Nowadays, the idea that offshore drilling is safe seems ridiculous. The Gulf spill nowhere compares to drilling disasters that have occurred before including one off the coast of Santa Barbara, Calif. In 1969 that discarded three million gallons into coastal waters and led to the present moratorium. The Deepwater Horizon calamity is a standard low probability, high impact event. It is the kind that has been seen more and more recently (Mcquaid, 2010).
The consequences of this spill are only beginning to be seen, as the exact causes of the initial explosion on the drilling platform and the malfunction of a blowout preventer to deploy on the sea floor probably won't be ascertained for many weeks or months to come. But the summary of many serious universal problems have already emerged, indicating just how misleading the idea of risk-free drilling really was, while uncovering some potential areas for reform. These mistakes include weak government oversight of the compound technical challenge of drilling deep wells many miles under the ocean surface and BP's collapse to evaluate or even consider any worst-case scenarios (Mcquaid, 2010).
A blowout on an oil rig happens when some mixture of pressurized natural gas, oil, mud, and water gets away from a well, shoots up the drill pipe to the exterior, expands and catches on fire. Wells are outfitted with structures called blowout preventers that sit on the wellhead and are theoretically supposed to shut off that flow and tamp the well. Deepwater Horizon's blowout preventer failed to work as it should have. Two switches, one that was manual and one that was an automatic backup, both failed to initiate it. When such disastrous mechanical failures occur, they're almost always figured out that there were flaws in the broader system. This could include the personnel on the platform, the corporate hierarchies they work for, or the government administrations that oversee what they do (Mcquaid, 2010).
There appears to be a problem with fragmentation of responsibility. Although Deepwater Horizon was BP's operation, BP rented the platform from Transocean, and Halliburton was doing the deepwater work when the blowout happened. Each of these companies had fundamentally different goals. BP wanted access to the hydrocarbon resources that feed their refinery and distribution network. Halliburton provided oil field services. Transocean drove drill rig. Each had different operating processes and different objectives. The more intense problem seems to be the failure of the companies to put the risks in view. BP and other companies tend to gauge safety and environmental conformity on a day-to-day, checklist basis. This is almost done to the position of basing executive bonuses on those metrics. But even if worker accident rates fall to zero, that may reveal nothing about the risk of a major disaster (Mcquaid, 2010).
Oil giant BP has held responsible porous cement, failed safety valves and a string of poor decisions by workers for the explosion of the Macondo well. Transocean has criticized the report, calling it an attempt to hide the real cause of the explosion. The company, which owns the oil rig, has blamed the disaster on what it portrays as BP's seriously flawed well design. In both its design and structure, BP made a series of cost-saving decisions that amplified the risk and in some cases severely compromised the quality (BP: 'Sequence of failures' caused Gulf oil spill, 2010).
These things lead to some fundamental problems that need to be looked at in response to the Gulf oil spill. The company needs to re-evaluate their policies in regards to cost saving decisions in order to ensure that these types of decisions are not jeopardizing overall safety. They also need to look at what outside resources that they are using and have a plan in place to make sure that all outside companies being utilized are the best that there is. The qualities of these outside products are, in the end, vital to the safety of their overall projects. The last thing that BP needs to change is that they need to have a better disaster plan in place to deal with things like that if they should ever happen again. It did not seem that when this happened that they had much of a plan on what they should be doing and when.
The organizational development intervention that BP should use to implement the changes that they need to is that of Technostructural Interventions. Technostructural interventions center on improving the organizational success and human development by focusing on technology and structure. These interventions are entrenched in the fields of engineering, sociology, and psychology, combined with socio-technical systems and job investigation and design. These kinds of interventions rely on a shortage based approach. The goal is to find problems to solve. Technostructural advances focus on improving an organization's technology like task methods and job design along with structure like division of labor and hierarchy. Technostructural interventions include: organizational structure, organization systems, business process redesign, space and physical settings, socio-technical systems, change management, job design / enrichment, competency-based management, knowledge management and organizational learning (Organizational development (OD) interventions: Managing systematic...
United Kingdom and Chinese newspaper coverage of BP Oil spill British Petroleum came under severe criticism from around the world when in April 2010 the company lost control of marine drilling operations and caused a major oil spill in Gulf of Mexico. The disaster claimed 11 lives and injured many others. Apart from human loss, the oil spill also resulted in massive loss of precious oil as 205.8 million gallons of
Evidence of this can be seen with the company being slow to provide information, on the total amounts of oil that are leaking into the ocean and the various restrictions that they have placed on media coverage. (Lack of Transparency Afflicts Oil Spill Response 2010) This problematic, because when there are restrictions and the company is slow to release information, it appears as if they have something to hide.
Regulating Oil and Gas Drilling and Transport The American economy runs on energy produced from oil, coal, natural gas, hydroelectric power, nuclear power and renewable sources like solar and wind energies. In fact according to a report in the Congressional Research Service, oil provides the United States with 40% of its total energy needs. It is used in myriad ways, providing "…fuel for the transportation, industrial, and residential sectors" (Ramseur, 2012).
Crisis and Disaster The running of any Government, Community, Society or even an Organization for that matter is, no doubt, a very complicated matter. The main reason for this complication is the many arrays of problems and situations that can arise and each one of them demands special attention to cater to. This makes the smooth running of any setup, then, a big challenge for the concerned authorities. However, this
So far, this is not the case, and oil companies only pay royalties on production. This is another area under scrutiny in the MMS scandal. There are reports, dating back to 2008, that the royalty offices of the MMS, located in Denver, routinely accepted oil company numbers on the amount of oil they produced, rather than independently auditing the numbers. No one knows how much lost revenue to the
"But we did kill a lot of resources," said Beck. That having been said, Beck does believe that some habitat losses -- and some that occurred prior to the oil spill -- can be "re-engineered" if the marshes receive the attention they deserve to receive. Meanwhile, the assertion that the oil has dissipated and there is "very little" oil that is recoverable goes against the tone of a story in
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