Another Oil Rig Fire … Ho-Hum …
Another day, another oil rig explosion in the Gulf. Ho-hum.
That, of course, is an exaggerated way of looking at today’s fire on an oil production platform, the Vermillion 380, located eighty miles off the coast of Louisiana in the Gulf of Mexico.
All thirteen workers were able to get off the rig in life jackets and float for two hours – linked arm-in-arm – before being rescued. It doesn’t sound like oil is leaking into the ocean but for the moment most of the “information” is coming from the rig’s management, Mariner Energy.
A cynic could equate the spate of recent oil industry explosions, fires, leaks and sinkings around the world – whether in China, Michigan or the Gulf – as the price we must pay, especially in the U.S., for ridiculously cheap oil and the lack of a serious, forward-looking energy policy.
There was a story in the Times three days ago about oil exploration going on in the Gulf far deeper than the Deepwater Horizon. It cited the example of a rig called Perdido (or Lost) that can pump oil from dozens of wells simultaneously, all at least two miles below the surface. It is located 20 hours from shore, far from easy repair if an accident happens, whether man-made (a bad cement job) or natural (hurricane).
While the story does a serious job of investigating and highlighting the safety risks of doing business in super-deep waters, it never mentions why this kind of high-risk, incredibly expensive drilling continues, especially in light of all the negative press and expense BP suffered. You’d think that might encourage other oil companies to scale back on the most-risky, most-costly, most-experimental operations.
From the oil companies’ perspective, offshore drilling is safer than drilling on land because it is more expensive, thus subject to more rigorous inspections. Given the lack of oversight evidenced in the BP debacle, that seems hard to believe. According to the Times story, 4,000 wells have been drilled in the gulf’s deep water, 700 in water more than 5,000 feet.
But such expensive operations will continue and for one simple reason: We, the U.S. public, demand cheap and abundant oil. Until that demand lessens, as long as the oil companies continue to profit from even the most expensive drilling operations, nothing will change.
The U.S. consumes 19.6 million barrels of oil a day, 25 percent of the world’ total. In the U.S. we produce more than 11 million barrels a day of crude oil and natural gas and import almost 10 million barrels a day of crude. Every single day we use virtually everything we create. Texas is the biggest producing state; Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay the top oil field; Saudi Arabia our biggest exporter.
Until 1970, we were able to produce everything we needed; today we import 57 percent. Yet despite predictions that U.S. will exhaust its own supply of oil within the next forty years, our demand continues to grow.
Each day, every person in the U.S. and Canada uses 3 gallons of oil. In the rest of the world, the figure is less than 0.2 gallons. And compared to the rest of the world, prices at American gas pumps are astonishingly low: Today, on the eve of Labor Day weekend, the average price per gallon across the country is $2.69. Of that, only 18.4 cents per gallon is tax. (At the low end of the scale is oil rich Venezuela, where a gallon of gasoline costs just eight cents.)
But prices at the pump in the rest of the Western world are more honest and include sizable taxes, like Denmark ($7 a gallon), France ($6.89) and Germany ($6.51).
If there is a light at the end of the tunnel regarding the U.S.’s greedy addiction to cheap oil and aversion to alternative energy sources, it’s that soon – within 40 years? – there won’t be an option. At least not an inexpensive one.
In the meantime, deepwater drilling will continue, as will oil rig explosions, leaks, fires and sinkings.
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