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.
A few months from now, at the height of Antarctica’s very short summer, riders aboard one “bad-ass” snowmobile will attempt to cross the seventh continent.
A so-called “Bio-Inspired Ice Vehicle” designed by Lotus will pace a team of eleven researchers hoping to make the fastest “crossing” of Antarctica. As is required of all expeditions these days, whether they mean it or not, there is an environmental message attached. The Moon-Regan Transantarctic Expedition says it wants to “examine the impact of climate change on the continent and raise awareness of the issue.”
(I’m not 100 percent convinced that driving across Antarctica is the best way to do that, despite its testing of how bio-fuels stand up in the cold. Northern Minnesota and the Northwest Territories are both pretty fricking chilly in January ….)
Novel forms of transport are hardly new to Antarctica. Ernest Shackleton took both horses and the first car to the seventh continent; Australian Douglas Mawson was responsible for shipping the first airplane to Antarctica (it never successfully flew), as well as a classic Volkswagen Beetle, in 1910.
(For the rest of my dispatch go to takepart.com)
The worst thing about the dead zones now growing annually at the mouths of more than 400 rivers around the world is that the causes aren’t local, but originate in farm fields and urban areas sometimes more than a thousand miles away.
Take the very first identified dead zone, for example, at the mouth of the Mississippi River where it dumps into the Gulf of Mexico. Each year during the summer months it stretches from Mississippi to Texas covering an area the size of New Jersey and killing everything – fish and plant alike – in its path.
But the roots of the Gulf’s oxygen-sapped dead zone — primarily phosphorous and nitrogen – is mostly fertilizer runoff delivered from far away by a river system connecting 31 states to the north.
It is yet another example of the Gulf being treated like America’s toilet bowl; flush the farm fields and gutters in Illinois and Pennsylvania, and eventually all the crap ends up off the coast of Louisiana.
But legislating polluted runoff is tricky, whether by state or federal law. Imagine the governor of Louisiana asking his counterparts in Iowa and Ohio to mandate their farmers use less fertilizer; it’s a tough sell.
Yet there are increasing examples of efforts being made locally and by individuals to slow contributions to the mess that is quickly helping to kill off the Gulf … and other estuaries around the country and the world.
(For the rest of my dispatch, go to takepart.com)
Recent reports about a spike in ocean temperatures off Sumatra and subsequent coral reef die-off takes me back to a pair of recent visits to the Maldives, where a similar mysterious warming killed off its reefs a dozen years ago. A just-released report by the Wildlife Conservation Society suggests as much as 60-80 percent of the reefs across the Andaman Sea from Sumatra to Thailand and Myanmar have been bleached by temperatures risen to as high as 93 degrees F, about nine degrees warmer than average.
The WCS labeled it one of the “most rapid and severe coral mortality events ever recorded.” While occasional cyclical phenomenon can drive sea temperatures up, Andrew Baird of James Cook in University in Townsville, Australia, contends this rise is “almost certainly due to global warming.”
I first went to the Maldives in 2004; just weeks after tsunami waves had nearly drowned the 1,192-island nation. Ironically the coral reefs surrounding the islands had protected them, absorbing the brunt of the wave. Sadly most of those reefs were already badly damaged. In 1998, thanks to shifting ocean patterns, which was then associated with El Niño, sea temperatures rose above 90 degrees F for more than two weeks, badly “bleaching” the coral (the killing of the symbiotic algae that lives within the coral and gives it color).
Between seventy and ninety percent of all the reefs surrounding the Maldives 26 atolls were estimated to have died as a result. Last spring I returned to the Maldives to see how the reefs were doing.
Swimming along the coral edge of what transplanted marine biologist Anke Hofmeister calls her “home reef” the line dividing the shallows and deep blue was exact. To our left in the brightly sunlit coral, hundreds of shiny reef fish darted and fed; in the dark blue, just to our right, which descended straight down a dramatic hundred foot wall, swam big jackfish, tuna and red snapper, each over one hundred pounds. An occasional spotted eagle ray elegantly flapped its way past in the dark blue below the surface of a calm Indian Ocean.
(For the rest of my dispatch go to takepart.com)
A lead NOAA scientist responsible for the agency’s report suggesting that “74 percent of the oil” spewed by the BP gusher had already disappeared is now suggesting the numbers in the government-released document were drawn from incomplete science.
Few in Washington and certainly no one in the Gulf believed the account when it was first leaked to the New York Times on August 5, for simple reasons: There’s still lots of oil visible on beaches, in marshes, on the surface and below. And there are increasing numbers of scientific studies that immediately call into question NOAA’s clearly optimistic numbers.
Last week a University of Georgia report claimed “70 to 79 percent of the oil is still in the Gulf,” based on 57,000 readings taken during a recent 10-day voyage. Scientists from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute report identifying a 22-mile long plume of hydrocarbons spanning 3,000 feet below the surface of the Gulf.
It seems that Bill Lehr, senior scientist with NOAA, may actually agree more with those statistics than the NOAA report he helped write.
Late last week Lehr told a Congressional hearing that the optimistic report from his agency was rushed and never intended to be released to the public. He said the report was intended to inform “the emergency response, not the general public.”
“I would say most of (the oil) is still in the environment,” Lehr told the house energy and commerce committee. In a conference call with congressional investigators, Lehr reportedly said some scientists had concerns with the report and that it was the White House that decided to release the stats, not the agency. A NOAA spokesman later said Lehr’s comments were “false.”
Massachusetts congressman Ed Markey, who has been the BP gusher’s sharpest critic in Washington, railed against Lehr, suggesting NOAA’s report had given people “a false sense of confidence” and wondered why the agency had released any numbers when Lehr admitted the research was not complete. Lehr’s boss, respected ocean scientist Jane Lubchenco, continues to stand behind the sunny statistics while admitting the agency’s “comprehensive report” would not be delivered for another two months.
Markey is calling on NOAA to share the data it based its report on so that independent scientists can assess its credibility.
Despite the hullabaloo created around the world by the Deepwater Horizon accident, oil spills are hardly a new occurrence. They’ve been happening since prehistoric man first accidentally tapped into an underground petroleum reservoir.
Long prior to BP’s debacle, yellow and orange booms have permanently ringed rigs in the Gulf – and around the world –, in effort to contain the inevitable daily leakage from a far-from-perfect extraction process. Study the reports from just the past twelve months of leaks and spills in the Gulf; they are common occurrences, though usually measured in the hundreds of gallons rather than millions.
And given our lack of a cohesive energy policy, our national unwillingness to truly commit to developing alternative energy sources and still-growing demand for energy from fossil fuels, such leaks and spills and gushings will continue.
Just read the headlines from the past few days: A thirty-inch pipeline near the Kalamazoo River splits and spills a million gallons of oil into a waterway headed for Lake Michigan. A barge slams into an abandoned well in Barataria Bay at 1 a.m. (an ecologically-sensitive estuary already dealing with a massive oil mess thanks to BP) sending a shower of water, natural gas and oil spewing into the air for days.
(For the rest of my dispatch go to takepart.com)
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