In praise of the blowout preventer
Why you should know how Frank Seaver made his money
While researching and writing my recent essay on the dedication of Seaver College, I went down a rabbit hole to better understand how Frank Seaver made his money, which then turned into a quest to learn enough about oil drilling to understand the purpose of his Hydril Company’s products. Although the details of petroleum engineering aren’t exactly germane to my normal subject matter, I hope you’ll humor me as I try to better understand an important part of Pepperdine’s history.
Frank and Blanche Seaver, the most generous donors in the history of Pepperdine University, derived much of their wealth from the Hydril Company, which sold oil drilling equipment. It would be easy to learn this bare fact and conclude that Pepperdine must have been built with tainted money or that the university bears some disproportionate responsibility for global greenhouse gas emissions.1 Among other issues with this sort of argument, it betrays a rather shallow knowledge of just what Frank Seaver’s role was in the oil industry.
In order to (ahem) drill deeper into the legacy of the Seaver fortune, it will help to review the fundamentals of oil drilling so we can better understand the value of Mr. Seaver’s innovation. Before diving into the details, however, I’d like to offer a précis of my argument by way of an analogy.
Imagine Wendy is deeply troubled by the many deaths caused each year by car crashes, and she figures accordingly that a university funded in large part by Carco, a car-part manufacturer, bears a disproportionate responsibility for the destruction of so many innocent lives. But suppose further that Carco in fact makes the vast majority of its money selling seatbelts and airbags, which are of course mitigating the very problem Wendy professes to be concerned about. Were it not for Carco’s intervention in the market, many more people would be dying in car crashes. Shouldn’t someone like Wendy regard Carco as addressing a serious problem, and to the extent this informs her evaluation of any university funded by Carco’s profits, shouldn’t she regard such an institution as—if anything—less responsible for car crash deaths than universities not so funded?
In the rest of this essay, I’d like to suggest that Hydril’s role in the oil drilling industry is equivalent to Carco’s role in my little story. This analogy only obtains inasmuch as Hydril’s products are like seatbelts and airbags. In short, the equipment sold by Hydril was narrowly aimed at mitigating the harms of the oil industry, not contributing to them, so if our opinion of Pepperdine is at all informed by its connection to Hydril, it should be for the better.
Where the Seaver money came from
Hydril made much of its money selling a piece of oil drilling equipment called a blowout preventer (sometimes abbreviated by those in the industry to BOP). The job of a BOP is to prevent a blowout, which is the industry term for what happens when, in the course of drilling an oil well, the drill bit breaches a pocket of fluid (be it oil, natural gas, or even water) that is under so much pressure that the fluid rushes back up the borehole and erupts from the top of the well. There are different kinds of blowout preventers, but they all seal off the top of the well to keep everything contained in the event of unexpected and unbalanced downhole pressure.
Blowouts are dangerous to the people working on the rig, especially when the pressurized fluid spewing from the well is natural gas, which can explode. But blowouts can also be environmental disasters, leaking large amounts of methane into the atmosphere or leading to oil spills that can be difficult to stop once they’ve begun.2 Simply put, blowouts are really bad, and preventing them is good for human life and for the environment. BOPs protect against the worst harms of blowouts just like seatbelts and airbags protect a car’s passengers in a crash.
Hydril offered different kinds of blowout preventers, but the one that made them famous around the world (at least in the drilling industry) was the annular BOP. Frank Seaver didn’t invent the annular BOP, but he did hold patents for improvements to its design.3 Many sources claim that Hydril was the first company to sell a hydraulically operated blowout preventer, though I haven’t been able to confirm this claim. Either way, the Hydril name stands for Hydraulic Drilling Equipment.4
If you want to understand how annular blowout preventers work, there’s just no avoiding the geometry and physics of oil drilling. These details are important to my case that BOPs are safety equipment. I don’t have any credentials in petroleum engineering, so you’ll be wise to read the following section with an appropriate level of suspicion. But I think I understand enough about it to lay out some basic principles. (If you don’t care about the details, you can skip to the next section, but it’s actually pretty interesting and not just because I’ve spruced it up with a little etymology and a flower metaphor.)
How blowout preventers work
When you’re digging in search of oil, the drill bit is suspended in the hole by what’s called a drill string, which is less like a string and more like a pipe. The drill string contains various tubes inside it that we’ll discuss below, but for now it’s enough to say the drill string imparts rotation to the bit, driving the drill.
