The explosion on Transocean Ltd’s drilling rig Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico has made politicians, oil executives and environmentalists sit up and take notice that safety measures employed by maritime platforms extracting oil from the ocean floor could be wholly inadequate in the case of a serious accident.
The Deepwater Horizon was equipped with a “blowout preventer,” a house-sized metal device that was supposed to seal the pipeline that brings the oil to the surface shut. The President of BP America testified to the House of Representatives committee that this device was “fail-safe”. But, at the critical moment it did not work. Next a large cement “dome” chamber lowered over the well failed to contain the oil flow.
The fallout from this environmental disaster has been immediate. Now the US will not permit drilling in new undersea areas until the findings of the investigation into the Deepwater Horizon accident are known. In Canada there is a renewed concerned over the safety of drilling for oil and gas in the Arctic Beaufort Sea. No exploratory wells have yet been authorized, but oil companies have invested hundreds of millions of dollars to lease large areas of the seabed for exploration.
The response of Canada’s Environment Minister, Jim Prentice, to questions asked in the House of Commons about Beaufort Sea drilling following the Deepwater Horizon accident was low-key but confident. He stated that Canada protects this area by the most robust offshore drilling policies anywhere in the world.
Oversight of off-shore drilling is controlled by the National Energy Board, an independent federal agency that regulates parts of Canada’s energy sector. Oil and gas companies that want to drill in the Arctic must first get regulatory approvals from the Board. To do that, they must show they will drill relief wells in case of an accident or provide an alternative safety plan.
Oil companies have argued relief wells in the North are not practical, since it would take too long to drill them if there is an accident. It is hard to disagree, considering that to drill a relief well just offshore in the Gulf of Mexico could take two- three months. In the meantime the Deepwater Horizon well is spewing oil at the rate of 5,000 barrels a day.
The oil and gas companies continue to place their faith in blowout preventers, claiming that they have developed similar but newer technology that would shut down an Arctic well after a similar accident before it got out of control. Toronto Globe & Mail writer Eric Reguly bets on more exploration: his article (Business B2 May 13, 2010) is headlined “Is this the end of off-shore drilling? Not a chance”. Click here to read the article.
Faith in newer technology is a characteristic response of businesses with economic interests to protect. But nature can prove to be too much for human artifice, and the consequences of a large scale oil spill in the Arctic could last for decades, if not centuries.
The stakes are high: please use the blog feature to tell us what you think!
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Another shocking and telling fact that emerged from this ‘accident’ is that the US Interior Department granted BP with a bogus exemption from undertaking an extensive environmental impact analysis last year of their Gulf of Mexico drilling, as reported in the Washington Post on May 5, 2010 (click here to read the article). BP successfully lobbied the government for the exemption in projects where environmental damage is likely to be “minimal or non-existent”. As hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil continue to spew into the Gulf every day, clearly this exemption should never have been granted. As Kierán Suckling, Executive Director of the Center for Biological Diversity commented, the role of the government agency that granted the exemption “has devolved to little more than rubber-stamping British Petroleum’s self-serving drilling plans” and put BP “entirely in control” of the way it conducts its drilling.
Even more disturbing, and proving Suckling’s point, is that since the Gulf of Mexico disaster, the Centre for Biological Diversity reports that as of May 7, 2010, the same government agency has approved a staggering 27 new drilling projects in the Gulf, granting the same exemption to 26 of them, including 2 BP projects (click here to read the release).
This is a very clear example of how industry controls the government, not the other way around. When prospective environmental regulations and climate change pacts that would make life difficult for companies such as BP fail to materialize or fall through, this is usually why.
As seen on CBC, May 24, 2010, the very same US Interior Department that granted BP the waiver that exempt BP from conducting rigorous environmental testing of its Gulf of Mexico drilling projects had the audacity to now wash their hands entirely of the disaster, claiming that this is “a BP mess”. It was quite shameless. I can’t fathom how they are not being made to answer for having granted the bogus exemption that potentially allowed this disaster to happen, and for subsequently granting 26 more such exemptions!
Does anyone have thoughts on the matter?
this seems to go back to Cheyne, the oil man who let the oil cos. write/erase the regulations, but Clinton had apparently been in favour of gutting gov’t. regulation
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