A Sea in Flames - Carl Safina [58]
The discerning reader may note this subtlety: there’s a slight difference among that planned capacity, the 1,000 barrels per day BP had first announced, its grudging acknowledgment and later insistence that 5,000 barrels were leaking, and its refusal to engage on the question of “how much” after Purdue professor Steve Wereley estimated 56,000 to 84,000 barrels. Yet BP plans to collect essentially the very same amount the professor estimated. What does that tell you?
Meanwhile, the Thadmiral says that within the next week all these activities “could take leakage almost down to zero.” Says he’s ordered a special task group to work up new estimates on how much oil is still gushing out. (It’s about time.) Says, “I’m not going to declare victory on anything until I have the numbers.” He adds for emphasis, “Show me the numbers.”
Here’s the only number we need: zero. Show us zero.
On June 9, BP shares hemorrhage an incredible 16 percent, to $29.20. BP shares have lost half their value, wiping off $90 billion in market capitalization, since the blowout began.
On June 10 the official government-accepted rate of leakage gets doubled. The U.S. government’s flow rate assessment team announces, “The lowest estimate that we’re seeing that the scientists think is credible is probably about 20,000 barrels, and the highest is probably a little over 40,000.” Twenty-five thousand, near the low-end estimate, is over 1 million gallons a day. The Exxon Valdez tanker leaked an estimated 11 million gallons.
“I think we’re still dealing with the flow estimate. We’re still trying to refine those numbers,” says—guess who—Coast Guard admiral Thad Allen. Almost certainly the rate is changing; it may be increasing, because once oil starts flowing out of a geologic formation, the rock erodes with the flow and the channels enlarge.
The Gulf isn’t the only thing hemorrhaging; BP stock closes down 6.7 percent, hitting its lowest level since 1997. The company’s market value has spilled billions. Its share price has collapsed more than 40 percent since the blowout began, leading some to raise the possibility of bankruptcy.
It occurs to me that this would be a time to buy, if I hadn’t sworn off fossil fuel stocks. Bankruptcy is just wishful thinking. BP is the third-largest oil company in the world, after ExxonMobil and Royal Dutch Shell, with 80,000 employees, sales of $239 billion in 2009, and a market value—even after the recent losses—of more than $100 billion. BP is multinational, traded on both the New York and the London stock exchanges, with Brits and Americans on its board of directors, and extensive U.S. holdings. In 1998 it merged with the American oil company Amoco. About 40 percent of its shares are held by American investors. Its Texas City refinery is one of the world’s largest, and BP owns 50 percent of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline.
Sarah Palin calls BP a “foreign company” because, well, she’s a little behind in her current events. The White House knows better, but it, too, is whipping up anti-foreign sentiment by consistently calling BP by its former name, British Petroleum. And so in Britain—where BP is, in fact, an evocation of the glory of the empire, a huge tax contributor, and thus beloved—Conservative peer Lord Tebbit calls the American response “a crude, bigoted, xenophobic display of partisan, political, presidential petulance.” He may think America’s response is much too crude, but from our vantage, BP has provided America with too much crude.
The fisheries closures continue expanding. Now totaling 88,522 square miles. About 37 percent of the Gulf’s federal waters. Federal waters begin three miles from shore, but most state waters are also closed. More than half the Gulf remains open to fishing, but buyers are canceling orders. “I’ve had guys saying, ‘If it’s from the Gulf,