The Deepwater Horizon Disaster [electronic resource] : What Happened and Why.
The Deepwater Horizon disaster was the largest oil spill in US history, and the second largest spill in the world. 11 men lost their lives in the explosion and fire. Although the impacts of the spill were evident to large numbers of people, its causes were harder to see. This lecture will focus on t...
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Online Access |
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| Format: | Government Document Electronic eBook |
| Language: | English |
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Washington, D.C. : Oak Ridge, Tenn. :
United States. Department of Energy. Office of Science ; distributed by the Office of Scientific and Technical Information, U.S. Department of Energy,
2011.
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| Summary: | The Deepwater Horizon disaster was the largest oil spill in US history, and the second largest spill in the world. 11 men lost their lives in the explosion and fire. Although the impacts of the spill were evident to large numbers of people, its causes were harder to see. This lecture will focus on the technical aspects of the events that led to the spill itself: what happened on the rig before, during and after the event, up to the time the rig sank. As with many engineering disasters, the accident was due to a sequence of failures, including both technical systems and procedural issues. Although the causes were complex and interacting, the lecture will focus on four main problems: (1) the failure of the cement and casing seal, (2) the failure to recognize and respond to hydrocarbon flow into the riser, (3) the ignition of hydrocarbons on the rig, and (4) the failure of the blow-out preventer (BOP) to seal the well. The lecture will conclude with some suggestions as to how events such as the Deepwater Horizon disaster can be avoided in the future. (Roland N. Horne is the Thomas Davies Barrow Professor of Earth Sciences at Stanford University, and was the Chairman of Petroleum Engineering from 1995 to 2006. He holds BE, PhD and DSc degrees from the University of Auckland, New Zealand, all in Engineering Science. Horne is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering and is also an Honorary Member of the Society of Petroleum Engineers.) |
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| Item Description: | Published through SciTech Connect. 01/05/2011. Fermilab Colloquia, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (FNAL), Batvia, Illinois (United States), presented on January 05, 2011. Horne, Roland N. |
| Physical Description: | 1:16:11 : digital, PDF file. |