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Chevron Got North Sea Contract Despite IT Safety Crashes
DMandPenfold writes "The UK government gave Chevron the go-ahead in September to drill in the North Sea off the coast of Scotland, in spite of the US oil giant's admission that its contractor's spill prediction software constantly crashed and was not a reliable predictor of how far oil could travel if an accident took place. The news comes in a week that US investigations into BP's disastrous Deepwater Horizon oil spill hit the buffers, after an IT contractor firm refused to hand over access to its software."
Oil and government... do mix.
Oil deposits in the North sea have been propping up the British economy for decades now. While the UK is facing a big deficit, and getting stung by other economies in the Eurozone looking wobbly, they'd probably overlook a few things to get their hands on the money. -So much for a 'greener' coalition!
What price safety? Obviously only a few billion.
It's pretty clear that any obstacle to oil drilling anywhere just means it costs more money. The bribes paid to officials to allow it are small compared to the $BILLIONS it costs to do the rest, and of course much smaller than the many $BILLIONS the well produces.
Even when the damage done by the drilling can't be repaired with money. And even when the money spent on getting the drilling done is not spent on the people (or other living things) damaged by it.
I am sick of waiting for the goddamn oil to run out. We should use what's left to produce decentralized, renewable energy systems. Otherwise the 21st Century is going to be as mercenary and dreadfully wasteful as the 20th, but much faster, less opposable by mere humans, and so much, much worse.
--
make install -not war
People have been drilling in deep water in the North Sea for decades, with admittedly a couple of nasty accidents, but so far things have gone pretty well. And do you know what? No-one had oil spill prediction software when they started. They relied on the skill and experience of the people operating the rigs.
Bear in mind that this is the UK, where we have far, far tighter safety regulations than the US for the oil industry. We know what we're doing. Oil companies in the US clearly don't, or don't care to do it properly.
Is that like weather prediction software?
For in politics, as in religion, it is equally absurd to aim at making proselytes by fire and sword. - Publius
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piper_Alpha
"An explosion and resulting fire destroyed it on July 6, 1988, killing 167 men, with only 59 survivors. The death toll includes two crewmen of a rescue vessel. Total insured loss was about £1.7 billion (US$ 3.4 billion). At the time of the disaster the platform accounted for approximately ten percent of North Sea oil and gas production, and was the worst offshore oil disaster in terms of lives lost and industry impact."
"People were still getting off the platform several hours after the initial fires and explosions. The main problem was that most of the personnel who had the authority to order evacuation had been killed when the first explosion destroyed the control room. This was a consequence of the platform design, including the absence of blast walls. Another contributing factor was that the nearby connected platforms Tartan and Claymore continued to pump gas and oil to Piper Alpha until its pipeline ruptured in the heat in the second explosion. Their operations crews did not believe they had authority to shut off production, even though they could see that Piper Alpha was burning."
Why is Snark Required?
It might help if Chevron hired people with bonafide computer science backgrounds, instead of "management information science" backgrounds, whatever the hell that means. All I know is they would be fucking clueless when it came to a large project that didn't involve Windows and databases. I mean, 2 years of the 4 years in a B.S. goes to G.E., another year goes to management classes, and maybe a year to stuff computer related. And I mean computer "related", not computer science.
And to top it off, they aren't looking for the student who took hard classes (like C++) and got a B. They want the guy who got the A, even though he only took Introduction to the Internet for his elective.
I mean, really? Gee Wiz.
Shit is blowing up and burning around you...and you do nothing because you don't believe you have the authority to do anything (at least, anything significant)?
One hell of a corporate indoctrination seminar that had to be. I'm sorry, but if it were me, shit were blowing up, flaming out, people getting killed, it really wouldn't matter to me who had told me I couldn't do X, Y, and/or Z, if X, Y, and/or Z could at least prevent things from going from worse to OMFG (and provided I had the ability to do those things--else I'd be all 'see ya later bye'). When it's life and limb, only the guy with a uniform, badge, and gun is in charge.
I don't post AC. I like my -1, Flamebaits. Trump/Sheen 2012 on the Batshit Insane ticket!
bp got oil all over the us coast chevron is just coming here to return the favour
Maybe wasnt so good idea to make Rovio to design that software, but hey, maybe we could finally find where those pigs hid the eggs.
the US oil giant's admission that its contractor's spill prediction software constantly crashed and was not a reliable predictor of how far oil could travel if an accident took place.
"what's the worst that could happen?"
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
You do know that Guy Fawkes was fighting to replace one monarchy with another? That his intention was not to get rid of Parliament but rather to kill Protestant Christians and replace them with Catholic Christians and maintain the political status quo (a group of rich, landed members of Parliament serving a monarch), just change England from Protestant to Catholic rule?
