Article in the FT.
Designer of clean-up ship rues missed opportunity:
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/42ba810e-5de4 ... ab49a.html
A project to build a rapid-response “oil spill battleship” that could have helped clean up the Deepwater Horizon leak was presented to US politicians and oil companies 20 years ago but rejected on cost grounds, according to the man who designed it.
Herman J. Schellstede is an oil man’s oil man. He assigns no blame for the potential pollution disaster threatening four US states. He says BP, which leased the rig, is “a first-class oil company” and Transocean, which built it, is among the best in the world.
He also has no truck with “those people in Washington who say ‘stop drilling’ ”. He added: “There’s a lot of history here in the Gulf. You don’t just eradicate it because BP had a bad day.”
However, Mr Schellstede, 72, believes the industry and the inhabitants of the Gulf of Mexico coast would be facing less of a crisis today if the oil companies had taken him up on a proposal he believes would have limited the impact of a deepwater blowout. As head of Herman J. Schellstede and Associates, which he founded in the 1960s in the Louisiana town of New Iberia, he was called in after the Exxon Valdez spilled 10m gallons of crude off the Alaskan coast in 1989 in what was one of the biggest oil pollution disasters.
Mr Schellstede’s task was to devise systems for incinerating oil-polluted waste. “I saw how inept we were at that time. I’ve never seen anything like it. They had housewives scooping up oil from small boats.”
The Alaska disaster persuaded him and his design team to turn their attention to the problem of pollution from a deepwater leak, at a time when deepwater drilling was still in its infancy.
They drew up a plan and a prototype for a 275ft by 217ft, 33-storey-high vessel that could be deployed to a spill site within 18 hours, encircle the slick with 20ft-high booms as used in the turbulent North Sea, sweep and clean 20,000 barrels of oil every 24 hours via three circular sweepers 40ft in diameter, return the water to the sea and transfer the salvaged crude to barges moored alongside.
The prototype model, housed in the gymnasium of the former New Iberia school where Mr Schellstede has his offices, resembles a semi-submersible oil rig, like the offshore fire ships that have been deployed in the North Sea since the 1980s.
The detailed prospectus for the so-called Sea Clean project, a copy of which he provided to the Financial Times, was presented to some 300 government officials, industry leaders and the press at a meeting in Anchorage, Alaska, in 1990.
It was also presented to congressmen in Washington, including Al Gore – then a senator – with whom Mr Schellstede had a two-hour meeting. “I don’t think I ever got over to him what was wrong – that it was a deepwater problem. Deepwater was just starting. I looked for government support to propose it to the oil companies. I told them, ‘We’ve a got a different frontier here. It’s a different ball game and we need other tools.’ ”
Exxon and other oil companies expressed enthusiasm for the project but turned it down on cost grounds, according to Mr Schellstede, and because it addressed a problem they did not believe existed.
“They concluded it was a wonderful design but they couldn’t invest $100m in it. They might have been right. We went a long time without any problems.”
He estimates that such a vessel would now cost $220m to build.
In 1990, Lieutenant Commander P. A. Tebeau of the US Coast Guard wrote to the federal environment engineering office, saying of the Sea Clean project: “We believe this proposal shows technical merit and ingenuity but would require additional research and development.”
As a project manager and designer in the oil industry for 43 years, Mr Schellstede believes companies have gone as far as they can in terms of safety. However, a standing fleet of rapid-deployment vessels would act as an insurance policy.
When his father, Herman “Blackie” Schellstede, worked on the first offshore rig in Louisiana’s Ship Shoal Block 32 in 1947, there were no regulations governing the industry. That has changed, but the response to the latest crisis had still been piecemeal.
“Everything they’ve had to piece together, we would have had on site.”
