Impacts, Perception, and Policy Implications of the Deepwater Horizon Oil and Gas Disaster
| Date | 01 November 2010 |
| Author |
40 ELR 11058 ENVIRONMENTAL LAW REPORTER 11-2010
Impacts, Perception, and Policy
Implications of the Deepwater
Horizon Oil and Gas Disaster
by Elliott A. Norse and John Amos
Elliott A. Norse is President, Marine Conservation Biology Institute, Bellevue, Washington.
John Amos is President, SkyTruth, Shepherdstown, West Virginia.
I. Background
In many places, truth is what economic interests or gov-
ernment say it is, and the media and legal institutions are
their facilitators. But countries with a robust nongovern-
mental sector have made the decision to welcome (or at least
tolerate) unblinking, independent scrutiny as a way to create
both more just societies and more eective economies and
governments. W hen d isseminated publicly, the analyses of
skilled nongovernmental observers can provide crucial per-
spective and a useful reality check on powerful economic
interests and government. As scientists (JA is a geologist;
EAN is a marine biologist) who worked on aspects of oil
and g as drilling f or the industry and the federal govern-
ment, respectively, and now, as chief executive ocers
of small environmental nonprot organi zations, we oer
this Article on what is seen as the greatest environment al
catastrophe in U.S. history. Our purpo se is to help pe ople
remember this very recent past, and t hereby avoid bei ng
condemned to repeat it. Be cause this event is so rec ent,
almost none of the work we cite has appeared in the peer-
reviewed scientic liter ature.
A. How It Happened
In the early months of 2010, a technological marvel oated
in the Gulf of Mexico, 50 miles o the Louisiana coa st. She
was the Deepwater Horizon, drilling the rst oil well in the
newly discovered Macondo Oileld. Known as a Mobile
Oshore Drilling Unit, this semisubmersible rig was built in
South Korea in 2001. It was 400 feet long, 250 feet wide, and
stood 14 stories tall.1 Designed to withsta nd heavy weather
and operate in the extreme deepwater f rontier environments
targeted by the global oshore oil industry, it had just set a
record at the end of 2009: drilling a well nea rly seven miles
into the earth, in water 4,000 feet deep, continuing a long
string of record-setting achievements for its owners, Trans-
ocean, and the rig’s client, BP.2 But on April 20, something
went terribly wrong.
At about 10 p.m., a series of explosions ripped through
the rig, killing 11 workers and injuring 17 others. Intense
re spread rapidly, and the survivors evacuated, some jump-
ing o the deck and plunging nearly 80 feet into the dark
Gulf waters below. Fire raged unabated for nearly two days,
as emergency teams raced to the site and poured seawater
on the blaze. But despite their eorts, the rig listed heav-
1. Oshore-Technology.com, Macondo Prospect, http://www.oshore-technolo-
gy.com/projects/macondoprospect/ (last visited Sept. 24, 2010).
2. Transocean, Deepwater Horizon Drills World’s Deepest Oil & Gas Well,
http://www.deepwater.com/fw/ma in/IDeepwater-Horizon- i-Drills-Worlds-
Deepest-Oil-and-Gas-Well-419C151.html (last visited Sept. 24, 2010).
Authors’ Note: During an environmental trauma of this magnitude,
when emotions are running high and information is scarce, scattered,
and sometimes contradictory, it is especially encouraging that good
people have come forward with obser vations, data, analysis, and
funding when it is needed most.
We are grateful to our colleagues Caley Anderson, Je Ardron, William
Beller, Sandra Brooke, Bill Chandler, Richard Charter, Ion Cotsapas,
David Festa, Hannah Goldstein, Hans Graber, Jim Greenwood,
Kay Grinnell, John Guinotte, Kevin Hassett, Heather Hewitt, Katie
Holmes, David Johns, Bob Kerr, Ian MacDonald, Russ Mott, Lance
Morgan, Liz Rauer, Scott Rayder, David Shearer, Sarah Soltow, Vikki
Spruill, and Paul Woods for their ideas, information, and analyses.
e non-polluting fuel that propelled our work was general support
and BP Disaster-specic funding from the Alki Fund, Arcadia, Arntz
Family Foundation, Sally Brown, Margaret A. Cargill Foundation,
Edwards Mother Earth Foundation, Fledgling Fund, Ben and Ruth
Hammett, Andy Luk, Marisla Foundation, Curtis and Edith Munson
Foundation, Ocean Conservancy, Ocean Foundation, Gail Osherenko,
Patagonia Inc., Surdna Foundation, Tiany & Co. Foundation,
True North Foundation, Vidda Foundation, Wallace Global Fund,
Weinstein Family Charitable Foundation, and WestWind Foundation.
Finally, we thank our wise and patient spouses, Amy Mathews Amos
and Irene Norse, for enduring our obsession with absorbing the copious
information on OCS oil and gas, critiquing our ideas, and allowing us
to devote the long hours needed to understand this momentous event.
Copyright © 2010 Environmental Law Institute®, Washington, DC. reprinted with permission from ELR®, http://www.eli.org, 1-800-433-5120.
11-2010 NEWS & ANALYSIS 40 ELR 11059
ily to one side, and on April 22—Earth Day— the Deepwa-
ter Horizon slipped beneath the waves and plunged to the
muddy seaoor 5,000 feet below.
