Deepwater Horizon – Learning from Past Experience and Defending Against Future Oil Spills
a report by Arne Jernelov Professor of Environmental Biochemistry, Institute for Future Studies, Stockholm, Sweden
In the late spring and summer of 2010 the drill platform Deepwater Horizon and the Macondo oil well in the Mexican Gulf became infamous names worldwide, as media around the globe followed the oil that spilled out after the blowout on 20 April 2010. As the days, weeks and months went by, with oil continuing to guzzle out despite efforts to contain it, the accident grew into a disaster for the environment and for BP’s reputation and finances. Politicians, fishermen, spokespersons for environmental groups and for the unfortunate operator as well as scientists all had their media-heralded say about the size of the catastrophe, which the US president termed “the worst environmental disaster in American history”.
Although this assessment can be debated – there are quite a few competing events – that is not the purpose of this article. Instead the idea is to look at the Deepwater Horizon spill against the background of the changing face of oil spills during the last three to four decades and to discuss what needs to and can be undertaken to defend against a repetition that might occur in even more sensitive ecosystems than the Gulf of Mexico.
In the 1960s and 70s the large oil spills, some of them media covered, came from tanker accidents. The larger volume of oil released to the sea came from tens of thousands of smaller operational discharges but they seldom drew any attention. Tankers like Torrey Canyon, Amoco Cadiz and later Exxon Valdez became well-known symbols for oil pollution and environmental catastrophes, while other tankers like Atlantic Express and Castillo de Bellver, with even more oil, sunk in obscurity.
The quantities of oil spilled annually from tanker accidents averaged 314,000 tons in the 1970s and has steadily dropped since. In the first decade of the third millennium it was 21,000 tons, with a mere 100 tons in 2009.
The reasons for this positive development are technical improvements like double hull and sectioned tanks as well as better organised sea traffic with one-direction-only lanes in narrow straits. The single most
Arne Jernelöv is a Swedish scientist in the environmental field. His research specialities are mercury and oil pollution. From the early 1970s to the mid 1990s he led a number of UN advice and assessment teams that assisted governments, mostly in developing countries, in some 40 large oil spill cases. Among those were the Ixtoc blowout in 1979 and the Kuwait war in 1991. He has since been the director of research institutes and research councils in Sweden and at the International
Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Vienna, Austria. He is affiliated with the Institute for Future Studies in Stockholm, Sweden. He is a professor of environmental biochemistry and a member of The Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences, among others.
E:
arne.jernelov@
chello.at
important factor, however, is the global positioning system (GPS), which allows even inexperienced and less-than-sober captains on duty during major holidays to know where they are.
In the opposite direction, with much more oil spilled today than 40 years ago, have gone pipelines. Not only are there tens of thousands of kilometres more of them, but in places they and the associated pumping stations are ill-maintained and corroded. In some areas they are also sabotaged and attacked as targets in armed conflicts or simply drilled through by oil thieves. Reporting of such incidents is sporadic, but some regions where substantial oil losses from leaking pipelines regularly occur can be readily identified: the Russian arctic, the Niger delta and Western Amazonas and Columbia. Very often these pipelines are left leaking for weeks and months, if not for years, as operators figure that the value of the lost oil is smaller than the cost of doing something about it. Also, from China there are intermittent reports of oil leakage from pipelines. One such case occurred in July 2010 in Dalian, overshadowed in the media by BP’s on-going Mexican Gulf disaster. Some reports said the spill was huge, blackening the sea as far as one could see. The authorities, on this occasion, verified a leak but said it was small.
Given the scarcity of reports and, even when reported, the lack of reliable quantification, no clear figures can be given of the total global extent of pipeline discharges. Even conservative estimates, however, put the annual figure at several hundred thousand tons, but it might also be a million or more.
The Deepwater Horizon spill demonstrated one of the very special features of oil spills that tend to differentiate them from many other types of environmental disasters: the knowledge and lessons learned from previous similar events are half-forgotten and not at the fingertips of the people who get involved in the new episode. In this case the most obvious ‘forgotten’ lessons about behaviour and effects of oil from sea floor blowouts came from the Ixtoc 1 blowout on the Mexican side of the same waters 31 years earlier. In addition, there were administrative lessons from the handling of the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989 that clearly had not been learned. Also, knowledge of the pros and cons of the use of dispersants, learned over and over again in numerous oil spills over almost half a century, seemed to have evaporated.
The reason for this ‘learn; forget; relearn; forget again’ cycle so typical for oil spills is the special funding schemes for research and study. Normally, there are practically no funds for oil spill studies; then there is a spill that makes headlines and money is plentiful from governmental as well as industrial sources. Lots of scientists flock to the spill site and the spotlight. Then the episode is over and the money quickly dries up, and the scientists move to more productive hunting grounds, as do the civil servants and industry people who were involved. By the time there is a new major oil spill in the same country – typically several decades
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Industry Outlook
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