Australian Oil Well Blowout Foreshadowed Gulf Disaster - NOLA.com

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Australian oil well blowout foreshadowed Gulf disaster
Rebecca Mowbray, The Times-Picayune
Sunday, June 13, 2010, 10:24 AM Updated: Friday, June 11, 2010, 7:14 PM

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Ever since the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded and sank, resulting in the massive oil spill in the Gulf, many have said that it was an unforeseeable event, the result of a complex chain of equipment failures and human errors that could not be anticipated.

Yet last August, an oil well blew out off the coast of Australia, dumping oil into the Timor Sea for 10 weeks and becoming Australia's largest oil spill.

The blowout of Australia's Montara well just eight months before BP's Macondo well began spewing oil into the Gulf of Mexico would seem to suggest that a catastrophic rig failure and oil gusher are not nearly so implausible.

John Amos, president of SkyTruth, a nonprofit group that uses remote sensing and digital tracking to follow oil spills around the globe, said that Montara and Macondo confirm the worst fears of those who have been concerned about offshore drilling, but the back-to-back nature of the events meant that there wasn't time for any lessons of Montara to have headed off disaster at Macondo.

"There just wasn't enough time between investigating those lessons there, and applying those lessons here, to prevent something from happening," said Amos, who testified before Congress in November about Montara alongside a BP official in charge of exploration in the Gulf of Mexico, who said that offshore drilling is safe.

Indeed, hearings by the Australian government's Montara Commission of Inquiry wrapped up just days before the Deepwater Horizon explosion. The commission's final report is scheduled to be released by Friday.

Efforts to digest the two events are just now ramping up. In October, oil regulators from around the world will gather in Vancouver for their triennial meeting at the International Regulators Offshore Safety Conference for three days of sessions exclusively on the theme of Montara and Macondo.

The official efforts to understand what happened are a welcome sign, said Elmer "Bud" Danenberger, retired chief enforcement officer from the Minerals Management Service, who has a blog chronicling both events. After Montara, Danenberger said, the emphasis was on explaining why a repeat was implausible rather than examining what happened and what lessons should be learned.

"People were forced into explaining why it couldn't happen here rather than understanding what did happen," Danenberger said of Montara. "If you understood what did happen with that well integrity there, it could happen and it did."

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More: http://www.nola.com/news/gulf-oil-spill/index.ssf/2010/06/australian_oil_well_blowout_fo.html

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