Chevron Got North Sea Contract Despite IT Safety Crashes

DMandPenfold writes "The UK government gave Chevron the go-ahead in September to drill in the North Sea off the coast of Scotland, in spite of the US oil giant's admission that its contractor's spill prediction software constantly crashed and was not a reliable predictor of how far oil could travel if an accident took place. The news comes in a week that US investigations into BP's disastrous Deepwater Horizon oil spill hit the buffers, after an IT contractor firm refused to hand over access to its software."

Re:North sea oil

[MrQuacker]

The positions that control contracts like this are all controlled by tenured bureaucrats, regardless of what "face" the rest of the government is wearing this election period.

We've been doing it for years.

[Gordonjcp]

People have been drilling in deep water in the North Sea for decades, with admittedly a couple of nasty accidents [wikipedia.org], but so far things have gone pretty well. And do you know what? No-one had oil spill prediction software when they started. They relied on the skill and experience of the people operating the rigs.

Bear in mind that this is the UK, where we have far, far tighter safety regulations than the US for the oil industry. We know what we're doing. Oil companies in the US clearly don't, or don't care to do it properly.

Re:We've been doing it for years. (Piper Alpha)

[Required Snark]

The worst oil rig disaster, in terms of lives lost, in history. 1988, the North Sea.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piper_Alpha [wikipedia.org]

"An explosion and resulting fire destroyed it on July 6, 1988, killing 167 men, with only 59 survivors. The death toll includes two crewmen of a rescue vessel. Total insured loss was about £1.7 billion (US$ 3.4 billion). At the time of the disaster the platform accounted for approximately ten percent of North Sea oil and gas production, and was the worst offshore oil disaster in terms of lives lost and industry impact."

"People were still getting off the platform several hours after the initial fires and explosions. The main problem was that most of the personnel who had the authority to order evacuation had been killed when the first explosion destroyed the control room. This was a consequence of the platform design, including the absence of blast walls. Another contributing factor was that the nearby connected platforms Tartan and Claymore continued to pump gas and oil to Piper Alpha until its pipeline ruptured in the heat in the second explosion. Their operations crews did not believe they had authority to shut off production, even though they could see that Piper Alpha was burning."

Re:You do know what Guy Fawkes was fighting for?

[h00manist]

IMHO.... Guy-Fawkes-Anonymous guys should get smart, read, and analyze what they're getting into. Bombing parliament-type strategies might have been considered standard revolution practice when Fawkes was around (and make great movie scripts), but now it seems pretty widely considered counterproductive and obsolete. It seems that real wars now take place at the level of espionage, corruption, media manipulation, and legal-political cheating. Which is why WikiLeaks is effective. Violence is still widely used, but it has to be either covert, blamed on the other guys, or joined with public manipulation to justify it. Generally with some argument that's if for a "greater good" - preferably killing the bad guys, if not possible some non-verifiable non-visible concepts such as "protecting democracy", "national interests". But just using violence without those is hard to justify anymore. I think that strategy of militancy, and even for the military, is pretty much gone. Governments still use it because they can - they have greater firepower, and media power. But still, they always run the risk of creating even greater opposition, so try to hide/justify it.