Member Info for adoubleuk

fjones40,

"Smells of delays personally !!!"

Yes, I agree, it's a delay.

Now various regular, longtime correspondents might be staggered to see me writing that. But it's only a delay relative to 'what would be happening if the operation had gone OK'.

But looking at the bigger picture, we're still well within the 'Foil H12019' window.

Hell, I'm as pi**ed-off as everyone else is about this screw-up. And probably not nearly as pi**ed-off as Hurricane's CEO must be. Hey, big celebratory weekend! His daughter's wedding day! And this happens. But being pi**ed-off, whether one's a small PI calling himself Adoubleuk or whether one's the CEO, achieves nothing. Doesn't turn the clock back, doesn't solve the problem.

What everyone, Hurricane and Bluewater will be concentrating on is getting a new rope delivered as fast as possible. Calling contacts, stuff like that. Post-mortems can come later.

fitguy5,

" Hurricane/ Bluewater may still be given a warning notice."

That made me laugh.

By whom? For an incident in which there was no equipment damage, no pollution, and nobody was hurt?

What's the system here? Two yellow cards and then you get shut down?

If that were the case, the entire N.Sea and surrounding oceans might be struggling to produce 10,000 bbl/day. And no, I haven't missed out a zero.

You haven't a clue what you're talking about, I'm afraid.

thestreet,

Oh yeah, I forgot something.

The supply boat and safety boat were already on charter anyway. Sure there has been one spot-hire since the 'first attempt, and almost certainly there will be another before the next one. Plus a few extra choppers. But that's peanuts, and it's possible HUR will backcharge the spots to BW, because they wouldn't have been needed were it not for these foulups. That's fairly normal.

I totally agree, without this bal$$ up, FoiL would have come earlier. And the money coming in earlier. But it has happened, and it's an intangible, so one can't seek redress.

thestreet,

I'm quiet because I've been out to do some shopping. And I'll be quiet again from the early evening, 'cos I'll be going for an apéritif, then a vietmamese meal, then down to the 'poker café' for a chinwag with the owner (not to play).

Interesting how one can do that with zero income, isn't it? A bit like Hurricane.

"I would class this as a bal$$ up 6.5% off the share price. Also the costs involved with all the ships crews choppers investigations. Not something I would be proud of but each to their own. The most important part is no one was hurt I do agree with you in that. "

I agree, it's a bal$$ up. But I don't necessarily equate the SP to it. If the SP of Hurricane was directly related to 'good news', it should be over a quid by now. What if latch-up had been successful? What would the SP be, in your opinion? The way this share goes, it might have dropped even so!

By the way, your question about 'how many snapped ropes during hookup in the UK' is rather meaningless. There aren't many turret-moored FPSO's in UK waters (I can't be bothered to check how many), and they're all different. You can't form a statistical 'sample population' comprised of different things.

"Where do you see the share price going until we get another replacement rope?"

I don't do share price predictions (except on Reverandy's sweepstakes): leave that to the smart people like you.

Nigwit,

"Three failures in a row points to a systemic issue."

What was the third failure? I only know of two, so far.

thestreet,

" I can’t ever recall anything going wrong at the latching on stage like this??"

Well given that the Aoka Mizu has only once ever latched a buoy once before, on Ettrick, back in 2009, so that's not surprising.

However, if you want an example of a real ba**s-up, check out Tullow's Jubilee FPSO. Bill so far, 1.5 billion or so, and still mounting.

Cebo,

"So you now have contacts close to the project? or do you know that it was BW that supplied or Spec'd tested inspected or maintained the said rope, or Technip or are you privy to any of the other factors that may have caused the "rope to fail"."

To answer your four questions, No, to each of them.

What I am 99.9% sure of , though, is that it won't have been Hurricane who supplied the rope, and 100% sure that it wasn't someone from Hurricane supervising the latch-up show.

bartlebottom,

" Macondo ...I've often wondered how a UK court would view Halliburton; a contractor with an obligation of proceeding with due diligence ?"

That's an interesting (if totally hypothetical) thought.

Differently. If for no other reason than that the case would have been heard differently, and also the UK doesn't have an equivalent of that stupid 'fifth amendment' thing.

Nigwit,

Join the Muppets!

" I trust the company a little less now and the market knocked 6.5% off its value so it does too. Blathering on here like the old muppets in the gallery won’t add that 6.5% back on."

The matter of trust is your own business. But 'the market' didn't knock 6.5% off its value. It knocked 6.5% off the SP.

I was waiting for a post like yours. The spread-bet companies must be jumping up and down with glee at what's happened. Trading outfits with enough clout to materially affect the SP and like selling into rises and were waiting for the SP to get a bit higher might not be so happy.

fitguy5,

"The buck always stops with the License Holder, Hurricane, in the 500m zone no matter who caused it! BP found that out in the Gulf of Mexico, Halliburton got off virtually scot free!! You can contract out operational day to day management, but you cannot contract out overall responsibility."

Absolutely. Agree completely.

But what's that got to do with this incident? Where no damage has been done, material or environmental, and nobody has been hurt?

