Oil, Oil Go Away. Come Again Another Day.

What was the word, the name, which has yet to be mentioned in this British Petroleum disaster? Not to leave you hanging, it is Ixtoc. Ixtoc was an exploratory well drilled by Pemex, Mexico’s government-owned oil company. Located about 60 miles out in the Bay of Campeche, in about 150 feet of water, Pemex leased Sedco’s 135F Triangular Semi-Submersible drilling rig for the job; using their own crews as was their standard practice.

On June 3, 1979 they were down to about 11,000 feet setting casing, which is a type of pipe used to line a well. It keeps the sides intact and along with oil-based mud, helps to control the immense pressure at 11,000 feet (nearly two miles down).

The mud, pumped through holes in the drilling bit, keeps the bit lubricated and carries cuttings back to the surface. The weight of the circulating mud column exerts a counter pressure on the bottom of the hole, and acts as a plug—keeping the gas and oil under control. If the mud isn’t heavy enough, the gas starts displacing mud, and if left unchecked, a geyser of mud, gas, oil, cuttings and drill pipe would blast forth like one of Discovery Channel’s catastrophic fantasies.

Such a blowout is a terrible thing to behold. In the older movies, directors loved to show oil wells coming in by spraying oil everywhere. And, in the early days, they did do so, but then the rig derricks were wooden. Raw crude consists of flammable gas as well as other highly volatile components—so with steel involved, one spark is really all it takes. KABOOM! And it is not just a kaboom explosion; it is a ball of fire kaboom—hot and nasty.

The problem with working offshore is just that, you are on a platform 70, 80, maybe 90 feet above the ocean; moreover you are working in an close, confined area about the size of a couple of football fields—if you are lucky.

That is what happened on Ixtoc, the 3rd of June 1979. That no one was killed is a miracle (however there were rumors that many were). The resulting ferocious fires caused structural steel to weaken and give way, eventually collapsing the whole rig to the sea floor in a tangled multi-ton mess. Meanwhile crude oil was gushing up to the surface, some burned while the rest floated in the Gulf of Mexico’s prevailing currents.

What happened? The Pemex version is that “the drill bit hit a soft strata… causing the circulation of drilling mud to cease, causing a loss of hydrostatic pressure… as the mud escaped into fractures. PEMEX officials decided to remove the bit, run the drill pipe back into the hole and pump materials down this open-ended drill pipe in an effort to seal off the fractures.” Unfortunately it did not work.

Imagine the drill pipe is like a drinking straw in a thick malted milk. If you pull it out, a huge quantity will adhere to the straw. In the case of drill pipe this means less weight holding the gas down. KABOOM!

Well not kaboom for certain—there are safety features. You have been hearing a lot about BOPs, or Blowout Preventers, valves stacked on the well head which can be closed from the surface to shut off the well on the ocean floor. Included in the stack are shear rams which are made of hardened steel and shaped like cutting shears. They can slice clean through drill pipe in seconds.

Unfortunately, in their haste to pull out of the hole, the operators reached what are called drilling collars. These are extra thick and heavy pipes attached behind the drill. The idea is to weigh down the drill to keep it on track and cutting effeciently. However, shear rams, for all of their awesome might, cannot cut drill collars. Alas—KABOOM!

Eventually Ixtoc spewed over 3 million barrels of crude into the Gulf over nine months, and a lot of it washed up on Texas beaches. It polluted turtle nesting sites, killed thousands and thousand of birds and sea creatures. That was, come to think of it, almost exactly 30 years ago.

A couple of years later I was working for Drilling Magazine and got an interview with Red Adair, the famous well fire fighter, who was given credit for putting Ixtoc out. Red was an amazing man, short and very powerful. He began his career as a nitroglycerine delivery driver in Texas oilfields. That’s how he got to know explosives.

Red told me what really happened. Yes, the Pemex crew hit a soft formation and lost drilling mud. But, they had neglected to order extra mud for emergencies. They ran out. They had nothing to put down the rumbling hole to equalize the pressure and desperately tried to close the shear rams. With increasing desperation they sought to seal the well from the surface. Bad idea. Yep, KABOOM!

Meanwhile, as nasty crude slopped on the Texas coast, a political uproar began. Bill Clements took office the previous November as the first Republican governor since the Civil War. Oops! He owned Sedco, so naturally the media blamed him for everything; rather like blaming Hertz for a rental car accident. Does any of this sound familiar? Clements took it like a pro, applying the “nevermind Jake, it’s Chinatown” principle.

Beaches and wildlife eventually recovered; flowers bloomed and babies were born. Yet even Ixtoc is not the first such nightmare to visit our coast. During World War II, German U-boats happily sank oil tankers along the Gulf Coast, around Florida and up the Eastern sea board, staining pristine beaches with dead sailors and black oil. Thank God there are many bacteria in our warm waters that just love oil.

Finally, the real question in this latest disaster is why British Petroleum’s BOPs repeatedly did not work. Tisk, tisk—they better have a good story.