MEC&F Expert Engineers : CHEVRON'S K.S. ENDEAVOR CATCHES FIRE DURING OIL EXPLORATION IN LAGOS AREA. TWO WORKERS DIED IN THE EXPLOSION AND FIRE. NIGERIA WANTS BILLIONS IN PENALTIES FOR THE DAMAGE.

Saturday, December 6, 2014

CHEVRON'S K.S. ENDEAVOR CATCHES FIRE DURING OIL EXPLORATION IN LAGOS AREA. TWO WORKERS DIED IN THE EXPLOSION AND FIRE. NIGERIA WANTS BILLIONS IN PENALTIES FOR THE DAMAGE.




Chevron's K.S. Endeavor Catches Fire During Oil Exploration in Lagos Area.  two workers died in the explosion and fire.  NIGERIA WANTS BILLIONS IN PENALTIES FOR THE DAMAGE.

The offshore oil rig K.S. Endeavor, run on behalf of Chevron Nigeria Ltd. by drilling contractor FODE Drilling Co., caught fire on early in the morning on Monday, January 16th 2012 while operating in the Funiwa field off the coast of Nigeria.  The jack-up rig was being used to seek out potential deepwater oil and gas fields in the Lagos area.  It was not connected to any oil production at the time of the fire, according to a Chevron spokesperson.



Chevron was forced to shut down operations at its North Apoi platform due to its proximity to the fire on the K.S. Endeavor.  At this time, it appears that the fire did not cause any oil spill, but Chevron is taking precautions to avoid further issues.
Search and rescue operations were initiated as soon as the fire was reported, and 152 workers were found and evacuated.  Two workers remain unaccounted for, with no news of their whereabouts at this time. The cause of the fire is still under investigation, though a spokesperson for the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation stated that a buildup of gas pressure from drilling may have been the cause of the fire.  Currently, neither Chevron nor FODE have presented information as to the potential cause of the fire.
Producing approximately 2.4 million barrels of crude oil every day, Nigeria is the fifth-largest crude oil exporter to the United States.  Chevron has exploration rights to approximately 2.2 million acres across Nigeria's delta and offshore. In 2010, the company produced an average of just over .5 million barrels of crude oil a day, making it the third-largest producer in Nigeria.

When a fire or explosion occurs on an offshore oil rig, the risk of injury is considerable. All workers on the rig may be affected, particularly due to the risk of sinking or the fire spreading to consume the entire platform. This incident off the Nigerian coast is an example; though we can only guess as to the workers' conditions, things are not looking good at this point in time.

In the 2012 fire involving the jack-up rig KS Endeavor offshore Nigeria, the fire burned for about two months, and there was literally nothing left of the rig by the time the well stopped flowing.  In the meantime however, another jack-up rig was contracted to drill a well to intercept the one that was flowing in order to stem the flow of the well from its source.

This was a very expensive task for both Chevron Nigeria, and indirectly ExxonMobil, who had to disengage their rig from a current project to help quell this incident.

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UPDATE: As of Tuesday evening, Chevron Corp. said a fire on an offshore rig near Nigeria’s coast was still burning as a search continued for two missing workers. Chevron said earlier it had accounted for 152 workers on the natural gas rig and a nearby barge. Two workers remained hospitalized Tuesday with minor burns.
Chevron said the investigation into the fire was ongoing, though they believe a possible equipment failure caused the inferno. Officials with Nigeria’s state-run oil company already have blamed the fire on a “gas kick” — a major build up of gas pressure from drilling. Chevron said it does not know how long the fire will last on the rig, which has partially collapsed.



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LAGOS, Nigeria —Two contractors are still missing after a Chevron drilling rig caught fire Monday off Nigeria’s coast, the oil company said today.

Two of the 154 workers on the KS Endeavor, a jack-up rig, are missing today after the offshore rig caught fire as it explored possible oil and gas fields off Nigeria’s coast. Chevron said it was still investigating the cause of the fire, which has not been contained, but it did not appear to be sabotage.

The fire occurred near its North Apoi oil platform, and the blaze forced it to shut down.
“We do not know what caused the incident. We are working diligently to contain the fire, which is restricted to the rig,” Andrew Fawthrop, managing director of Chevron’s Nigeria/Middle East strategic business unit, told Upstreamonline.com. “Substantial resources have been deployed including well control specialists and drilling experts. We continue to work in full cooperation with Nigerian authorities and are committed to providing additional information as it becomes known.”