I think a lot of people cheer Guy Fawkes because they think he was standing up for democracy and overthrowing tyrannical states whereas I am pretty sure the situation was that he just wanted to overthrow one religious authority with another. He wanted the same political system (monarch served by ineffectual unrepresentative MPs) just a different religious flavour.
His goal was to replace King James the first of England (and sixth of Scotland) with his nine year old daughter princess Elizabeth.
I'm not a modelling guru but I've delved a little into current and weather modelling and it's not simple stuff. The inputs would vary depending on the weather conditions and weather predictions change significantly over that time. The best you could hope for would by a dynamic model that updated daily and became less reliable the further away from now that you went. Having a model that predicted where the spill was headed after the spill occured so you could direct clean up to the most effective places on a daily or hourly basis would make a lot more sense to me than a model that took a theoretical set of conditions and set in stone the response. I'd suspect that the complexity of this sort of thing probably means the guys who write the software sell the service.
So it runs on windows then.
Curious choice of words there. It sounds like you're not too happy about the UK drilling for oil off its shores? Green concerns, or other?
I suppose that oil is propping up the UK economy in the same way that agriculture props up the US economy?
This isn't actually that huge a deal. No matter what the conditions are in the location they want to put the platform, any sort of large spill would be Real Bad.
The important part here is not to let a spill happen in the first place, and the spill prediction software has nothing really to do with that.
on the British oil spills.
As one prof of mine said:
When you understand the unique chemicals and items we can synthesize out of this ancient black goop, you realize how stupid we are for simply burning it.
That's a lot of potential plastic...
Why do you mention it as if it were a good thing?
And just how exactly is Joe Grunt Sixpack supposed to know that shutting off valve #3983 on a control panel full of other valves, controls and switches, is going to have a positive effect on the flaming inferno on the next platform?
Not to mention, in these days of litigation-happy and point-your-finger gotta-blame-somebody corporate culture, do you want to be the one to find out?
Sorry, just isn't going to happen. You can't have a solid set of contingency plans when your original design is full of flaws. Especially on something as operationally complex as an oil platform, there is no "shut off everything" button, and there shouldn't be for good reason.
Uh... training? Emergency Operating Procedures?
Who would insure a platform that had never practiced something as simple as a fire drill?
People like Guy Fawkes because we get to stand in front of a bonfire, singe some eyebrows, and blow stuff up all together.
How odd.
i was aiming for humor, really
sorry!
lost in translation
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
or hiring from tech school that have classes that are more tech and less G.E / Introduction to the Internet for filler or wait some schools make you take stuff like art history and PE as in Physical education as filler as part of a 4 year BS.
That's a reasonably valid point. Certainly true of the UK and many other countries as well. We all seem to be using up our mineral reserves at terrific rates.
I often despair that the UK doesn't invest in renewable energy research and development more, seeing as it is a windy set of islands on the edge of a huge ocean. Lots of challenges but potentially huge amounts of renewable energy always going to be available, waves rolling in from thousands of miles and fairly blowy at times too.
Isnt BP british, and now another one is going under the radar and getting deals to drill right away....come on people, what is it going to take, that the US invade the brits before they learn their lessons. Seriously, this is about as stupid as one can get, throw more money at the problem no matter how bad it ends up in the end.....f*ckin greedy bastards!
Take some of the US army send them over to the brit ilses, and force their way into the Queens chambers, and say,
"there we do not care for your laws either...." see how long it takes for them to react.....
If your software crashes when run for long periods, the root cause is almost always one of the following:
None of these should be present in the "standard industry systems" of multi-billion (trillion?) dollar industries, especially if they pertain the safety systems. Memory leaks and boundary overflow/underflow are trivial to avoid by any programmer who takes the time to code defensively. Race conditions can be a bit harder to detect and avoid, but they are a less common issue, and handling them is well within the expectations of even a newly-graduated programmer.
There are also more esoteric error conditions. For example, in locations which are higher above sea-level, the "average neutron flux density" (i.e. number of cosmic rays hitting your chips) is higher, and thus the incidence of random transient faults in electronics is higher. It is not unheard of in large computer clusters to have the occasional bit-flip error in RAM due to a random cosmic ray. At the same time, these systems have built-in checkpointing, and when for whatever reason the running software develops a fault, the entire system can roll back to the last known good checkpoint, and restart.
Serious customers would never accept a system or simulator which exhibited the sorts of problems these "industry standard systems" seem to be plagued with. More to the point, I have worked indirectly with some petroleum companies on simulation software, and know for a fact the acceptable "unrecoverable error rate" was written into the contract in a very forceful way. Then again, the simulation software was being used to locate oil, so I guess that says something about the industries priorities. (And it was designed to run on a "real" cluster)
Sure, but then after the disaster is over you find that you are fired, a scapegoat, and unemployable.
