One mile underwater in the Gulf of Mexico, trawling in darkness and near-freezing temperatures, car-size robots do more than shoot video of crabs, eels, and sea cucumbers: They also might help prevent oil spills. These subsea robots now carry tools that can seal a well within 45 seconds.
“We’re becoming a second fail-safe,” says Kevin Kerins, senior vice president of Houston-based Oceaneering, which has about 80 remotely operated vehicles monitoring Gulf wells. In a test offshore Angola last year, Kerin says the ROVs quickly sealed a well in mile-deep seas.
Five years ago, when disaster struck in the Gulf, these robots, lacking high-flow pumps, couldn’t do that. On April 20, 2010, about 50 miles off Louisiana, an explosion on the Deepwater Horizon rig killed 11 workers and triggered the worst oil spill in U.S. history. The Cameron Int. blowout preventer, a key safety device that sits atop a well and is designed to seal it in an emergency, failed to activate. For 87 days, until BP’s Macondo well was capped, more than 100 million gallons of oil gushed into the Gulf.
After a six-month U.S. ban on Deepwater drilling and a slew of technological and regulatory changes, at an astronomically coat to the Drillers and ultimately you and I at the GAS pumps...
“Can an accident happen again? Of course it can, because we’re going down deeper and deeper,” says Charles Ebinger, an energy expert at the Brookings Institution, a Washington-based think tank. However, he expects future accidents will not be as serious as the 2010 disaster because of recent safety measures.