Extensive corrosion threatens BP pipelines in Alaska, risking explosions, spills

The extensive pipeline system that moves oil, gas and waste throughout BP's operations in Alaska is plagued by severe corrosion, according to an internal maintenance report generated four weeks ago.

The document, obtained by the journalism group ProPublica, shows that as of Oct. 1, at least 148 BP pipelines on Alaska's North Slope received an "F-rank'' from the company. According to BP oil workers, that means inspections have determined that more than 80 percent of the pipe wall is corroded and could rupture. Most of those lines carry toxic or flammable substances. Many of the metal walls of the F-ranked pipes are worn to within a few thousandths of an inch of bursting, according to the document, risking an explosion or spills.

BP oil workers also say that the company's fire and gas warning systems are unreliable, that the giant turbines that pump oil and gas through the system are aging and that some oil and waste holding tanks are verging on collapse.

In an e-mail, BP Alaska spokesman Steve Rinehart said the company has "an aggressive and comprehensive pipeline inspection and maintenance program," which includes pouring millions of dollars into the system and regularly testing for safety, reliability and corrosion. He said that although an F-rank is serious, it does not necessarily mean there is a current safety risk.

Rinehart added that the company will immediately reduce the operating pressure in worrisome lines until it completes repairs. "We will not operate equipment or facilities that we believe are unsafe," he said.

Rinehart did not respond to questions about what portion of its extensive pipeline system was affected or whether 148 F-ranks were more or less than normal, except to say that the company has more than 1,600 miles of pipelines and does more than 100,000 inspections a year.

In 2006, two spills from corroded pipes in Alaska placed the company's maintenance problems in the national spotlight. At the time, BP temporarily shut down all transmission of oil from the North Slope to the continental United States, cutting off about 8 percent of the nation's oil supply, while it examined its pipeline system.

Photos taken by employees in the Prudhoe Bay drilling field this summer, and viewed by ProPublica, show sagging and rusted pipelines, some dipping in gentle U-shapes into pools of water and others sinking deeply into thawing permafrost. Marc Kovac, a BP mechanic and welder, said that some of the pipes have hundreds of patches on them and that BP's efforts to rehabilitate the lines were not funded well enough to keep up with their rate of decline.

"They're going to run this out as far as they can without leaving one dollar on the table when they leave," Kovac said.

BP Alaska's operating budget is private, so the picture of its maintenance program is incomplete. But documents obtained by ProPublica show that BP has pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into maintenance and equipment upgrades on the North Slope since the 2006 spills. In 2007, BP's maintenance budget in Alaska was nearly $195 million, four times what it was in 2004, according to a company presentation. In 2009, $49 million was budgeted to replace and upgrade systems that detect fires and gas leaks alone.

Despite the investment, workers say that the capabilities of equipment of all types continue to be stretched and that maintenance plans set years ago remain incomplete.

BP employees told ProPublica that several of the 120 turbines used to compress gas and push it through the pipelines have been modified to run at higher stress levels and higher temperatures than they were originally designed to handle. They also said giant tanks that hold hundreds of thousands of gallons of toxic fluids and waste are sagging under the load of corrosive sediment and could collapse.

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Oil spill commission questions BP's response plan

The two chairmen of the president's Oil Spill Commission, which is conducting an inquiry into the April 20 Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, expressed skepticism Monday about claims from BP and government officials that initial underestimation of the flow rate of the Macondo well had no impact on the response to the spill.

"It's a little bit like Custer. He underestimated the number of Indians that were on the other side of the hill and he paid the ultimate price for that," said former senator Bob Graham, speaking at a news conference with his co-chairman, William Reilly.

The flow rate of the blown-out well sparked great controversy at the height of the crisis. The Coast Guard initially pegged the leak at 1,000 barrels a day, then upped that to 5,000 barrels, using both government and BP estimates. But the actual rate initially was 62,000 barrels a day, according to scientists in the government-backed Flow Rate Technical Group.

A persistent question is whether BP and the Coast Guard calibrated their initial response plans, at the surface and at the sea floor, to handle the smaller amount of gushing oil. Representatives of both, appearing Monday at a commission hearing at the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel, denied that they made such a mistake, saying they went all-out with every available resource.

"We literally threw everything at it," said Doug Suttles, BP chief operating officer for exploration and production. Coast Guard Capt. Edwin Stanton echoed those remarks.

But Graham said at the news conference that the commission has information suggesting that some of the deep-sea technology used to fight the leak, such as the "top hat" containment cap, was premised on a smaller flow.

