Pressure tightens on bolt problems

WASHINGTON — Federal regulators are increasing pressure on the Gulf of Mexico’s offshore drilling industry to figure out why the bolts that hold together critical undersea equipment are failing.

Brian Salerno, director of the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, said at a news conference in Washington Monday that he wanted to see answers “sooner rather than later.”

“We need to have the root cause before we dictate a solution,” he said. “It’s in nobody’s interest to have a catastrophic failure.”

The government urgency on a problem that stretches back more than a decade comes as more and more incidents come to light of bolts breaking while under the intense pressure and loads involved in containing the oil and gas that spew forth from underground wells.

General Electric Oil & Gas, one of three primary suppliers, issued a global recall after its bolts on a piece of undersea equipment in the Gulf failed in 2012, releasing more than 400

barrels of drilling fluid into the water.

So far the other two manufacturers, Houstonbased National Oilwell Varco and Cameron, a Houston company acquired by oil services giant Schlumberger earlier this year, have not issued recalls.

Pulling equipment up to the surface can cost oil companies hundreds of thousands of dollars a day, testing their commitment to shareholders against that of preventing a repeat of an accident on the scale of BP’s Deepwater Horizon in 2010.

The American Petroleum Institute, which sets standards on oil and gas drilling equipment, has been examining its specifications on bolts in light of the reports, said Erik Milito, director of upstream and industry operations for the American Petroleum Institute.

“Were looking at materials. We’re looking at design. We’re looking at stress,” he said Monday “We believe we have a holistic approach in place to address all the factors.”

Right now government officials say they do not know how many cases of bolt failures have occurred because companies are not required to report them unless there is an injury or a spill. That will change with new rules put into place by the safety bureau this year.

The offshore drilling industry had discussed possibly replacing all the bolts in question in the Gulf over a period of years. But those discussions have ended pending a better understanding of the problem, Salerno said.

“There was some back and forth, but the thinking has evolved on this,” he said.

Within the bureau, which was created after the Deepwater Horizon spill, the belief is that before any action is taken engineers must first figure out what is causing the bolts to fail. Possibilities include flaws in the fabrication process or simple overtightening of bolts during installation in the field.

Bureau officials have drawn in scientists from government agencies including the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to sit on a task force. On Monday, the bureau staged a forum in Washington with speakers from inside and outside the agency, to present what they know so far.

Bolt failures have plagued structures from bridges to aircraft carriers, prompting President George H.W. Bush to sign into law in 1990 tougher standards on the bolt industry.

“The marine environment is one of the harshest for metals,” said Tim Foeke, a director with the National Institute of Standards and Technology who is sitting on the BSEE task force. “We’re just getting started (on the investigation). We’re trying to figure out what information exists and what information needs to be developed.”

Already, those discussions with outside interests have opened the possibility that the bolt failures on undersea oil and gas equipment might extend to facilities on land. Likewise, officials at BSEE are also interested by reports from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that bolts at some nuclear reactors were breaking, likely due to radiation exposure over decades.

“There’s some indications that the problem may manifest itself in other industries,” Salerno said. “Pipelines for instance onshore potentially could be affected if the issues are related to torquing or stress corrosion, things like that.”