Safe and effective well control must be fundamental to drilling for hydrocarbons. Yes?
And yet the Macondo disaster of April 2010 happened.
It shocked the offshore industry and became catalyst to massive changes, especially in the US.
Safety was pushed to the fore; sloppiness and cozy relationships were supposedly given marching orders.
Among initiatives seeded by Macondo, together with mounting concern worldwide that drilling and especially well control safety, was due an overhaul, was the creation of the Well Control Institute last year.
While it has an independence, it sits under the wing of the International Association of Drilling Contractors.
The WCI grew out of work done by IADC and its well-cap advisory panel to significantly improve the well-cap training standard and curriculum. But to succeed it had to achieve buy-in from a very broad church.
Here’s how IADC describes it:
“The Well Control Institute (WCI) brings together representatives from drilling industry stakeholders to develop the comprehensive solutions necessary to significantly improve well control performance worldwide.
“With a belief that well control impacts, and is impacted by, every facet of the drilling industry and process, the WCI ensures that operators, contractors, equipment manufacturers, regulators and service providers have the forum to collaborate on well control initiatives and work products.”
And the man hired to make this vision happen is Cason Swindle whose last role was as the director of learning & development at Noble Drilling (2006 through to early this year).
Swindle is no dyed in the wool drilling or well control engineer. Indeed his original passion is music.
What he brings to the WCI table as executive director more than anything else is a razor sharp mind.
“Our express purpose is improvement of human performance in well control,” says Swindle. “We may find in the future that we expand beyond that, but right now we’re firmly focused on human performance on well control.”
He is in no doubt about the catalytic role played by Macondo.
“I would say that it has been the seminal event to focus the industry on a number of clearly important elements regarding safety and stewardship; fundamentally around well control.
“In the same way Piper Alpha focused the UK industry on personnel safety, Macondo focused the industry on process safety, major hazards safety, including the full scope of well control . . . people, equipment and systems.
“There are organisations around the world . . . trade associations, regulators, individual companies and subject matter focus groups who are focused on different aspects of well control.
“However, WCI is around improving human performance in well control. For us that means those who either directly or indirectly impact the success of well control operations worldwide.”
WCI started out with a global remit and this must be reflected in its governance, initiatives and outreach.
It means that Swindle is already clocking up the air-miles, meeting with regulators, trade associations and industry members in different countries; seeking to understand where the challenges are, see where WCI can improve its focus, participation and initiatives.
The executive board of 16 members, which first met in May, is global, with US, European, Asian, South American and Middle East representation.
And the WCI team is for now tiny. Just Swindle based in Houston and Malcolm Lodge located in Aberdeen is director of training and assessment.
Swindle: “He took the recommendations of the IADC Wellcap advisory panel, which I chaired, and he has since been working with small groups of subject matter experts around the industry to turn those recommendations into greatly revised standards and curricula for well control training.
“These were recently published with a view to seeking public input.
“After the comment review period, the plan is to launch those for training providers, contractors, operators and regulators, and to begin to make the shift towards the new standards starting at the start of Q3 (this year).
“This is our first big initiative and has been ongoing as WCI has itself been developing. We now have our executive board in place; our advisory panel is in place; indeed our first advisory panel meeting as the WCI advisory panel was held in Aberdeen.”
Swindle says it is important to realise that WCI is a standalone organisation with its own governance. While it has ties back to IADC, this is said to be for practical back office reasons.
While the WCI team can get on with developing its programmes, the IADC administers them on an ongoing basis.
“When someone gets a well control certificate under WellCAP (training) it’s the IADC staff who run the administrative function of it,” says Swindle.
“WCI owns and governs the standard and goes out and creates additional initiatives to support improving well control performance.”
Another asset that the IADC can bring to the table is its network of chapters worldwide, like the North Sea.
Swindle: “We spend quite a bit of time meeting with chapter representatives; I’ve met the North Sea ones; spoken at chapter meeting in Brazil at Macae; so no question, we get an international presence through IADC’s representative across many parts of the world.”
But to really gain traction an organisation like this needs more people, so how is Swindle dealing with this?
“We’re doing so in a methodical fashion. We need to keep the WCI team small and focused and leverage resources in the organisations that support WCI, of course including IADC.”
The board is critical in terms of steering the institute and it has set the strategic direction for Swindle and Lodge.
Three key early objectives comprise; to draw up a revised well control training standard; the second is an alliance that WCI has created with a subject matter expert group to create a BOP (blow-out preventer) maintenance credentialing programme; and the third is to draw up a well control efforts map.