There was also new information on how the erroneous flow estimate came to be early in the crisis. Ian MacDonald, a Florida State University physical oceanographer, testified Monday that BP's Regional Oil Spill Response Plan, a 567-page document dated 2008 that covers the Gulf of Mexico and is famous for its provision for saving walruses that do not live in the gulf, contains an incorrect statistical formula for estimating the size of a spill.

The formula in the BP plan underestimates the thickness of black oil on the surface of the sea by a hundredfold, MacDonald said. As a result, BP's "best guess" for the leak as of April 27 was 5,768 barrels, close to the 5,000-barrel estimate initially produced by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

MacDonald made headlines early in the crisis when he said that his own scrutiny of satellite images of the slick produced a leak estimate of 26,000 barrels a day minimum. He told reporters Monday that he did not take evaporation into account, and thus the real flow had to be higher yet.

MacDonald said that most of the oil remains in the gulf. This oil "is a highly durable material that resists further dissipation," MacDonald concluded. Referring to the spill as a kind of uncontrolled experiment, he wrote in his prepared testimony that there could be long-term damage to productivity and biodiversity in the gulf: "[W]e must remember that this experiment was performed on an ecosystem that was already badly damaged" by overfishing, coastal runoff and low oxygen levels.

Doug Inkley, senior scientist with the National Wildlife Federation, said in a written statement citing MacDonald's findings, "From Day One, BP and the government have lowballed the volume of the oil in the water and minimized the current and future impacts of this disaster."

Earlier, Graham pressed Suttles about why the company overestimated its ability to handle a massive spill when it applied for a permit in 2009 to drill the ill-fated Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico. Suttles said he was not involved in the creation of the company's Oil Spill Response Plan.

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Oil spill dumped 4.9 million barrels into Gulf of Mexico, latest measure shows

The blown-out well in the Gulf of Mexico gushed 12 times faster than the government and BP estimated in the early weeks of the crisis and has spilled a whopping 4.9 million barrels, or 205.8 million gallons, according to a more detailed analysis announced late Monday.

BP's Macondo well spewed 62,000 barrels of oil a day initially, and as the reservoir gradually depleted itself, the flow eased to 53,000 barrels a day until the well was finally capped and sealed July 15, according to scientists in the Flow Rate Technical Group, supervised by the U.S. Geological Survey and the U.S. Department of Energy.

The new numbers once again have nudged upward the statistical scale of the disaster. If correct -- the government allows for a margin of error of 10 percent -- the flow rate would make this spill significantly larger than the Ixtoc I blowout of 1979, which polluted the southern Gulf of Mexico with 138 million gallons over the course of 10 months. That had been the largest unintentional oil spill in history, surpassed only by the intentional spills in 1991 during the Persian Gulf War.

The new flow rate figures came as engineers made final preparations for a "static kill" operation that might plug the well permanently even before a relief well intercepts Macondo at its base. BP announced late Monday that the procedure would be delayed, probably until Tuesday, because of a leak in the hydraulic control system on the well's new cap.

(Photos: Oil spills through history)

Macondo's flow rate has been a major source of controversy since the April 20 explosion on the Deepwater Horizon. Early in the crisis, the Coast Guard and BP pegged the flow at 5,000 barrels a day, sticking with that figure even as outside scientists declared that it low-balled the actual rate. The flow rate team, assembled in May, tried to come up with a more solid figure. Scientists examining the surface slick as well as video taken by submersibles soon upped the estimate; by early June, the government declared the flow to be 35,000 to 60,000 barrels a day.

Even the high end of that estimate did not quite do justice to Macondo when it was at full throttle in the early weeks of the crisis. The new figures reflect more data, including high-definition video, sonar measurements of the oil-gas ratio, and pressure readings in the new capping stack before, and then after, the sealing of the well July 15.

"We may never know the exact answer. But as we get more data, you're able to shrink the uncertainty," said Bill Lehr, senior scientist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and a leader of one of the teams.

The new figures indicate that the roughly 800,000 barrels of oil that BP managed to capture with its various containment strategies -- a riser insertion tool, a "top hat," and flaring from a surface rig -- represented only about one-sixth of the crude that surged into the gulf over the course of nearly three months. In all, about 1.2 million barrels of oil have been accounted for, either burned, captured or skimmed off the ocean's surface. That's about a quarter of the new estimate for the total spill.

Where the other three-quarters has gone is unclear. Some has evaporated; some has been consumed by microbes; but scientists remain troubled by the possibility that large amounts of oil remain underwater in cloudlike plumes.

"This further confirms that a lot of the oil is still at sea. And we just don't know the implications of it," said Ron Kendall, director of the Institute of Environmental and Human Health at Texas Tech University. Kendall will testify before Congress on Wednesday about his fears that dispersant chemicals have helped much of this oil sink into deep-sea habitats.