Because the drill bit is wider than the drill string, drilling leaves an empty ring-shaped space around the drill string that is called the annulus (from the Latin for ring). The annulus is typically pumped full of drilling mud, which cools the drill bit, carries the cuttings up to the surface, and—most important for our purposes—balances the pressure of the wellbore’s walls, which are always trying to cave in. The drilling mud is pumped from the surface down a tube in the drill string, out the drill bit, and into the annulus, whence it is circulated back up to the surface so the cuttings can be filtered out and the mud recycled.
Engineers pay careful attention to the consistency of their drilling mud because if it is not dense enough, the pressure from the walls of the wellbore, including any fluids in the rock formation such as oil, natural gas, or water, might force their way into the annulus, which is called a kick. When a well kicks, pressure in the annulus spikes as fluid floods into the wellbore, which might lead to a blowout as the pressurized fluid seeks an outlet at the surface.
This is where the blowout preventer comes in. When a well kicks and threatens to blow out, an annular BOP can seal off the top of the well by hydraulically squeezing together a ring of rubbery packing elements that converge on the drill string, closing the top of the annulus and preventing fluid from escaping. A BOP being activated sort of resembles a daisy pulling its petals inward for the night, except the “petals” are preventing highly pressurized fluids from ruining everyone’s day.
The legacy of the blowout preventer
Frank Seaver made so much money because Hydril’s annular BOPs were in demand everywhere anyone was drilling a deep hole. The devices were made so well and lasted so long that Hydril eventually decided to lease them rather than sell them to avoid saturating the market.5 Over the decades, Hydril’s blowout preventers have probably saved countless lives and untold environmental damage. If you’re worried about the oil industry polluting the environment, you should respect the inventors, manufacturers, and distributors of the blowout preventer.
Like a seatbelt, a blowout preventer doesn’t eliminate accidents entirely, it just makes the worst outcomes less likely. In 2010, an unlikely series of events on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico kept the rig’s blowout preventer from successfully sealing off the well during a kick. The blowout led to an explosion that killed eleven people, and the resulting oil spill dumped almost 5 million barrels of oil into the gulf, making it one of the largest environmental disasters in US history. Since the accident, the design of BOPs has been revisited, and the new models should be safer than ever. Deepwater Horizon is a sobering reminder of the risks involved in oil drilling and also of the kinds of scenes that would be much more common in a world without blowout preventers.
It’s not obvious to me that Pepperdine deserves any special credit for having been built in large part with the money Hydril earned by selling equipment to save lives and protect the environment. But if you’re inclined to think that it matters where a university’s donations originate from, I’d say at the very least you can rest easy in the case of Hydril.
I take this sort of consideration to underlie such arguments as one offered by student journalist Ali Levens, who quotes UC Berkeley professor Severin Borenstein: “If a university was enriched based on the production of fossil fuels […] they might feel more responsibility for doing something about it, now that we all have become aware that this is a real environmental problem.” See Ali Levens, “‘A Lack of Creativity’: An Investigation Into Pepperdine’s Relationship with Solar Energy,” The Graphic, 18 Sep. 2023. I don’t mean to single out Levens and Borenstein; I only offer them as evidence that this sort of argumentative move really is extant among discussions of Pepperdine specifically—my interlocutors are not entirely imagined.
One way to stop a blowout in the days before BOPs was to collapse the well using dynamite. Many techniques in well shooting were pioneered by Word A. (“Tex”) Thornton, whose son Charles Bates Thornton is the namesake of Pepperdine’s Thornton Administrative Center (TAC).
Albert L. Stone and Frank R. Seaver, “Packing head for oil wells,” 2,148,844A (1939).
These days Hydril still exists, but it has changed hands repeatedly over the last couple decades. Hydril was bought by a company called Tenaris in 2007. Early in 2008, Tenaris sold the pressure control division (the part of Hydril responsible for making blowout preventers) to General Electric (GE), where it merged with Baker Hughes in 2017. Since 2021, what remains of Hydril Pressure Control is part of a company called HMH, which still sells blowout preventers.
Bill Youngs, The Legacy of Frank Roger Seaver, Pepp. Univ. Press (1976): 93.