Spill? What Spill?

Oil spill? What oil spill?

BP's nonchalance over Gulf leak tars entire offshore drilling industry

By Lorne Gunter, Edmonton Journal May 16, 2010

Source

When you watch news reports of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, remember one thing: The hurricanes that regularly plague the Gulf often have enough force to churn up the seabed.

A Category 4 or 5 hurricane at the surface spins and whirls with such magnitude that the ocean floor 2,000 or even 3,000 feet below is sometimes turned over.

What has this to do with the Deepwater Horizons disaster? Plenty.

At the moment, being unable to cap the erupting wellhead a mile below, oil company crews, with the approval of government administrators, are injecting the spreading mess on the surface with dispersant -- chemicals designed to break up the enormous, creeping black blot that threatens the Gulf's freshwater deltas and saltwater marshes.

But dispersants are little more than a cosmetic coverup. They may even do more harm than good by masking the extent of the environmental catastrophe and breaking the oil up into smaller parcels that will be harder to clean up.

What's more, the dispersant may increase the formation of tar balls, globs of heavy, gooey black oil that often sink to the sea floor only to be carried to shore on currents and tides --- a few here, a few hundred there.

That's where the hurricanes come in.

If British Petroleum (BP) and its partners, coupled with the U.S. Department of the Interior, inject enough dispersant and create enough tar balls, these tacky ecological time bombs will keep being torn up from the ocean bed and brought to shore for decades and decades.

Just when Americans are certain the legacy of this tragedy has passed, another hurricane will come along and pick up scores of these viscous reminders of the Deepwater disaster and deposit them on some shore birds' nesting grounds or fragile oyster bed or sea life spawning zone.

I certainly do not favour a ban on offshore drilling. There are, at present, too few alternatives to oil and natural gas to power developed and developing economies alike.

It is naive in the extreme to believe we can simply proclaim our desire to find alternative energy sources and it will happen like magic.

Over time, alternatives will come, but what replaces hydrocarbons cannot be directed by government. Nor can they be predicted now.

Perhaps wind, solar or nuclear -- or some combination of the three -- will provide our future energy needs. But it is also possible that some as-yet-unknown source will emerge.

Still, while we wait for the replacement or replacements -- while we are still dependent on crude oil and natural gas -- and while we need to expand offshore exploration, the companies doing the drilling and exploring have to be better prepared for accidents than BP has shown itself to be in this case.

BP's attitude has appalled even a diehard free-marketer such as me.

First, it seemed to say "Oil spill? What oil spill?" Then when the slick could no longer be ignored, its attitude became one of nonchalance: "Don't worry. It's only a small leak."

To this day, neither the company nor the U.S. Department of the Interior seems prepared to admit the true extent of the disaster. Both are insisting that no more than 5,000 barrels a day are gushing from the broken well (after having insisted, disingenuously, for two weeks that it was only 1,000).

Meanwhile, independent engineers viewing the speed of the flow estimate the true rate at 20,000 to 70,000 barrels daily.

(The upper estimate would create an Exxon Valdez every four days.)

Indeed, BP's attitude seems still to be one of unconcern. They still seem to be saying it's no big deal. Even if it is a big deal, it's not our fault. Besides, what are you going to do, sue us? Government regulations limit the extent of our financial liability.

A story in Friday's Miami Herald claims BP employees had described the well as "troublesome" in the weeks leading up to the explosion in late April.

Unscheduled gas penetrations had occurred and three times during the course of the rig's final day there had been "sudden loud noises as bursts of pressure had been released." Pressure tests had shown a "disturbing imbalance." Nonetheless, BP pushed ahead.

Such a cowboy attitude does the cause of offshore drilling more harm than good.

According to a study by the National Center for Policy Analysis in Dallas, offshore drilling remains less damaging than shipping oil by tanker.

"Since 1991, oil tankers have still spilled three times as much oil as offshore platforms and more than twice as much as pipelines."

Even during hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005, very little oil spilled into the Gulf.

But there is no excuse for companies being shielded by governments from the full impact of the mistakes they make.

If they want to drill in sensitive areas, oil companies have to be more accountable, especially for the damage they do to others' property and livelihoods: fishermen, homeowners, boaters and entrepreneurs.

lgunter@shaw.ca
© Copyright (c) The Edmonton Journal

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