The BP Disaster: Five Years On
Five years after the catastrophic BP blowout in the Gulf of Mexico, offshore oil and gas production there is little safer and, by some measures, even more dangerous than before the 2010 disaster that killed 11 workers and dumped millions of barrels of crude oil into the sea, government figures show.
Last year in the Gulf, there were 7.3 percent more injuries and other hazardous incidents per producing well than in 2009, the year before the BP disaster. Injuries alone were 6.9 percent higher per well, according to publicly-available records maintained by the U.S. Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, which oversees offshore oil and gas activity.
The agency logs hazardous incidents such as deaths, injuries, fires, explosions, collisions, spills of 50 barrels or more and instances in which crews lose control of a high-pressure well — the situation that led to the BP blowout that killed 11 workers on April 20, 2010, and dumped millions of barrels of crude oil into the sea.
Overall, hazardous incidents in the Gulf were down 14.2 percent in 2014, as compared with 2009 levels, while injuries alone declined 14.4 percent. Offshore activity, though, has fallen 19.9 percent over the same period, as companies have focused on expanding onshore development of shale fields using hydraulic fracturing, or fracking.
The result has been fewer wells — and more hazardous incidents per well.*
Since the BP blowout, both the industry and the Obama administration have taken steps to reduce some of the risk from what is an inherently dangerous industrial operation at sea.
Fatalities are down. One worker died last year, compared to 4 in 2009. In the four-year period from 2007–2010, there were 32 workers killed in the Gulf, including the 11 who died in the BP blowout. In the four years 2011–2014, there were 11 workers killed.
Well per well, though, hazardous incidents were up 4 percent during the four-year period 2011–2014, as compared with the 2007–2010 period.
The official data show that the industry continues to put our workers, waters and wildlife at grave risk in the Gulf, at a time when oil and gas companies want to drill in Arctic and Atlantic waters and the administration has proposed allowing them to do so.
The record of enduring hazard makes clear that we can’t afford to put the rich Arctic Ocean and the waters and coasts along the Eastern Seaboard at risk of a BP-style disaster. Not now — not ever.
Widespread, Enduring and Ongoing
Dolphins are still sick and dying, about 43 more just last month, extending what has already been the worst and longest die-off of the species ever recorded in the Gulf. Since the BP blowout, nearly 1,200 dolphins have been found dead and about 75 others too sick to swim. Scientists figure that many die for every one recovered, suggesting that many thousands more may have died, with the toll continuing to rise.
Brown pelicans are struggling to overcome losses that wiped out 12 percent of the population, along with one-third of the region’s laughing gulls, 15 percent of its royal terns and up to 800,000 birds in total.
And only now are the tiny acrobat ants near the base of the food chain cautiously venturing back into the spartina grass along the edge of coastal marshes that were heavily oiled.
The question of how much oil the ocean choked down in the three months it took to plug the runaway well has been debated from the beginning.
In August, 2010, the month after the well was plugged, an interagency team led by the Department of Energy and the U.S. Geological Survey estimated that the well released 4.9 million barrels, or about 206 million gallons, of crude oil. A separate interagency team, led by the Department of the Interior and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, estimated that 17 percent of the oil was captured at the wellhead, leaving about 171 million gallons going into the ocean.
In a decision filed Jan. 15, 2015 in U.S. District Court in New Orleans, Judge Carl Barbier ruled that the well discharged 4.0 million barrels, or about 168 million gallons and that about 810,000 barrels, or about 34 million gallons, were collected without going into the ocean. With those figures in mind, the court ruled that, for purposes of levying penalties under the provisions of the Clean Water Act, the legal amount of oil discharged into the ocean was 3.19 million barrels, or about 134 million gallons.
In addition, 1.84 million gallons of toxic dispersant was sprayed across the ocean’s surface or released at the wellhead. The chemical was still being found in patties of oil rolling onto Louisiana beaches six months after the blowout.
By any measure, the oil wrought disaster for the Gulf.
It contaminated some 1,100 miles of coastline, roughly the distance from Savannah to Boston. It still wells up in giant mats that surface in heavy weather and in tar balls that show up on beaches after storms.
Oil settled across at least 1,200 square miles of the deep ocean floor. Scientists described an “exponential decline” in the population and health of bottom dwelling organisms that will take decades to recover. There’s been a near collapse in some areas of seaweed, which plummeted in places from 60 species to about 10, driving a sharp decline in the deep-sea shrimp, lobsters and crabs that depend on seaweed communities.
