Image yourself in 25 years. There will be too many physical changes to count. With any luck, you will have the necessities of life and a few of the niceties.
Imagine a child or a grandchild or great grandchild hearing a reference to the oil spill that devastated marine life in the Gulf of Mexico and seabird populations along its shores. Suppose that child asks you the obvious question - why did this happen? What will you say in response?
Will you explain our dependence on oil? How will that discussion go? Will you fib and say we really did not have the means to use something other than oil to power our cars, buses, trains, and planes? Or will you have the courage to explain we had the technology but lacked the will or desire to change course? In other words, we failed in our ethical responsibilities to future generations. Instead of a tea party, we had an oil party to celebrate our greed and show our contempt for generations to come.
Will you touch on the political expediencies that made drilling a reality and regulation of the oil companies inconvenient? What will you say as you look in those innocent eyes and fumble for words to explain why no one knew how to stop a leak this big?
You might as well start thinking about these questions. When it has been a month since the disaster began and the company responsible cannot or will not answer the simple question of how much oil is leaking, you know the Gulf ecosystem will be changed for decades to come.
BP has resisted entreaties from scientists that they be allowed to use sophisticated instruments at the ocean floor that would give a far more accurate picture of how much oil is really gushing from the well.
“The answer is no to that,” a BP spokesman, Tom Mueller, said on Saturday. “We’re not going to take any extra efforts now to calculate flow there at this point. It’s not relevant to the response effort, and it might even detract from the response effort.”
New York Times, May 16, 2010 article by Justin Gillis
We all know BP is lying about not knowing how much is gushing into the Gulf. They were all too willing to offer up unrealistically low estimates after the well began gushing oil and gas uncontrollably into the Gulf. Now they are exercising their self-indulgent right against self-incrimination in the court of public opinion.
Here are some interesting observations about spill magnitude by Paul Noel and Stirling Allan at Pure Energy System News.
BP estimated a spill of 165,000 barrels per day would not even reach land! That is what they told the US Government before they drilled the well. They had excellent science on their side, which you can begin to comprehend when you understand how oil reacts in salt water, as we will briefly discuss below. The fact that the spill has reached land clearly states that the size of the spill is probably well above 200,000 barrels per day.
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There is also another factor that says that the numbers are vastly higher than published to date. That is money. The BP investment in this well is very high -- close to a billion dollars. They must earn over $5,000,000 a day off of the well in order to pay back their investment. (That was before the explosion, and doesn't count the cleanup costs, etc)
They were, until the well blew, extremely happy with the well. In fact, on the day of the explosions, executives were on board celebrating the well's success.
This well had to produce over 60,000 barrels per day in order to break even. Shocking as it seems, this well would have been closed in and disposed of had it produced a minor total like 20,000 barrels per day. That would have been a "Dry Hole"! It wouldn’t have paid for the pipes to bring the oil to market. The fact that BP management was aboard the rig and very happy, celebrating, just prior to the explosion says the well probably produces more than 200,000 barrels per day.
The key point Noel and Allan make is that the 5000 feet of ocean water serves as a fractionating column for the oil and gas, confining many of the most toxic effects below the surface. Call it a bad chemistry experiment.
Rising through 5000 feet of water, the oil is going through a process that the oil men call Fractionating. Literally the tremendous pressure and temperature issue are the equivalent of taking the oil and boiling it in a cracking tower 5000 feet high. The oil and natural gas change on their way up. The very light, easy-to-evaporate parts are all that is rising to the surface.
While I cannot verify whether or not BP executives were celebrating the well productivity before the disaster occurred, I have little doubt about the damage unfolding below the surface. When scientists are finding giant plumes of oil below the surface of the Gulf waters, you know the worst is happening.
Scientists are finding enormous oil plumes in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico, including one as large as 10 miles long, 3 miles wide and 300 feet thick in spots. The discovery is fresh evidence that the leak from the broken undersea well could be substantially worse than estimates that the government and BP have given.
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Dr. Joye said the oxygen had already dropped 30 percent near some of the plumes in the month that the broken oil well had been flowing. “If you keep those kinds of rates up, you could draw the oxygen down to very low levels that are dangerous to animals in a couple of months,” she said Saturday. “That is alarming.”
New York Times, May 16, 2010 article by Justin Gillis
It will be pretty easy to explain media relations strategies by corporations concerned about their liabilities and damage to perceptions of their brand. It might be more difficult to explain something like this:
JACKSON, Miss. -- Gov. Haley Barbour said that the Mississippi Gulf Coast is open for business, despite the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
In an effort to encourage tourism, Mississippi Gulf Coast officials are offering $75 gas cards for those who book a two-night stay at one of the participating hotels or resorts listed online at www.gulfcoast.org. Resident can also sign up online for a chance to win one of four getaway packages.
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In an effort to recoup the lost business, Mississippi tourism officials will ask BP PLC to pay $7.5 million a month for a national advertising campaign to overcome coverage of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.
Yes, Sonny, the powerful people in Mississippi were far more concerned about the bad publicity generated by the oil gushing into the Gulf than the disaster itself. And rather than address the folly of our addiction to oil, they preferred to give away free gas cards and cheap hotel rates.
So how will we explain this mess to those born after it occurred? Perhaps the answer depends on what we do in the face of this disaster. Blogging, tweeting, and booking our outrage are nice ways to prove we spoke up. However, our focus needs to be on pushing politicians to deliver clean energy solutions. If we are still drilling for oil and burning it in our cars in 25 years, we will have failed. And the disaster in the Gulf means we cannot pretend not to understand the risks of maintaining the status quo.
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