casing while cement was being poured. This caused a piece of casing to become lopsided in the well. Cement was pumped around it. The cement in this region failed to dry properly. When the well was put under pressure, the pipe stood up straight again and left a gap in the annulus, where gas could seep through.

 

Schlumberger’s wireline crew would have caught this with a cement bond log. In the movie, however, as Wahlberg’s character arrives to the rig by helicopter, the Schlumberger crew immediately hops on the same one to get the heck out of there -- before doing their job. We later find out that at the last minute, BP cancelled the service.

 

This happened in real life. When I worked for Schlumberger, I was told that when the Schlumberger crew’s boss back in Larose, Louisiana heard about BP’s decision not to log the well, he told them to get out of their as soon as they could. Doing so may have inadvertently saved their lives.

 

Later that day, in the afternoon, Transocean employees decided to perform a “negative pressure test” to make up for not having a cement bond log. These are the crucial moments that vilify Vidrine in the movie, with his “bladder effect” explanation that convinces everyone that the test is good.

 

It’s unclear from where the movie draws this version of events, as Vidrine himself never testified in court. The others who discussed the test in the driller’s shack that day claim it was Transocean’s toolpusher, Jason Anderson, who came up with the idea. He died in the explosion, so we will never know. Regardless, the point is that a whole group of very experienced people in charge of the rig collectively convinced themselves that they were seeing what they wanted to see.

 

Since the test results were “good”, it was time to prepare the well for production. Deepwater Horizon, an exploratory rig, would leave the Macondo Prospect and travel onwards to the next well. Another rig would take over to produce the oil. BP ordered the rig crew to begin to pump mud out of the top of the well and replace it with much lighter seawater.

 

Then the blowout began to unfold.

 

Initially, apart from those on the rig floor getting showered with mud and oil, very few people on the rig knew that a blowout was occurring. The rig floor tried to communicate to the driller’s shack, but as the movie shows, the rig was “broken” -- many communications systems were down, and failed to perform when needed most. Walhberg’s character Mike Williams had complained of this to Transocean and BP in the days leading up to the accident.

 

Andrew Fleytas, who was in a boat off on the side of the rig called the “Bankston”, was responsible for controlling the rig’s position. She saw the numerous alarms going off on her computer screen, including those for high levels of gas. She became paralyzed, unsure of which alarm to respond to first.

 

The rig crew, meanwhile, acted quickly to deploy the blowout preventer, which had several methods to take control of the well. They tried at least two of these methods, both of which failed. No one knows exactly why. Mike Williams claimed in his interview with 60 Minutes that the blowout preventer was damaged during the first failed attempt the drill the well. In the litigation that followed, it was also discovered that the device had been poorly maintained by Transocean.

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Those in the engine control room could have simply shut off the rig’s engines; they knew something was wrong – they could see mud spewing out of the well. But they did not have any concept of the severity. As they failed to act, within minutes, gas poured into the engine rooms.

 

Then came the explosions.

 

The eleven dead were all near the rig floor and are believed to have perished instantly. Their bodies were never recovered. Nine of them were part of Transocean’s rig crew and the other two were from M-I SWACO, the mud contractor.

 

An Opportunity to Reflect

 

Apart from a few simplifications by necessity (and images of the sea floor boiling – that doesn’t happen in real life), the movie’s portrayal of this confusing and extraordinarily complex sequence of events is technically sound. After watching, it’s worth doing a side-by-side comparison of the famous New York times article published shortly after the accident.

 

Most importantly, from what I’ve read, the survivors of the accident are pleased with director Peter Berg’s handiwork (except for BP, that is). Mike Williams  – whose testimony was crucial during the litigation and for recreating the events in the film – said that while it was difficult to capture everything in two hours, “what is portrayed in the film is all accurate” and “it’s an important tribute to my 11 brothers”.

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Upon reflection, I think this comes as an important and timely reminder. We are just at the point where this event has begun to fade from public memory. We don’t want to become complacent enough to let something like this happen again.

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But that brings us to one inevitable question: what, if anything, has changed?

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Hmm. Well, offshore drilling is still alive and well. There are more rigs than ever drilling in the Gulf of Mexico and Deepwater Horizon’s depth record has since been surpassed.

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I don’t want to give the impression that we are necessarily more at risk today than we were before – although some would disagree. Offshore drilling is inherently complicated and risky, to be sure. But BP’s practice went against industry standards and should not be considered the norm.

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Moreover, severe accidents can change corporate culture – Exxon Mobil, for instance, refocused its mission on oilfield safety after the Exxon Valdez accident occurred in 1989. Over the past ten years, they have had hundreds fewer Occupation Safety and Health Administration (OSHA)-reportable incidents than their competitor, BP.

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Which brings me to this point: the problem lay in BP’s (and others’) corporate safety culture. It might work well for Whole Foods, but in the oil industry, it’s wishful thinking to expect every company to always prioritize safety and the environment over profitability out of the goodness of their hearts. Corporations don’t have hearts.

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That’s why we need laws and effective law enforcement. Maintaining safe and environmentally responsible industry falls most heavily on the regulator.

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In fact, one of the key issues that emerged from this accident is that the regulator was both under-resourced and technically unfit to regulate offshore drilling in the Gulf. The problem, one could say, is that the oil industry is too innovative. Regulators have difficulty keeping up with oilfield technologies, and the engineers who have the necessary technical expertise would choose lucrative industry work over federal employment any day.

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Ironically, the Deepwater Horizon events also showed that even when an accident does occur, the only people who have the expertise to deal with it are the oil companies themselves.

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Then there’s the added complication that with so much money on the line, oil companies have serious propriety reasons to keep their well designs a secret.

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Despite all of this, there has been some progress in reaction to the accident. BP, as I mentioned, was dealt the largest fine in history and had no easy task in rebuilding its corporate image.

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As for the regulator, the Minerals Management Service, a bureau within the U.S. Department of the Interior – they reviewed BP’s well design – well, that’s now defunct. The Obama administration split it into three more focused entities.

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What else? The number of offshore inspectors has doubled, and there are many new mandatory inspections and audits of critical safety equipment, such as blowout preventers. A bipartisan entity was established, the “National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling”, which made a series of recommendations on how to improve offshore drilling safety and mitigate the environmental impacts of future oil spills.

 

Oil companies also set up the Marine Well Containment Co. And Helix Well Containment Group to improve their technology to cope with larger volumes of leaked oil. And so forth.

 

After watching the movie, I’m not sure if all of this will be enough to make you feel satisfied. But offshore drilling is a major part of the U.S. oil industry and will continue for the foreseeable future, whether you like it or not.

 

So, what can you do?

 

Watch the movie, read the articles, and watch videos about how oil drilling works. Oil is important enough for everyone to know about it. Become informed enough to make your own judgement.