Advanced Subsea Technology
May 31, 2010
As recently as the 2008 presidential campaign, the debate over whether to resume offshore oil drilling had a flippant quality to it, as is often the case when a relatively minor issue comes to the fore. The GOP vice-presidential candidate even joked about it in words that have come back to haunt the industry and its political clients alike: “Drill baby drill!”
Any logical plan to reduce US dependence on foreign oil should address the feasibility of increasing domestic production. The United States is already the world’s third largest producer of petroleum, and vast reserves remain under the North American continent and continental shelf (“wayerhoused,” as Sarah Palin put it). Offshore drilling, benefiting from improved extraction technology, can now reach reserves lying under several thousand feet of seawater. Thus it appeared to many observers that opposition to offshore drilling, even if concerted, would fall before the icons of 9/11 that the oil industry would be sure to trot out. After all, the United States needs twenty million barrels of oil per day to keep from grinding to a halt (about four times what can be produced domestically). It is therefore vitally important to our national security that domestic production be maximized—a fact beyond dispute. The industry’s case for lifting the ban on new offshore drilling seemed strong.
In the event, however, the industry chose a softer approach. America’s oil and gas magnates hired Brooke Alexander, an actress and former Miss Hawaii, to narrate a series of advertisements touting the safety and efficiency of current drilling methods, especially deep-sea methods. The industry’s campaign was a true PR blitz, with TV slots and banner ads a fixture in prime-time programming and the nation’s top newspapers.
Ms. Alexander played her role to the hilt in a series of commercials. At once a soccer mom, Bond girl, and budding grande dame, she delivered what may well be the performance of a lifetime while managing to appeal in some way or other to a wide swathe of the US population. Amazingly, the campaign, entitled “the People of America’s Oil and Gas Industry” (emphasis in original), contained a segment on how one drilling platform vessel could pump from many different wells using “Advanced Subsea Technology.” The montage, a classic example of begging the question, aimed to allay fears of coastal residents about unsightly platforms on the horizon by pointing out that the number of platforms would be greatly reduced using the new method. Then, on March 31, 2010, the campaign paid off: President Obama lifted the ban on offshore drilling.
On April 10, 2010, twenty-nine men were killed in a coalmine explosion in Montcoal, West Virginia; the mine owner there had a long history of both safety violations and political contributions. The oil and gas industry was in no way implicated in the disaster; and yet Ms. Alexander’s silky performances—still being broadcast—began to take on sinister, Orwellian overtones when placed atop newspaper coverage of the disaster or wedged in between network television coverage of vain efforts to save trapped miners.
Then on April 20, 2010, disaster hit the industry squarely in the jaw, as the deep-sea drilling platform vessel Deepwater Horizon exploded and sank, taking eleven of its crew to the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. The Deepwater Horizon was the industry’s flagship. The most sophisticated drilling platform vessel to date, the Deepwater Horizon, like the Titanic a century before, inspired in its operators an irrational and quickly-tested faith in its infallibility. It was the pride and joy of BP Corporation (f.k.a. British Petroleum), the UK giant and single largest producer of petroleum in the United States.
Although tasked with the near-Herculean feat of drilling the deepest oil well in history, through a mile of seawater and six miles of rock, the crew of the Deepwater still faced constant harangues from superiors about remaining on schedule, and they regularly traded safety for time. To put it bluntly, BP was legally responsible for eleven deaths and scores of serious injuries. Fines would be in the billions.
But the worst was yet to come. The explosions aboard the Deepwater were only a consequence of a larger explosion miles below. Subterranean oil and gas are under great pressure; and BP had forged ahead with drilling despite its failure to address existing safety issues on the project. The result was a “blowout” of the well. With the Deepwater itself destroyed by the force of the blast, the well began to spew oil into the Gulf of Mexico at the rate of around one Exxon Valdez spill every two or three days. Nobody knows how much oil is now in the Gulf, or when it will stop. Efforts by BP to shut the well down have not been successful.
Brooke Alexander mysteriously vanished within days of the explosion. With President Obama’s reinstatement of the drilling ban, and images of befouled aquatic birds dominating the airwaves, the industry’s PR campaign is now in tatters. BP’s lawyers will be busy defending the company and its employees against a range of civil and criminal prosecutions. Yet BP’s corporate greed and cavalier safety standards are but a symptom of a larger problem—America’s dependence on vast quantities of petroleum. Our economy’s oil dependence almost guarantees that it is only a matter of time before the industry rallies and offers a new plan to make offshore drilling safe and efficient.
