Shell oil was explaining the things it would do to make drilling in the Arctic safer. There were some surprising omissions, in view of the BP gulf disaster. It is generally acknowledged that BP's blow out preventer failed to shut off the flow of oil up the drill pipe. The blowout preventer is a giant valve installed on the sea floor to shut off oil flow in an emergency. BP's blowout preventer didn't work when activated. Reports have been circulating for some years that standard blowout preventers are not strong enough to shut off the thicker tougher pipe used in off shore work.
First thing Shell ought to propose is to test each blowout preventer on the pipe they will be using to insure that it will squeeze shut or shear off the pipe. This test ought to be down above water, before the blowout preventer is sunk to the bottom of the sea.
Second thing is to insure the blowout preventers have redundancy so that a single failure won't mean catastrophe. The blowout preventer should be required to successfully shut off a real pipe after sustaining damage. For instance, the preventer should work properly with a single hydraulic line or wire bundle cut, a single battery, or single air tank, or single hydraulic accumulator discharged, or run down. In short the preventer ought to have a dual everything, so that it works if any single item fails.
Third thing is to beef up the fire fighting capabilities of the drilling platforms. Out at sea they have plenty of water to spray on a fire. With enough pumps, water piping, sprinkler heads and fire hoses, they ought to be able to put out the worst fire. BP's platform should have been able to put its fire out. Clearly more fire fighting capacity is required.
I'm surprised that Shell mentioned none of these things.
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