Star One Smart Blog's

A preliminary investigation into the cause of the tragic oil rig disaster allows for some preliminary analysis...this is a preliminary report based on known facts and the interviews of the surviving crew members. The analysis is mine.

The deadly blowout of an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico was triggered by a bubble of methane gas that escaped from the well and shot up the drill column, expanding quickly as it burst through several seals and barriers before exploding, according to interviews with rig workers conducted during BP's internal investigation.

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...the workers set and then tested a cement seal at the bottom of the well. Then they reduced the pressure in the drill column and attempted to set a second seal below the sea floor. A chemical reaction caused by the setting cement created heat and a gas bubble which destroyed the seal.

Deep beneath the seafloor, methane is in a slushy, crystalline form. Deep sea oil drillers often encounter pockets of methane crystals as they dig into the earth.

As the bubble rose up the drill column from the high-pressure environs of the deep to the less pressurized shallows, it intensified and grew, breaking through various safety barriers, Bea said.

"A small bubble becomes a really big bubble," Bea said. "So the expanding bubble becomes like a cannon shooting the gas into your face."

Up on the rig, the first thing workers noticed was the sea water in the drill column suddenly shooting back at them, rocketing 240 feet in the air, he said. Then, gas surfaced. Then oil.

"What we had learned when I worked as a drill rig laborer was swoosh, boom, run," Bea said. "The swoosh is the gas, boom is the explosion and run is what you better be doing."

The gas flooded into an adjoining room with exposed ignition sources, he said.

"That's where the first explosion happened," said Bea, who worked for Shell Oil in the 1960s during the last big northern Gulf of Mexico oil well blowout. "The mud room was next to the quarters where the party was. Then there was a series of explosions that subsequently ignited the oil that was coming from below."

According to one interview transcript, a gas cloud covered the rig, causing giant engines on the drill floor to run too fast and explode. The engines blew off the rig and set "everything on fire," the account said. Another explosion below blew more equipment overboard.

A couple things stand out..."A chemical reaction caused by the setting cement created heat..." There has to be a way to limit that heat generation, or isolate the setting cement from the semisolid methane that just so happened to be at wrong place at the wrong time.

It seems there was a 'party' of BP executives on the platform at the time of the disaster, celebrating the rig's safety record. Maybe someone was distracted, didn't realize or missed a step. Best to keep the party in the boardrooms, not where people are actually working.

Oh, and ..."The gas flooded into an adjoining room with exposed ignition sources..." That exposed ignition sources could be as simple as a thrown switch arcing or a blender motor or...a cigarette? Unforgivable. There should be NO 'exposed ignition sources' at all on a rig that might just be find itself clouded with methane gas, especially during such an operation as sealing the bore column.

While there are no 100% guarantees for success, working at a mile down under where the pressures are over a ton per square inch, it seems to me that BP was a bit sloppy. But only a deep analysis and investigation will determine exactly what happened, but my preliminary gut feeling is that BP didn't operate as well as should be expected.