Murphy's Law and the Stupidity of Obama's 'Drill Baby,
Drill' Offshore Oil Policy
03 May 2010By Dave Lindorff
British Petroleum had a fail-safe system for its
Deepwater Horizon floating deep-water drilling rig.
You know, the one that blew up and sank in the Gulf of
Mexico, leaving a tangled spaghetti pile of 22-inch
steel pipe one mile long all balled up on the sea
floor a mile below the surface, and that is leaking
oil at 42,000 gallons per day...so far. (Note: as of
Thursday, the Coast Guard has upped the leak rate to
over 200,000 gallons of crude a day, meaning that over
a month and a half it could release the amount of oil
carried by a supertanker--and remember, this leak
could get worse.)
The thing is, the fail-safe system, about the size of
a McMansion sitting at the wellhead on the ocean
floor, um, failed. It didn’t collapse and shut off the
flow of oil as intended, and it could take months now
to shut the well down--during which time the leak rate
is likely to increase to up to 300,000 gallons per
day, or over two million gallons a week.
President Obama claimed last month that off-shore
drilling technology had become so advanced that oil
spills and blowouts were a thing of the past. Of
course, as he said this, Australia and Indonesia were
still assessing the damage from a similar offshore oil
platform, the Montana, in the Timor Sea, which blew
out and poured millions of gallons of oil into the
ocean off Western Australia for over three months
before it could be sealed off.
Murphy’s Law: Anything that can go wrong will go
wrong.
Given that this is true, particularly of complex
technological enterprises, the question that needs to
be asked is not, what is the probability of a
catastrophic failure of an offshore well, but what is
the potential damage in the event of even one such
catastrophe for the local environment?
In the case of the Deepwater Horizon, the potential
damage if this well really blows is staggering. Just
50 miles off the coast of Louisiana, it poses a near
fatal risk to the region’s wetlands and bayous, with
their shrimp and oyster fisheries, not to mention the
breeding grounds they provide for endangered birds,
fish and other animals.
But the real lesson of the Deepwater Horizon is what
it means for expanded drilling in the Arctic waters
north of Alaska.
Oil companies, including BP, Exxon Mobil, Chevron,
Shell and others, like Goldman traders looking at a
tranch of subprime mortgages, are casting covetous
eyes on the Arctic Ocean and the oil and gas that
studies suggest lie under the virgin sea floor. Their
plan is to drill for these hydrocarbons once the
summer sea ice vanishes as a result of rising global
temperatures (more about this in a future article).
Obama, as part of his opening of more coastal areas to
drilling, is including areas of the Beaufort and
Chukchi Seas, which are already ice free during
summer.
But let’s think about this for a moment. Suppose there
were a blowout like the one in the Gulf of Mexico at a
rig drilling in the Arctic? Suppose it happened
towards the end of the short summer, when the ice was
about to return to cover the ocean surface? If it was
a blowout that couldn’t be plugged, like the Montana
blowout in the Timor Sea, or if the fail-safe system
at the wellhead failed, as with the Deepwater Horizon,
and if the only solution was, as with the Montana
well, to drill new wells to ease the pressure on the
blown well, how would this be done, once the ice moved
in?
Answer? It couldn’t be done. Murphy’s Law again. And
so millions of gallons of crude oil would rise up out
of the burst wellhead to spread out underneath the
ice, whence it would eventually move on to destroy
hundreds of miles of fragile coastline, probably
killing untold numbers of species that live in the
affected waters. The damage from such a completely
predictable disaster wouldn’t just be staggering, like
the Montana or the Deepwater Horizon blowouts, but
incomprehensible!
So why are we even talking about this?
The argument, made ad nauseum by Republicans and
Democrats alike, is that the US needs more energy, and
that we don’t want to be dependent for our oil on
“countries that hate us.”
And yet, there is a much simpler answer than hanging a
hydrocarbon Sword of Damocles over our nation’s
critical coastal areas. Just copy Europe and impose a
100% tax on gas and oil, to make people turn away from
15 or 20 or 25-mile-per-gallon vehicles and start
driving fuel-efficient cars, car-pooling or forgoing
cars altogether.
Even better, tax the crap out of cars that don’t get
at least 35 or even 40 mpg.
Oh, I know. People will say, “but poor people in rural
areas or in the suburbs can’t pay those rates for gas
to get to work, and they have to buy used cars that
don’t get such high mileage rates.”
I understand the problem, but it is solvable, by
establishing refundable tax credits for low-income
people who can document long commuting distances, for
example.
The main point is that the country doesn’t need to
drill in risky settings. It needs only to cut oil
consumption.
What’s clear is that drilling in the open ocean is
simply disaster after disaster waiting to happen.
That brings us to another lesson from this disaster:
the corrupt role of corporations in rigging the
political system to prevent any kind of safety or
environmental regulation and the corrupt role of our
government in catering to corporate interests. Just as
the Massey mine explosion in early April revealed how
the coal industry has successfully killed efforts to
inspect and keep mines safe for workers, the BP
Deepwater Horizon disaster shows how the oil industry
has successfully fought off environmental protection
rules. The oil industry lobbiests and their wads of
cash handed out to members of Congress kept Congress
and the EPA from establishing rules that would have
required rigs like this one to have a remote switch
system that could have triggered a wellhead shutdown
on the ocean floor manually. Some countries, like
Norway, require such manual backups on offshore
drilling rigs, but the US oil industry (and foreign
firms like BP), argued in the US that they shouldn't
have to spend the $500,000 that such systems cost.
That argument looks kind of stupid now, with BP
spending a reported $6 million a day fighting the
spill.
©
EsinIslam.Com
Add Comments