Oil spread across surface water covering 68,000 square miles, about the size of Oklahoma, where schools of large, deep ocean fish, like the Atlantic bluefin tuna, lay eggs each spring that float on the water’s surface until they hatch. Scientists exposed larvae from bluefin tuna, amberjack and yellowfin tuna to field-collected samples of oil from the BP blowout. The result: fish with deformed hearts, eyes, fins, spines and other birth defects likely to result in early death.
These are snapshots of what the BP blowout has done to one of the richest ecosystems in the world. From the deep-water domain of sperm whales and billfish, to the coastal waters of speckled trout and redfish; from the beaches of nesting sea turtles and migratory birds, to the wetlands and estuaries that serve as the cradle of the Gulf; the BP blowout inflicted damage that is widespread, enduring and continuing.
“. . . likely to last for generations.”
Scientists are still tallying up the harm and will be for years, if not decades. The nation awaits an authoritative reckoning in the form of the Natural Resource Damage Assessment (NRDA). Guided by the NRDA trustees (the U.S. Department of the Interior, the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Defense Department and the state governments of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida), this assessment will pull together the results of hundreds of scientific studies that document the full scope of environmental harm as a precursor to long-term recovery work.
When BP asserted, though, on March 16 that “the Gulf of Mexico is rebounding,” the NRDA trustees responded that day that BP’s claims were “inappropriate and premature.”
The day after BP released its report, in fact, the company confirmed it was working with U.S. Coast Guard officials to remove a 25,000-pound tar mat from the waters off East Grand Terre along the Louisiana coast.
“From decades of experience with oil spills,” the trustees wrote, “we know that the environmental impacts of this spill are likely to last for generations.”
The disaster, to date, has cost BP some $30.2 billion, including $14.3 billion on initial response and cleanup, $13.6 billion on claims, advances and settlements, $1.3 billion in NRDA expenses and about $700 million to fund 54 early restoration projects. One is helping to restore beaches, dunes and marsh along Louisiana’s barrier islands, for example. Another will build up oyster habitat in Florida Bay, while yet another protects eggs, chicks and adults in bird nesting areas along the Alabama and Mississippi coasts. Federal prosecutors are seeking $13.7 billion in fines against BP, which is contesting the figure in U.S. District Court.
Nobody is pointing fingers at the people working to track the damage and help the region recover from one of the worst environmental disasters in history. The lesson here is that oil is disastrous to our oceans, coasts, marine life and all that depend on it.
We can’t undump that oil. We can’t undo this damage. We can’t make this right, no matter how many times we’re told we can.
Far More Needs to Be Done
With stakes this high, the Obama administration and the oil and gas industry have taken meaningful if measured steps over the past five years to reduce some of the risk from this inherently dangerous industrial operation at sea.
The Department of the Interior reorganized its widely-criticized industry oversight organization, breaking it into two new agencies: the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, to oversee federal leasing of offshore areas to oil and gas companies; and the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, responsible for ensuring compliance with safety and environmental standards.
In addition, the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement chose Texas A&M University to host the new Ocean Energy Safety Institute to pool industry, academic and government knowledge of ways that emerging technologies, research, training and other measures can help to reduce the risk of offshore drilling and production.
The bureau implemented new safety rules in 2012 that draw on lessons learned from the BP blowout and the explosion it caused aboard the Deepwater Horizon oil drilling vessel to improve well design and integrity. The bureau increased the number of safety inspectors in the Gulf to 92, up from 55 at the time of the BP disaster. And, on Monday, April 13, the bureau proposed new rules focused on improving the safety of well designs and the reliability of blowout preventers.
The oil and gas industry established the Marine Well Containment Company, which maintains a system of capping stacks the industry claims can cap a blowout in water nearly two miles deep. The equipment, kept near Corpus Christi, TX. has been tested at a depth of 6,900 feet. It would take up to ten days to get the equipment on site, under ideal conditions, and killing a runaway well could still take up to three months.
The industry set up the Center for Offshore Safety, under the auspices of the industry standards and lobbying association, the American Petroleum Institute, to help companies share safety information, identify areas where improvement is needed and raise the bar for auditor competence.
Under pressure from the industry — which spent $141.4 million last year alone lobbying in Washington — the Congress has failed to pass a single bill to improve safety for offshore gas and oil production.
And yet we know far more needs to be done.