For government lawyers preparing a case against BP, this number could help calculate the maximum civil penalty BP might face for the spill. If BP is not found to have acted with negligence, the penalty would be $1,100 per barrel. About 4.1 million barrels escaped into the gulf, according to the new estimate, so that fine would come to $4.5 billion. If BP is found to have acted with "gross negligence" in the lead-up to the spill, the maximum penalty would be $4,300 a barrel, which would work out to $17.6 billion.

"You've got to go in with a number," said David Uhlmann, a law professor at the University of Michigan and the former chief of the Justic Department's Environmental Crimes Section. "And I think these numbers strengthen the government's hand," compared with previous estimates that produced only a range.

In all, the 4.1 million barrels estimated to have polluted the gulf would be enough to fill the Pentagon to a depth of 18 feet or to fill 260 Olympic swimming pools. The entire Gulf of Mexico, by comparison, would fill 880 million Pentagons, or 973 billion Olympic pools.

John Amos at SkyTruth, an organization that uses satellite imagery to study environmental problems, said that this new figure showed how far off BP and the Coast Guard were in the crucial days at the beginning of the spill.

"When the next spill happens, being in the right order of magnitude with the spill estimate is going to be important," he said.

The well remains pressurized and dangerous, but BP and government officials hope that will change with the static kill attempt. The goal is to inject mud into the well and drive the oil back to the source rock.

First comes what BP calls an injectivity test. Mud will be pumped into the well from a surface ship at a gentle rate of one barrel a minute, then two barrels a minute, then three, as engineers monitor pressures and look for signs that the rogue oil is being forced back into the source rock 2 1/2 miles below the seafloor.

"We want to confirm that we can inject the oil that's in the well bore back into the reservoir," BP Senior Vice President Kent Wells told reporters Monday.

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With BP's know-how and U.S. authority, the Macondo well was plugged

It was awkward from the start, this marriage of necessity between BP and the federal government. The government had ultimate authority; BP had the technology to plug the Macondo well. Something known as the National Contingency Plan called for a "unified command" in which government officials would issue orders and make pronouncements but BP would do the most crucial work and be the "responsible party."

People got confused. Who was in charge, really? The well kept gushing; everyone looked bad. Reporters asked top officials why the government didn't simply take over. But we're in charge already, the officials said.

The fact is, the two sides formed a team, weird as that might be at times. That is true today, still, with the Macondo well looking rather dead -- choked by a mile of cement -- but not yet terminated to everyone's satisfaction.

Government scientists and BP engineers have been devising a complex endgame. Before Macondo receives a conclusive dose of mud and cement at its base via a relief well, engineers want to take the old, damaged blowout preventer off the wellhead and replace it with a new blowout preventer. That will delay the "bottom kill" until after Labor Day, according to retired Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, the national incident commander.

BP engineers and the government scientists come from different cultures. In general, the engineers want to plunge ahead, and the scientists want to go slower.

"We helped them see that there are dangers lurking here, and there and everywhere," Energy Secretary Steven Chu told The Washington Post. "The Department of Energy is in charge of the nuclear arsenal. . . . This is no messing around. In our culture, you want to make sure that nothing can go wrong."

The Obama administration has claimed credit for turning an uncontrolled calamity into something managed and mastered. The response to the disaster would have been different, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said after the well had been plugged with cement, had the administration not "pushed at every step of the way" for BP to "do things more comprehensively and faster."

BP has stayed clear of that debate.

"I've got a philosophy that when you're in the middle of the response, you stay focused on the response. When the response is over, that's a good time to analyze how the response went and decide what could have been done better," Kent Wells, BP senior vice president, said recently.

But the broader truth seems to be that BP and the government have overcome their natural antagonism to create a functioning partnership. The two sides had testy moments, but again and again they found a path to agreement. When Allen was asked whether a recent pressure test was conceived by the government scientists or the BP engineers, he replied: "It's hard to say anymore, we've been together so long. Some of these conversations start around the coffeepot."

The government needed BP because the company had the tools to plug the hole. BP benefited from the outsider perspective of government scientists and needed officials of the Environmental Protection Agency to run interference on such contentious issues as the use of chemical dispersants, a subject on which BP was viewed as having zero credibility.

Keeping everyone moving in the same direction has been Allen, perhaps the least-excitable person in American public life. Allen said in a recent interview that his goal was to "produce unity of effort" and added, "You can't do that by polarizing, or creating conflict, or getting caught up in a personal agenda or getting too excited about things."

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