PLEASE WRITE A 400 OR MORE WORDS ESSAY ON THE FOLLOWING LESSON: Lesson 8 Deepwat

Question

PLEASE WRITE A 400 OR MORE WORDS ESSAY ON THE FOLLOWING LESSON:

Lesson 8

Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill

This lesson we’re looking at a new case study, the 2010 Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill, considered one of the largest environmental disasters in history. Lecture this week is deliberately short. I want you to spend time researching the case and its details, and there is a lot of material to cover. The resources below should help you get started.

Your assignment this week is open-ended: in a normal length post, you are free to scrutinize and discuss any aspect of the case, including the technical, legal, environmental, or ethical details. However, I would like you to include some explicit discussion of the decision of the engineers overseeing operations on the Deepwater Horizon, especially those identified in the MIT Sloan article below. . To what extent is this an engineering failure? What aspects of the engineer’s code of ethics did they violate? What might they have done different to prevent such a disaster?

Consider the following sources:

BBC Horizons (video, 1 hr): BP Oil Spill: The Untold Story

BBC interviews key engineers, BP executives, and government officials on the disaster and its immediate aftermath. Notice that there is not much discussion of the circumstances that lead to the disaster, and focuses almost entirely on the corporate response. This is a corporate-friendly, completely uncritical report on the disaster-- giving it access to high ranking officials on the issue.

BBC In Focus (video, 1hr): Profit Pollution and Deception: BP and the Oil Spill

BBC interviews key engineers, scientists, political theorists, activists, and community members affected by the oil spill. This source is far more critical of BP and the government response, and details the extent of media control and cover-up engineered to minimize the damage to BP's financial interest, especially the controversial use of the dispersant Corexit. How do the differences between these two documentaries reflect our political and media environment today?

Ingersol et al: BP and the Deepwater Horizon Disaster of 2010

Includes technical details about the drilling operation, for instance that Deepwater Horizon was not up to spec and years behind on maintenance requests. Also names key BP engineers responsible for critical decisions leading to the disaster, including transcripts of emails where critical engineering decisions were made.

Klein: A hole in the world

Klein reports on how the spill reflects the larger political climate in America. Includes this zinger: "They say that Americans learn where foreign countries are by bombing them. Now it seems we are all learning about nature's circulatory systems by poisoning them."

Houke: Worst Case and the Deepwater Horizon Blowout: There Ought to Be a Law

Houke describes the legal and regulatory environment surrounding the disaster. Houke is also interviewed in the In Focus documentary above.

Smith et al: Analysis of Environmental and Economic Damages from British Petroleum's Deepwater Horizon Oil

Smith et al. document the extent of the damages in quantitative and economic terms.

Additional sources:

Wikipedia: Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill

Image: 6 steps that doomed the rig

Image: What happened on the Deepwater Horizon

Image: xkcd: Lakes and Oceans (warning: large!)

Konopka “Public, Ecological, and Normative Goods: The Case of Deepwater Horizon”

Konopka considers the ecological value of integrity, and the ways in which ecological integrity was compromised by the BP oil spill. Broader discussion of the ethical implications of the spill here.

You are encouraged to do your own research into the case, and report back your findings!

Explanation / Answer

DEEPWATER HORIZON OIL SPILL OF 2010:

Also called Gulf of mexico oil spill of 2010 or BP oil spill. The incident happened on 20 April, 2010 in the Mississippi canyon block 252 of the gulf of mexico in the United States. During then the deepwater horizon rig was drilling a well at depth approximately 18,000 feet into the crust of the earth, which released natural gas and traveled all the way to rigs platform where it ignited and blasted through concrete core and killed 11 men, injured 17 people. This particular oil spill is the largest marine oil spill in the history of the petroleum industry and estimates mention that about 205 million gallons of oil was leaked into the gulf of mexico and the impact was so extreme that after the explosion oil flowed out for almost 3 months.

The other major reason to blame gulf of mexico spill is the loss of control over the pressure of the fluid in the well. The BLOWOUT PREVENTER is a device which should automatically work and seal the well in such events like this but unfortunately in the gulf of mexico spill even blowout preventer failed to engage. The leak began on 20 April 2010 and it is cover capped on 15 July and later after months on 19 September 2010 it was permanently closed.

In my opinion deep water horizon oil spill blast could have been easily avoided if the cement-concrete mixture work is properly inspected and the blowout preventer negative pressure test must have been conducted before the incident. Safety engineers failed completely in training about safety measures. All these are very minor aspects which senior engineers can easily supervise and avoid because we cannot underestimate any risk. With technology developed over the years we hope that incidents like this would never happen again.

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