Offshore drilling industry’s dirty little secret: they can’t clean it

up

Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson recently told Congress, “the point is we have to
take every step to prevent these things from happening, because when they
happen we are not well equipped to prevent any and all damage. There is no
response capability that will ensure that you won’t have an impact.”

BY PIERRE SADIK

Beleaguered BP CEO Tony Hayward is running a series of television ads in the Gulf
region that end with the promise, as he looks the viewer in the eye, “we will make this
right”. Leaving aside for the moment the fact that hundreds of thousands of animals are
already dead or are slowly dying in the Gulf, Mr. Hayward’s promise is just plain
impossible for him to keep.

Which is probably why you will not hear the considerably more savvy President of the
United States make the same promise to viewers. President Obama has, undoubtedly,
been advised that the Gulf region cannot be “made right” on the heels of such a massive
oil spill.

The offshore drilling industry’s dirty little secret is that oil spills can never actually be
cleaned up. The oil - and the death and damage that accompanies it - lingers on not just
for years but for decades.

In 1989 the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska dumped 11 million gallons into the waters of
Prince William Sound and fouled 1,200 miles of pristine shoreline. A recent study by the
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration found that almost two decades after
the Exxon spill tens of thousands of gallons of oil remain just below the surface at Prince
William Sound.

The study found that “In sediment protected from physical dispersion, weathering rates
are also considerably reduced. As a result, oil buried in anoxic sediments may retain
toxic components such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH) on time scales of
years to decades.” Roughly translated this means that even after clean-up efforts, and
after the cleansing effect of countless waves, tides and Arctic storms, extremely nasty
petrochemicals such as PAH remain to contaminate wildlife twenty years after the fact.
The NOAA study found that the persistence of spill residue can create a chronic source
of low level contamination and pose a hazard for sea otters, ducks, and shorebirds.

Even a subsequent follow-up study, paid for by Exxon Mobil and published in the
Environmental Science & Technology Journal, found that 29 per cent of shoreline sites
tested at Prince William Sound still contain light to heavy oil residue almost two decades
later.

In 2004 the Terra Nova rig off the coast of Newfoundland spilled 1,069 barrels of oil into
the Atlantic Ocean. A federal government study prepared by the Canadian Wildlife
Service states that the area impacted by oil, which was visible by satellite, “was
estimated at 793 square kilometres”.
In most instances when animals, including birds, are in the vicinity of a spill and come in
contact with oil, either directly or indirectly through the food chain, they don’t survive for
very long. The above-noted federal study estimates that anywhere from 4,000 to 16,000
birds where subject to the effects of the oil spill.

The reason so many were killed by the Terra Nova spill is that Petro-Canada could not
recover more than a trivial portion of the oil that had been dumped into the sea. In this
instance, officials where unable to put containment barriers into place because of seas
of up to six metres at the site. Another vessel tried to recover some of the oil in
subsequent days but more high waves and strong winds made it difficult to deal with the
spill.

At the end of the day, officials admitted that 95 per cent of the oil spilled by the Terra
Nova rig was never recovered.

Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson, who is nobody’s patsy, put it thus to Congress two
weeks ago, “the point is we have to take every step to prevent these things from
happening, because when they happen we are not well equipped to prevent any and all
damage. There is no response capability that will ensure that you won’t have an impact.”

Tillerson’s unusually candid remarks about ineffective clean-up, coming on the heels of a
growing public awareness that all offshore drilling inevitably involves repeated spills
(each year there are dozens of spills in the Gulf and almost a dozen off of
Newfoundland), points to the conclusion that offshore drilling has no place as part of a
responsible energy policy.

In the final analysis, offshore drilling and the inevitable oil spills that accompany it are
only tolerated because the heavy costs of drilling are borne by others - and not by the oil
industry itself. Shareholders received a dividend during the Gulf spill and Tony Hayward
still went yachting because the incalculable devastation to the people, animals and
plants of the Gulf will be paid for by everyone and everything in the Gulf’s enormous
ecosystem well into the future - not by BP.

By the same token, Petro-Canada paid a paltry $290,000 fine for the substantial Terra
Nova spill. The real cost in lost life, contaminated water, and polluted air (due to
evaporation of petrochemicals) is exponentially greater than what Petro-Canada paid.

If the true cost of offshore drilling were “privatized” instead of foisted on the public, the
prohibitive cost would immediately stop all offshore drilling, period.