The Future of Oil Spills

The recent oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico off the Louisiana coast has put the spotlight back onto the dangers of drilling for oil deep in the earth’s oceans. Drilling for oil on land is difficult, expensive and dangerous. Drilling at sea presents even greater problems, and adds the possibility of out-of-control spills, like we are seeing now with the exploding BP rig and subsequent weeks of crude oil gushing out of the ocean floor. The spill in the Gulf may be the largest single man-made environmental disaster to ever befall the planet.

Even though the BP spill is undeniably horrific, it seems the big oil producers are unlikely to change their approach to deep-water drilling in the Gulf of Mexico or anywhere else around the world in the wake of the accident. Rex Tillerson, chairman of Exxon, the world’s largest energy company, projects that oil will remain the planet’s primary energy source through the year 2030 and that Exxon and other producers do not intend to deviate from that strategy. “There have been more than 14,000 deep-water wells drilled, the vast majority of them successfully,” said Tillerson. He added, “Until the facts of this latest spill are fully investigated, it’s too early to say what effect it will have on the industry.”

British Petroleum is now attempting a “top kill” technique to plug the spill. Tillerson said that if the BP effort fails his Exxon team would advise BP to try a “junk shot” approach of stuffing items down the well to try to stop the flow. For now, the flow continues unabated. According to the Soviet newspaper Pravda, the Soviets would have nuked the leak. The Soviet Union used nuclear weapons to shut down five different oil well blowouts between 1966 and 1977. According to Pravda, “The underground explosion moves the rock, presses on it, and squeezes the well’s channel,” and suggested that the U.S. should try the same solution now

Whatever course the Gulf Spill takes, the incident will likely have a bearing on future drilling. One likely effect is that the amount of liability for the companies doing the drilling will be increased up to one billion dollars. Permits for new offshore wells are very unlikely to be approved in the wake of the accident either, at least not for a few years. New regulations placing restrictions on the maximum depth of water to be drilled in are a good possibility too. If offshore wells were limited to depths that could be serviced by divers, it’s a good bet that the BP leak would already have been solved by now.

The spill in the Gulf is a tragedy, but it is estimated that oil spills currently account for only about five percent of the oil entering the oceans today. The amount of petroleum products ending up in the oceans are estimated at 0.25% of total world oil production, or about 6 million tons per year. Six million tons sound pretty bad, but the U.S. Coast Guard estimates that within United States waters, sewage treatment plants discharge twice as much oil each year as spills do.

Regardless of the percentages, it is undeniable that petroleum pollution in the seas as detected by satellites shows that most of the oil-contamination of the earth’s water is concentrated in the Middle East, particularly in the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman. Considering that the OPEC member countries in those same areas produce three fourths of the world’s oil, the degree of pollution is not too surprising. After reviewing the facts, the only thing that seems certain is that something must change.