The rig is run on Chevron’s behalf by contractor Fode Drilling Co., Walker said. Officials with Fode, which has offices in London and Jenkintown, Pennsylvania, could not be immediately reached for comment Monday.

Nnimmo Bassey, who runs an environmental watchdog group in Nigeria, said he had received reports from locals nearby that the fire was an industrial incident.
“Workers were trying to contain the gas pressure and they didn’t succeed,” Bassey said.
Nigeria is the fifth-largest crude oil exporter to the U.S. It produces about 2.4 million barrels of crude oil a day. However, more than 50 years of oil production has seen environmental damage through delta’s maze of muddy creeks and mangroves.
Chevron, based in San Ramon, California, produced an average of 524,000 barrels of crude oil a day from Nigeria in 2010. The company has exploration rights to about 2.2 million acres across Nigeria’s delta and offshore.


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UPDATE 1/17/12
We have some basic but unconfirmed information arriving in email.
The reports are that 2 people are missing. 1 a French Toolpusher and 1 Indian driller.
The background on this disaster is that the KS Endeavor took a kick around 3 days earlier with 13.5 mud but for whatever reason they did not weight up & kill the well. (possibly for fear of breaking down the formation)
After 3 days gas migrated up outside the casing and ignited. Apparently they spent quite a bit of time monitoring well pressures over this period.

UPDATE 1/20/12
Chevron has discontinued the search for the 2 missing workers and they are now presumed dead. Work has begun to drill a relief well to kill this well and will take some time. Below are satellite images taken today over the rig fire location. Oil on the surface is now clearly leaking from the well.


Chevron to permanently seal KS Endeavor rig — Odumabo
February 5, 2012 by Stanley Opara
Oil major, Chevron, has said its ultimate goal on the KS Endeavor rig is to put out the fire and permanently seal the oil well.
In an email response to queries from Sunday PUNCH, signed by the General Manager, Policy, Government and Public Affairs, Mr. Femi Odumabo, the firm said, “Our priority is protecting people and the environment and moving forward with our plan to put out the fire and permanently seal the well.”

The KS Endeavor shallow water jack-up rig was contracted from Field Offshore Design Engineering (Nigeria), Fode Drilling Company Limited.
When asked how much would be needed to reinstate the rig and the possible duration, Odumabo declined commenting, while referring our correspondent to the owners of the rig for the information.
The KS Endeavor drilling rig was gutted by fire on January 16, 2012 in shallow water approximately 10 kilometres off the coast of Nigeria. The incident has left two contract workers missing.

Odumabo said, “We are deeply saddened by the loss of our industry colleagues. Thankfully, 152 people were safely evacuated. The fire is still burning at the well, but continues to diminish in size and intensity.”
He said the company would continue to monitor the well and the surrounding area for impacts to the environment, adding that tests of the air and the water and constant monitoring of the beaches were ongoing.
He stressed that there was no apparent evidence of significant impact of the incident to the environment and shoreline communities.
Inspections of the area by a wide variety of government officials, he noted, had confirmed that there was no crude oil spill associated with the incident on the exploratory gas well.

“No oil was spilled or is flowing from the well. The natural gas is burning offshore, about 10 kilometres from the nearest coastline. Workers on offshore platforms and rigs in the area have experienced no health issues since the incident,” he said.
He said Chevron had actively engaged residents of the shoreline communities by listening to their concerns and to explain what had happened, adding that the firm was responding to the incident with continued engagement of all the stakeholders.
The company’s multifunctional team, he said, had included the health, safety and environmental officers, adding that medical workers too had participated in the visits to the communities.

Odumabo said, “We cannot predict how long it will take to put the fire out and permanently seal the well; but we will do so as quickly as possible while continuing to maintain safe operations.
“We are investigating to determine the root cause of this incident so that we can take appropriate action to try to prevent something like this from happening again.”

Chevron Ignored Rig Workers Evacuation Requests Prior to Deadly KS Endeavor Blast [REPORT]
By gCaptain On July 11, 2012


KS Endeavor on fire offshore Nigeria. Photo: Chevron
Chevron failed to address concerns of unsafe drilling conditions and requests for evacuation from rig workers on board the KS Endeavor in the days leading up to the jack-up’s explosion offshore Nigeria that resulted two deaths, according to report from Reuters.
The KS Endeavor, a jack-rig operated by Chevron Nigeria, exploded on January 16 resulting in the death of 2 of the 154 personel onboard and a fire that burned for 46 days before a relief well was finally drilled.

