A Sea in Flames - Carl Safina [55]
Drawback 1: kinks in the pipe have been slowing the rate of leak; cutting the pipe will facilitate a higher flow. Before the pipe is cut, the government has estimated that the oil is flowing at 12,000 to 19,000 barrels a day—meaning at least 20 million gallons since April 21. Now BP says that cutting the kinked pipe will increase the flow by as much as 20 percent. (It’ll be more like 300 percent.)
Coast Guard admiral Thad Allen says, “If we don’t get as clean a cut as we want, then we’ll put something called a ‘top hat’ over it, which is a little wider fitting, but you have an increased chance that some oil will come out around the sides.” Definition of “increased chance”: 100 percent certainty. And note: “we,” thrice. Quite the sense of camaraderie, the admiral and BP. Boot on their neck or feather boa?
And that brings us to Drawback 2: the diamond blade gets stuck, and a pair of remotely operated hydraulic shears finish a rougher-than-intended job.
“It is an engineer’s nightmare,” says a Louisiana State University professor. “They’re trying to fit a 21-inch cap over a 20-inch pipe a mile away using little robots. That’s just horrendously hard to do.” Tulane Energy Institute’s associate director says it’s like trying to place a tiny cap on an open fire hydrant.
BP is doing all it can. “No one wants this over more than I do,” says BP CEO Tony Hayward. “I’d like my life back.”
So would the families of the people who died on the rig. So would everyone in the Gulf region. Hello.
Meanwhile, an oil spill in Alaska has caused a shutdown of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. And in a piece headlined “That Was Then, This Is Then,” MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Show points out that in June 1979, an Alaska spill shut the pipeline at the same time oil gushed for months from a blown-out Mexican well in the Gulf of Mexico. “If you close your eyes and listen to the news reports from back then,” she says, “you’d be forgiven for thinking you were listening to today’s news.” Back then, the well was being drilled by the same company that later changed its name to Transocean. Its blowout preventer had failed. The responses included spreading chemical dispersants, putting out booms along shorelines, and burning floating oil. People worried about “underwater plumes” and the possibility that currents would carry oil to Florida. Being Mexican, they did not have a “top hat”; they tried a “sombrero.” When that failed, they tried forcing stuff down the top and pumping metal balls into the well to jam it up. And when that failed, a pair of relief wells finally stopped the blowout. Maddow’s summation: “The stuff that did not work then is the same stuff that does not work now: same busted blowout preventer, same ineffective booms, same toxic dispersant, same failed containment domes, same junk shot, same top kill; it’s all the same.” Point being: nothing’s changed in preparedness or response. What’s changed is the depth. Ixtoc was in about 160 feet of water; the present blowing well starts a mile down. “All they’ve gotten better at,” Maddow notes, “is making the risks worse.”
Congress has certainly played a role—and been played—in encouraging risky drilling. One trend has been to undo the tapestry of prior protections. In 1995, Congress “decided” to reduce the government’s royalties on oil and gas extracted from deep water (you can bet the idea came from Big Oil in an envelope marked “Campaign Contribution”). The goal and result: more drilling encouraged. Okay, fine; bringing more of our oil under domestic production is good for national security. But other nations charge more. Oil taxes and royalties in the United States are considered much lower than elsewhere in the world. Our country should benefit financially, as the oil companies do. And what else isn’t fine is that this encouraged more and riskier drilling but not more safety. Industry assurances that