Congress, first of all, needs to enshrine in law the changes the administration has made to strengthen public oversight of offshore oil and gas production. And Congress needs to raise, substantially, the absurdly-low $134 million liability cap on companies that conduct offshore operations.
It’s essential, also, that the industry create a fully independent institute with the sole mission of promoting a culture that puts safety first — every project, every time — as the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling recommended.
We need to require full environmental impact statements for sites with complex geology, in ultra deep water or other frontier areas. We need to protect marine life, especially species that are endangered or threatened. We need to enhance the role of science in decisions about offshore drilling permits and operations. And we need to create a distinct science division in the oversight process to coordinate closely with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration about how best to protect our oceans and all they support.
We’re Not Stuck with Oil
We owe it to the people of the Gulf to do everything we possibly can to prevent this kind of thing from ever happening again. We owe it to the waters and wildlife and all they support. And we owe it to those 11 workers who lost their lives aboard the Deepwater Horizon five years ago this week.
Finally, though, we have to reckon with the plain and immutable truth. Producing oil and gas at sea is an inherently dangerous industrial operation. There is no way to make it safe. We have to do all we can to reduce those risks. We have to reduce the amount of ocean we expose to those risks. And we have to reduce our reliance on oil, gas and the danger and damage they bring.
The industry wants to move us in exactly the wrong direction. Having delivered an enduring body blow to the rich waters of the Gulf, the industry now has its sights set on new drilling in the Atlantic Ocean, which has been off limits to drilling since 1983, and the Arctic Ocean, where we lack the equipment, know-how or experience to prevent, contain or clean up a catastrophic BP-style disaster.
We’ve seen this industry try to turn the Gulf of Mexico into a national sacrifice zone for the sake of our national dependence on gas and oil. Now they want to do the same for the Atlantic Seaboard and the Arctic? No thanks — no way.
This issue goes beyond protecting coastal economies worth billions of dollars each year and the priceless ecosystems that support all that. We have an obligation to protect future generations from the mounting dangers of climate change. That means reducing the dangerous carbon pollution that’s driving climate chaos and all that comes with it: more asthma attacks and respiratory disease; more air pollution and smog; rising sea levels, widening deserts, blistering heat, withering drought and ravaging storms, wildfires and floods.
Exposing new oceans to oil and gas drilling would lock the next generation in the carbon trap. To meet the climate challenge, we need to say no to reckless drilling that puts polluter profits first and puts the rest of us at risk.
The industry wants us to believe there is no alternative to oil and gas and that we’re stuck with dirty fuels and all the damage and danger they bring.
But that’s where they’re wrong.
We’ve cut our oil consumption (pg. 45) in this country 21 percent, as a share of our real economic output, over just the past decade. Think of what we can do in the next decade if we set our mind to building on that progress.
We’ve cut our overall energy use in half, as a portion of our economic output, in just the past 35 years. Imagine what we can do in the coming decades if we focus on the opportunities to use innovation and enterprise to do more with less waste.
And we’re building, in this country, some of the best all-electric and hybrid vehicles anywhere in the world. Just think what we can accomplish as we continue to power those cars and trucks with electricity we produce right here at home from the wind and sun.
No free people anywhere are ever stuck with bad habits that do more harm than good. We inherit out past; we create our future. Five years on, that’s the real lesson of the BP disaster. Let’s create the kind of future we want to pass on to our children, and let’s begin today.
__
*Actual Numbers and Calculations:
Last year in the Gulf, there were 666 hazardous incidents, a 14.2-percent reduction from the 2009 level of 776. The number of Gulf wells that pumped oil and gas, however, fell 19.9 percent, from 5,174 in 2009 to 4,143 in 2014. That means that, per well, there were 0.161 incidents last year, up 7.3 percent from the 2009 level of 0.150 accidents per well.
Of the incident totals, there were 244 injuries last year, down 14.4 percent from 285 in 2009. There were 0.0589 injuries per well, however, up 6.9 percent from the 2009 level of 0.0551 injuries per well.
During the four-year period 2011–2014, there were 2,500 hazardous incidents, down 17 percent from the four years 2007–2010. Over the past four years, though, there were 5,709 producing wells in Gulf, down 20.1 percent from the level, 7,142, during the years 2007–2010. There were 0.438 incidents per well in the 2011–2014 period, up 4 percent from the 0.421rate during the years 2007–2010.
—
Bob Deans is the author, with NRDC executive director Peter Lehner, of In Deep Water: The Anatomy of a Disaster, the Fate of the Gulf, and How to End Our Oil Addiction.