This is really just a case of long-term self-preservation vs short-term self-preservation.
Maybe if companies weren't able to get away with sleazy safety practices then people wouldn't be more afraid for their jobs than their lives.
There is a 'shut off everything' button - its called the ESD (Emergency Shut Down). Usually it's a pull button, not a push button (so you don't accidentally bump it) but it is there. It takes some guts to pull the big red button, but it is there for a good reason.
Oil and Gas production facilities are designed specifically for these shutdown modes, as well as other shutdown scenarios - power failure, full instrument air failure, control system failure, etc. The valves have failsafe positions (for example, a valve that is supposed to 'fail closed' will have a large spring that always forces it closed, unless you have positive air pressure on the valve actuator holding it open - once the air is gone, the spring forces the valve to the specified fail state), motors for pumps and compressors switch off, and emergency power is maintained. ESDs are tested at least annually.
I work offshore in the UK and can tell you this:
Since Piper Alpha, among the dozens of mandatory safety improvements designed to prevent such a catastrophe from ever unfolding to the state it can attain (total destruction/gas fire/melted steel) is the addition of the Station Bill.
Advice is, to read it so you know what to do in an emergency, usually showing the rig outline with lifeboats etc. Of course, nobody does so it's on the back of all the toilet stall doors.
In the middle, in bright red lettering are words to this effect: "If there is an event significant enough to disrupt communications, or you feel your life is in danger, use any and all means available to escape the platform to the sea below"
This is SPECIFICALLY to remove the "nobody told us to get off the rig" mentality that resulted in so many deaths on Piper.
When it's life and limb, only the guy with a uniform, badge, and gun is in charge.
And that is why I love "Walking Dead". :)
I'd add that when he/she says ESD is tested at least annually the test includes testing every single io-point in the whole ESD system.
In addition to the ESD system there is a PSD system which shuts down valves, motors, heaters and the likes if they enter dangerous levels. If this doesnt stop the issue and it reaches higher alarm levels ESD trips happen.
Having implemented controller logic at a major north sea installation I know a bit of what goes on and how things are tested...
Shit can happen, but the chance of a cascading failure that takes out the plant is extremely unlikely.
And Piper Alpha was a horrible incident. It had major industry impact and pretty much changed the safety system philosophy in place. Learning from the mistakes is important...
Authority is mostly about who has physical access to the required 'big red button' so to speak.
If the control room is gone and you have major errors in the control system you could be in a state where it is not possible to call a general evacuation -or- operate equipment.
Such a state -must- cause everything to go to a fail-safe position. This is industry standard these days but was not in the past.
There were emergency evacuation plans in place. These were put in place because people had sat down in a calm setting and worked out the best ways to get everyone safely off the platform. There are temporary refuges on (most) platforms. These are designed to keep you safe from the fires/explosions for at least an hour. When it looks like the fires are serious enough that you have to get right off the platform there are more plans that will get everyone off safely - everyone jumping off the side usually leads to most people breaking their necks when they hit the water, and the rest dying from the cold.
Jumping into a tiny escape boat is not something people want to do in most situations, so they were waiting in the refuge to see what was going to happen. 'Authority' is probably not the best word to use here, it refers to the people with the experience to know what's going to happen, and full knowledge of the situation at hand.
The only people who survived Piper Alpha were the ones who ignored the plan. A lot of these people were seriously injured when they hit the water, and a lot of them did not survive. This makes it fairly clear that the plan wasn't good enough.
The lessons we've learned from that event have changed the way we write our evacuation plans. There are still people in charge with the authority to direct the evacuation, but everyone now knows the procedures. If no-one has told you to get off the platform but you've been sitting in the refuge for an hour you know should know how to get off the platform safely.
Yes, I am a safety engineer.
Is 1563649 a prime number?
What is significant? All people on your tiny isolated platform with authority are dead, the only ones left are the working plebs. What can you do that is significant other than fucking run and dive over the edge.
You can get to an escape raft and hope that 50 other people came too.
You can get to an escape raft and launch it by yourself potentially killing 50 other people.
You can jump over the edge of an oil platform from a height of which will likely cause you to break your legs when you hit the water.
Ultimately it doesn't matter what situation you're in. Even office buildings have fire wardens for a reason, and that often is that if they are alive you have a greater potential for having everyone escape and be accounted for. If there's ever a disaster, and no one is there to make decisions ultimately you end up with chaos which will result in either nothing, or things getting far worse.