Now then, let's turn your argument around, using Escargot's plumber / sparky analogy. Let's say the plumber, changing a water boiler, breaks a drillbit on his Black and Decker, smashes the machine into the input pipework , with the result that instead of it being a one-day job as agreed, you don't have hot water for four days, because the plumber doesn't have a vital fitting to repair the damage? Or the sparky's voltmeter isn't working properly, and he somehow sets gets some wires crossed, setting the entire fusebox alight, meaning a complete new one has to be installed and you're without power for three days?

Are you responsible for that? No you aren't. In fact you've got a very good reason for wanting the overall bill to be reduced.

I'd submit that that's more what's happened here.

Macondo is not a good example to pick!

Muzza2

" Easy to blame the contractor but what about HE contractor management? So Mr Platt, three strikes.... ?!?"

This is just the disingenious sort of stuff I was expecting, and referred to earlier.

Neil Platt will have absolutely nothing to do with the nuts and bolts of the FPSO's operations like buoy pull-in. It's Bluewater's show until FoiL.

In the same way, the following is utter BS:

" until now HE has been successful because of its geoscience strength with drilling ops being effectively a turnkey operation with Dr T physically calling the shots from the rig floor"

It's possible that out on the rig, Dr T will be 'close to' the directional drillers, and more especially the mudloggers, but there's utterly no way he'll be involved with the actual drilling process, nor the rig's HSE.

Does Dr T have the right level of competency in production ops? No. He's a geologist / geophysicist / reservoir engineer. He'll certainly be 'calling some shots' regarding the initial flowrates he wants and the analysis of pressure data, and decisions regarding when to shut in one well, open the other, further data analysis about how the wells are 'talking to each other', and so on.

But he won't be telling the guys which valves to twiddle.

Remember, pictures of him on the rig show him wearing a green hard-hat. And if you know anything about anything, especially Transocean's hard-hat colour-coding, you should know what that means.

Maybe someone local (like Badger) could give us commentary on the following:

Is the rig jacked-up?
Is the derrick cantilever skidded-out (ie sticking out over the side of the hull rather than in its 'transit position').
Have there been supply boats alongside? What sort of stuff (roughly) have they been unloading?

Remember, most companies define 'spud' as when the first drillbit goes through the rotary table. But first, 'conductor pipe' , may need to be driven, and although that's 'operations started' , it's not 'spud'. So we may have to wait a couple more days for the RNS.

2kally,

If someone here has got full engineering specs of the setup, maybe they could give you an answer (and please send me a copy, as well).

fandg2,

Nice one. Hadn't heard it before.

Another is that to 'assume' is to make an 'ass of U and me'.

" did the rope part though?"

Good grief, Wellwell, you're right.

The RNS only told us the rope 'failed', not that it actually parted. That's just an assumption we're all making.

I've seen rope (both SWR and fibre) 'fail', but the problem was recognised before anything actually fell. Or the rope actually broke. In fact, seen it in SWR a few times. Example, a crane lift, where the operator picked up, but the load didn't budge. What was happening was the crane wire unravvelling (old, well-worn wire, admittedly).

Fibre? That was amusing. On a 17m pitch in a Pyreneen cave. Luckily three of us were already at the top. It was a well-travelled route, we'd been going up and down it for a week, and we knew it was getting well-worn. Number four set off up, for a couple of metres, then slowly decended to the floor again. He tried to continue, but with no movement. Further up, the rope's outer sheath had finally completely worn through, and all he was doing was dragging down the outer sheath over the core!

Poor bugger had a one and a half hour wait while one of us at the top continued out and back to camp for a new rope to re-rig the pitch, (something which should have been done a couple of days earlier, really).

Not suggesting BW's buoy pull-in rope was in that bad a state, but yes, a rope can fail without actually parting. Beware assumptions.

Wellwell,

"Maybe Blue Water will be similarly punished."

Here your argument falls flat. But is a good parallel to the point I was making.

Bluewater didn't manufacture the pull-in line, which is the equivalent (one supposes) of the rocket's 'O' rings...

Wellwell,

You're correct. I was cutting a very long story short. It was Feynman who was part of the team which dug out that information and made the theatrical press demonstration!

SotB,

It might be a long time (and some detective work) before you'll find that out! By which time it'll be ancient history, anyway. Come FoiL, this incident will have been relegated to the 'one hiccup on the way' drawer, as Escargot said earlier.

Rangers,

Apologies, maybe I missed something. I must go look at those links again.

SG2,

Agree completely. The 'investigative team' should hopefully find the reason behind this costly incident, and having done so, deliver a means whereby it doesn't happen next time. But heads won't necessarily roll.

Take a far more dramatic and costly parallel: the Challenger space shuttle disaster. It took no less a person than Prof Richard Feynman to figure out (and theatrically demonstrate!) the reason why the thing blew up. Failure of the booster rocket 'O' rings due to the compound they were made of being unsuitable for low temperatures. But that wasnt the cause. Which was the decision to launch on a very cold day, and eveyone being unaware of this material weakness.

No excuses. Accidents happen, yes, but things don't 'just break'. Let's simply hope we're not going to have to wait as long as NASA did before having another try!