After facing a significant fine from the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission for failures leading to an explosion and fire last March, Bill Barrett Corp. conducted an internal investigation and found major flaws in its practices. The company also was required to conduct a volatility study to help characterize whether oil in certain locations throughout the Wattenberg Field was more flammable than others.
Bill Barrett officials say they recognized their responsibility in the fire, paid a $17,000 fine and implemented steps immediately to reduce its risk of a repeat situation.
“We committed to a project with COGCC to investigate flammability, to better characterize the oil that’s produced, and we’ll be sitting down with fire departments so they’re better able to respond,” said Duane Zavadil, vice president of government regulatory affairs and environmental health and safety for Bill Barrett. “It raises the bar on the level of knowledge.”
Bill Barrett officials sampled oil throughout Weld County, in different stages of production. What they found, ultimately, is the volatility and flammability of the oil doesn’t vary much.
“The goal was to try to characterize the oil with an eye toward emergency response,” Zavadil said. “There didn’t seem to be any real trend we could offer up. That’s useful in that the character of the oil seems to be relatively consistent over time as it’s produced and in its flammability and volatility across the basin.
“That’s useful information in that we don’t need to be doing something different.”
The company presented results of its study to COGCC in December. Results will be shared with industry peers and Weld County emergency responders within the next 30 days, Zavadil said.
The volatility study was only one requirement of the COGCC after Bill Barrett’s fire northwest of Greeley on March 3, 2014, in which two employees received minor injuries and were treated at the scene.
At the time of the fire, the company was using temporary production tanks – which are on wheels, difficult to ground and only allow for top filling of well production fluids. According to an incident analysis report conducted after the fire by Bill Barrett, an employee of Rooney Petroleum Service, one of Barrett’s contractors, drove onto the site in his personal vehicle and parked next to a well head near the mobile separator. Oil was flowing through the separator and into open top frac tanks.
The vehicle is believed to have ignited flammable gas and hydrocarbon vapor from the frac tanks, which set the liquid on fire in four tanks.
“The practice of flowing to open-top tanks was in use for at least two weeks prior to the incident,” according to a root-cause analysis prepared by Bill Barrett Corp. “In this time, many people, both BBC employees and contractors, observed the practice and no one identified it as a hazard – or if they did, they did not say anything.”
Several contractors said they thought it was “normal” practice to use open-top tanks. “It is clear that the RPS (Rooney Petroleum Service) employee who parked his truck next to the oil tank had no understanding of the hazard posed by the oil in the tank and the associated vapor,” the analysis report said.
The report said the contractor hadn’t established an exclusion zone around the oil tanks, nor were they able to produce any documentation the vapor hazards were discussed in any safety meetings.
“The contractor and BBC personnel involved with the pre-incident operations at the Merritt pad (where the fire occurred) lacked the skill and/or experience to recognize the hazards posed by the storage of oil in open topped tanks,” the analysis said.
Immediately, Bill Barrett Corp. implemented a vehicular exclusion zone at least 75 feet from flowback tanks. It also stated in a report that all tanks would be bonded and grounded and a ground rod would be provided for trucks.
Also contributing to the blaze was a push for production by senior management, according to the analysis. The area superintendent and production foreman had asked to slow down the completions crew by a few days so flow lines could be installed, which would have eliminated the need to store oil at the site. The request was denied by senior management.
That push by management was linked to the fact the well had already been fracked, Barrett’s Zavadil said.
“We were in a situation where you can’t shut in these wells. You don’t frac a well and then let it sit,” Zavadil said. “There was clearly a timing issue that folks felt compelled to use the temporary equipment.”
Timing issues have not been a problem since, he said.
After last year’s fire, Bill Barrett stopped using temporary tanks immediately and implemented a new service in hopes of improving communications with contractors. The company hired a third-party health and safety inspector to “roam” sites and look for compliance issues or other “hiccups,” Zavadil said.
The Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission is “generally satisfied with how this matter has been addressed,” according to Todd Hartman, communications director for the Colorado Department of Natural Resources which oversees the COGCC.
Bill Barrett also is confident it has addressed all issues that led to its fire.
“We are hopeful that the circumstances that led to that fire, that we’ve addressed them and eliminated the opportunity of future occurrence of a similar event,” Zavadil said.