I've seeing a trend in the coverage of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The media is treating this spill as if it was just another accident. There is a very broad information gap in the media's narrative that I think needs filled in.
Mainly I think people need to understand the exceptional nature of this oil platform, and why BP's ambition has exceeded any adequate engineering safety. A couple of points before the fold.
- This Oil Well in the Tiber Oilfield is the Deepest ever Drilled (about 7 miles down)
- This Site was Considered a High Risk / High Reward Venture
- Deep Water Drilling is not the same as Traditional Offshore Drilling
I'm not trying to make any claims of responsibility here, because I don't know what caused the explosion and subsequent leak. However, I do think it is important for people to understand what will probably be the biggest ecological disaster in history.
The lease we are discussing is the Tiber Oilfield. This lease was awarded to BP in in 2003 and was set to expire in 2013. BP originally planned on starting drilling in September of 2008, but experienced many challenges with the rock formation and salt flats on the ocean floor. The drilling finally started in September of 2009. At a depth of 35,050 ft it became the deepest well drilled offshore.
This kind of deep water drilling is an entirely different engineering task. A standard offshore well occurs in two phases. First the well is drilled and capped. Then an oil rig is brought in to handle the extraction of oil. When we discuss previous disasters with oil platforms, these are the platforms we are discussing. Engineering safety protocols and government regulations were designed around this model of drilling.
Because of the depth of this well, it was impossible to use the traditional method of recovery. A specially designed ship was brought in for this purpose. The Deepwater Horizon was semi-submersible vessel designed to perform the task of both drilling and extracting oil from deep water fields. It was owned and operated by a company Transocean and built by Hyudai.
Before the explosion, BP at best expected to recover 20 to 30 percent of the oil in the Tiber fields due to the technical difficulty. Some believed that only between 5 - 15 percent could be recovered, which brought into question the commercial viability of the venture.
This is really the ultimate issue with offshore drilling in general. While there is little doubt that huge oil reserves exist under the ocean, we lack the technological capacity to extract it in an efficient manner. The same argument brought against solar or hydrogen cell batteries could easily be brought against offshore drilling, and more so with deep water drilling. Ultimately it is an expensive and inefficient venture with huge ecological downsides. The difference with solar and hydrogen cells is once that efficiency problem is solved, they become a constant source of energy. Even if we perfect deep water oil extraction, we are still talking about a finite supply.
We are facing a real decision point with this man made disaster. BP decided to be ambitious and ultimately it well be the ecology of the Gulf of Mexico that pays the price of that ambition. BP as company not only will face law suits, but also has had hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars lost in their gamble. If BP had made that same investment in developing a new battery or a high yield solar panel, they might have captured a whole new market in energy. Sadly we will all have to watch and wait to see the impact of the investment they chose.