At rst, the only sign of its passing was a thin slick of oil
spread across the water, dotted with workboats and response
vessels searching vainly for the 11 lost crew members. e
U.S. Coast Guard reported that the well the Deepwa-
ter Horizon had been drilling for BP wa s not leaking any
oil or gas. But soon thick, orange-brown crude oil bega n
emerging at the ocea n’s surface. A ssurances that t he “leak ”
rate wa s manageable soon gave way to the realiz ation that
a major oil blowout or gusher was happening. By the time
the well was nally killed more tha n 12 weeks later, the
nation had experienced the world’s worst unintentional oil
spill, with government scientists estimating that 205 mil-
lion gallons (4.9 million barrels) of oil had spewed from the
leaking well, aecti ng an area at least the size of Oklahoma
and fouling over 600 miles of be aches and wetlands spread
across ve states.
Multiple industry and government investigations, includ-
ing a panel appointed by President Barack Obama, are now
working to reveal t he cascade of technical brea kdowns and
human decisions that led to the blowout and uncontrolled
release of oil and natural gas. We anticipate that these inves-
tigations will produce many deta iled technical and manage-
ment prescriptions for improving the safety and reliability of
oshore drilling and the eectiveness of response activities to
contain and remediate future spills, and determining where
these operations can or cannot be conducted safely.
We write this as the well is capped, t he static kill has
stopped the gushing, and oil on the se a surface is becoming
scarce. Now, while the images and smell of oil in the marshes
are st ill f resh, and while tourism businesses look at forlorn
beaches and eld biologists make plans for post-hoc impact
evaluation, is a good time for us to oer some thoughts on
what happened, how understanding is shaped by perception,
what the impacts were, and what we must do to avoid a simi-
lar blot on America’s environment. is is an event we do
not want to repeat, an uncommon opportunity that invites
us to reexamine our idea s about the roles of scientists and
shermen, salt marshes and open seas, the private and public
sectors, and decisionmaking f rom afar versus locally.
e best teachers help us learn that the most important
step in arriving at the right answers is to ask the right ques-
tions. at is not ea sy, because huma ns pay more attention
to things that (1)are sudden, (2)are visible, and (3)touch
our emotions, compared with those that are not. Some key
aspects of this disaster were undoubtedly sudden, visible, and
moving; others that demand close attention were not.
e nearly three months from the blowout to the capping
of the well may be perceived as a sudden, concentrated event.
But it followed decades of diuse, accumulated decisions
and actions by the oil and gas industry, government agencies
responsible for regulating Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) oil
and gas operations, a nd people in the region. Here, we pay
special attention to what happened far from shore and in the
Gulf’s depths. ese impacts might be less visible and emo-
tionally moving to many people, but are nonetheless crucial
to the health of the Gulf and the people who depend on it.
is Article concludes with a few key conclusions and rec-
ommendations by EAN.
B. The Name for This Event
First, a litt le housekeeping is in order. What should we c all
this event?
Names matter because —so often—we remember little of
the past but a name. Names set o chains of associations
in people’s minds. As of t his writing, the United States has
not settled on a name for this event. We hear “BP Oil Spill,”
“Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill,” and va riations on these modi-
ed by other terms. But, we would arg ue, these are not the
right names.
One reason is that “spill ” has rather innocuous implica-
tions, of harmless minor accidents, calling for the need to
forget and move on, as in “Don’t cry over spilled milk .” But
the highly pressurized petroleum that jetted into the Gulf of
Mexico for some 80 days was not as innocuous as milk, and
the quantity was more like 3.3 billion glasses. is fatal event
was truly a disaster, and it was not just oil that spewed out
of the well: untold quantities of natural gas (mainly meth-
ane (CH4)) were also released into the deep ocean. For these
reasons, what is arguably the worst environmental event in
U.S. histor y is more accurately termed the “BP/Deepwater
Horizon Oil and Gas Disaster.”
C. Relevant Precedents
e BP/Deepwater Horizon Oil and Gas Disaster came after
major North American well blowouts in 1969 in the Santa
Barbara Cha nnel and 1979 o Yucatan. But the oil and gas
industry repeatedly assured us that these events had become
irrelevant: Improved technology had now made OCS opera-
tions so blowout-proof that decisionmakers and the pub-
lic need not worry. Despite these assurances, a d isastrous
blowout occurred in 2009, in Australia’s Montara Oileld,
located in the Timor Sea between northwest Australia and
Indonesia. It was a n eerie foreshadowing of the BP/Deep-
water Horizon Oil and Gas Disaster. A major international
oshore drilling company based in Norway but with opera-
tions worldwide, including in the Gulf of Mexico, was work-
ing at an oil platform 150 miles oshore in water 260 feet
deep. e platform and drill rig were less than two years old.
While drilling a new well, a previously completed well sud-
denly “blew out,” ejecting a spray of natural gas and crude oil
into the air and water. e platform and rig were evacuated,
fortunately with no loss of life. e oil company and Austra-
lian government determined that the best course of action
Copyright © 2010 Environmental Law Institute®, Washington, DC. reprinted with permission from ELR®, http://www.eli.org, 1-800-433-5120.
To continue reading
Request your trial