Citing a transcripts of rig workers obtained from Britain’s Rail, Maritime and Transport trade union, Reuters reports that workers on the KS Endeavor were ignored by Chevron when expressing concerns of increasing smoke billowing from the drilling borehole and requests for evacuation.

“Chevron knew for over a week that the well was unstable yet they refused to evacuate us,” said one of the rig workers who gave his account to the RMT union.
In fact, Reuters reports that instead of addressing fears that equipment failures and smoke presaged disaster, Chevron flew extra staff to the platform just before the January 16, 2012, blowout.
The most senior witness to give testimony to the RMT, a Frenchman, said a series of pump failures throughout the drilling operation led to a massive build-up of pressure that triggered the blowout.

The Frenchman said rig engineers held a site meeting and advised Chevron to evacuate staff while well pressure control measures were applied.
“That advice was not heeded and additional personnel were even brought onboard to get ahead of what was believed to be impending strike action,” the Frenchman, who was at that meeting, said.

Chevron denied claims that they ever received evacuation requests in an emailed statement to Reuters


HOW BLOWOUTS OCCUR IN JACK-UP RIGS
From a drilling safety standpoint, jack-up rigs are inherently more dangerous than floating rigs for two main reasons.

First, if the well blows out and catches fire, there’s no way to unlatch the rig from the wellhead and move off station, thus removing the fuel source.  Either the blowout preventer will close and the fire is extinguished, or the rig is going to burn to the waterline.   There’s very little in-between.

Secondly, because the blowout preventer is located roughly 60 feet below the rig floor, and not hundreds (if not thousands) of feet below on the sea floor, if the rig crew is unable to detect a “kick,” or influx of gas into the wellbore, before it reaches the blowout preventer (BOP), then it’s pretty much guaranteed that there will be a flammable geyser of mud, gas, and possibly oil, over the rig.  On a deepwater rig, such as the Deepwater Horizon, a huge steel pipe called a riser connects the floating rig to the blowout preventer on the sea floor.  There are added dangers in this situation as well, however there are effective means of mitigating these risks as well.
Do kicks happen often?

A kick is a well control issue that a driller will contend with dozens, if not hundreds, of times throughout a career in the oilfield.  While drilling, natural gas from the surrounding formation will quite frequently enter the wellbore as the rig crew is drilling down into the earth, and this pressurized flammable gas naturally wants to float to the surface…
So imagine a barrel-sized unit of natural gas enters the wellbore at 10,000 feet. 

 According to Boyle’s Law, the volume of gas will double each time the pressure is halved.  So at 5,000 feet, it’s expanded to 2 barrels, as it migrates up to 2,500 feet, it’s at 4 barrels, 1,250 feet – 8 barrels, and so on, until the bubble has expanded to the rig floor.
Left unmitigated, this kick can cause serious disaster on board a drilling rig as witnessed in this case, and as seen in the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

So how do you know when kick is migrating up a well bore?
While drilling a well, a fine, soupy, and dense mud is continuously being pumped down the drill string (which turns the drilling bit), and it returns up the annulus of the wellbore, where it is then filtered via the “shakers”, and then recirculated back down the drill string.  Most of the time, it’s a closed loop process, meaning what is pumped down the well, eventually returns back up the wellbore to get reprocessed again.  The volume, and rate of return of the mud is highly predictable, and is easily calculated.


This scenario changes when a gas bubble enters the well bore.
As bubble migrates up the wellbore, it pushes the drilling mud (and well cuttings) above it up with greater and greater force as it continuously expands.  Drillers can sense this situation in progress when they start seeing an increase in the flow rate of mud returning from the well.   It’s not a fool-proof system however because the expansion of gas is exponential as is rises, and an increase in mud returns is not always an indication of a kick.  Without getting too technical and discussing all the different possible scenarios, the important factor is to understand that at the end of the day, if a kick goes unnoticed, and the rapid gas expansion goes unchecked, a “blowout” is guaranteed to occur.
Did this happen off Nigeria?

GSF Baltic, image courtesy Transocean
We’re still waiting on specific details, but it seems very likely the answer is yes.  Chevron is reporting that the surface well control equipment (the BOP) may have failed in some fashion.  They also report that Transocean’s GSF Baltic rig has been contracted to drill a relief well that will intercept the blown out well and kill it in a similar fashion as the BP’s Macondo well.

The unchecked flow from this well could also bridge off and kill itself naturally, but the best option in this case is certainly to try and stem the flow via the relief well.