Let’s concentrate on the BOP dimension. In a nutshell, the BOP credentialing programme will create the means for those who work with these great lumps of metal to demonstrate competence . . . both knowledge and skill in those specific BOP maintenance tasks; understanding that human error and BOP maintenance is a significant contributor to BOP downtime and ultimately reliability.
“It isn’t the sole source of BOP reliability challenges but is certainly significant,” says Swindle.
“An outside group assembled by Chevron began looking at this particular issue about a year ago.
“WCI had some conversations with them and they have decided to align with us. So we will ultimately assist them . . . and we’re doing this now . . . in the design, development and ultimately implementation of that programme.
“We will be responsible for the content of that programme; it will go through the industry members’ review and approval process so that the industry stakeholders who sit on the advisory panel and executive board have seen it, reviewed it, approved it and so-forth.
“Then, ultimately, we’ll partner with IADC to implement the programme so that we can have true credentialing for BOP maintenance and tasks worldwide . . . something the industry’s never had.
“That has the potential for huge and positive impact on the reliability of our well control equipment.”
Swindle acknowledges that the reach is not yet global; obviously the Americas and Europe, indeed anywhere where Western contractors are active, such as Africa and across Asia-Pacific, but what about China? Or Russia? And what about their growing global influence, especially the Chinese?
“Both China and Russia are on our radar but they haven’t been as consistent as participants in the broader industry as we would like to have them be and hope that they will be in the future, recognising that there are challenges to having that happen,” he says.
“We believe there is certainly great opportunity for inclusion.
“They’ve been able to be largely independent from the wider community; that’s my opinion. But their presence and therefore impact are growing. At OTC, China’s presence was enormous.
“I think there’s opportunity to engage with the Chinese. Fortunately, in a previous role, I did a fair amount of work in China and so I have some connections there that could potentially help us make inroads. I’m hopeful we’ll get that opportunity very soon.”
Turning to Russia, Swindle hopes current tensions will ease and that everyone can get on with life, including the oil and gas industry.
“I’m certainly hopeful that we’ll have an opportunity to engage our Russian counterparts, indeed engage in what is truly a worldwide drilling industry challenge and need to ensure the safety of our people and the environment,” says Swindle, acknowledging that building bridges with either would be a mammoth task on its own.
“We’re having to come together as a community where we may have had very different agendas or ideas and really start to collaborate in a new way.
“This is the beginning of what I believe will be a fairly long journey, as it has been with personal safety.
“As we have seen, personal safety post Piper Alpha improved dramatically. I believe we can achieve the same kind of results in well control performance.”
As for why he, Cason Swindle, got the top job at the WCI and not someone else, the reply is: “I have a track record in the drilling industry in particular in learning and development, which is my background at Noble Drilling and Frontier before that.
“Fundamentally my role and where I see my strength and the reason why I was chosen to take on this role is around building consensus and building an organisation.
“There are many people out there who are phenomenal subject matter experts in vast areas when it comes to well control equipment and systems and training. But my job is to help bring the industry stakeholders together, to find alignment and towards alignment and then bring the right subject matter experts and people together to help solve those problems.
“A huge piece of my work as well is about outreach. What is it going to take for results to be delivered worldwide and not just have the conversation and do the initiatives?”
Swindle is alert to the fact that the WCI has a portfolio of different “publics”, core among them being the drilling industry itself. His message remains the same but they have different interests.
“Certainly the drilling industry is our primary audience. They’re the ones who are doing the work. The initiatives don’t go anywhere until they are operationalised out in the fleet. So the drilling industry is the main audience.
“We also have an international audience of regulators. To truly understand what the challenges of each different region are, understanding the challenges of the regulators themselves is very important.
“We’ve had some really great conversations with ANP in Brazil, with BSEE (Bureau of Safety & Environmental Enforcement) in the US, with DECC and HSE in the UK. We’ll be meeting with other regulators in an upcoming Europe trip. So far we’ve had very positive interactions with them.
“But ultimately our audience is the public worldwide. We need to be the careful stewards of our people, our communities and our environment. And if we’re making progress on that, if we’re improving our game, ultimately our relationship with the public may improve as well.”
And he adds: “I don’t know of a time when senior leaders of operators, drilling contractors, well service providers and equipment manufacturers, have come together to focus exclusively on a single issue like well control.
The intention and interest and focus of the industry is there to do something very significant and for a long-term impact. The opportunity is right here and I believe WCI is positioned to be the organisation that can lead.”
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