Beyond Petroleum After the Blowout

"The chain of responsibility for the Gulf disaster does not stop with its CEO but goes all the way from the bottom of the ocean to the ignition keys and temperature dials of American car, home and office owners"

- ON board member Prof. Michael Northcott gives his insight into the gulf oil disaster (a shorter version of this article was published in the Church Times on the 18th of June).

The Gulf oil disaster is one of the biggest blow-outs in the 120 year history of the oil industry, and has created the worst environmental disaster in US history.

The cause of the 'accident' has been much debated on both sides of the Altantic but testimony from a hearing in New Orleans gives a significant insight into this disaster, and into the dominant global business model not only of the oil industry but of most large multinational enterprises. The Chief Mechanic on the Deepwater Rig testified two weeks ago at a hearing being held by the US Coastguard and federal investigators outside New Orleans that he was present at a management meeting on the rig when a 'skirmish' took place between BP's manager and Transocean's crew. 

Transocean's chief driller did not want to remove drilling mud from the well that day because they did not think the well was fully prepared for shut down, and feared that if they did gas would seep into the pipe. But the Texan BP manager insisted that they went ahead and commenced with removal of the mud prior to plugging the well. Deepwater was an exploration rig and was costing BP $500,000 a day to rent and had been on site six weeks longer than BP had planned.

The manager wanted the exploration rig off the well so BP could move it to a new exploratory well and install its own production rig on the existing well. Later that night as the mud was thinned with sea water prior to the well being temporarily plugged gas seeped into the well head and up the 18,000 feet of pipe and the rig exploded. And there followed the deaths of 11 crew members, and two months later the blow out, from a well more than three miles deep, is still uncapped.

Conservative estimates indicate that an oil spill equivalent to the Exxon Valdez tanker disaster is taking place every ten days. Neither BP, nor the National Guard, have been able to prevent the vast plumes of oil escaping the blown well from decimating the businesses of Louisiana coastal fishers and shrimpers, and tourist trade of hoteliers. Despite the laying of inflatable booms around shorelines and wetland islands hundreds of miles of beach and wetland have already been polluted, and thousands of sea birds, including rare pelicans, and marine mammals such as leatherback turtle and dolphins, are drowning in oil.

The Deepwater Rig is registered as a marine vessell under a 'flag of convenience' in the low-regulation regime of the Marshall Islands. Like every major oil company BP has long been accustomed to reducing its exploration and productions costs by subcontracting its operations to companies and operators who run the rigs and the tankers that find and ship BP's oil. Similarly Esso's Exxon Validize tanker was registed in Panama.

Controversially President Obama has poured much ire on BP and its CEO, and stirred anti-British feeling, with little apparent regard for the so-called 'special relationship' with the US's junior partner in its present foreign wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But the United States government, like the other countries where the oil giants are headquartered, has failed to resist pressure from the industry to permit it to cut costs by subcontracting and the use of flags of convenience, especially as oil gets harder, and more expensive, to find.

The easy oil - that is oil on land and a few hundred or even a few thousand feet down - has already been found. And whether it is deep sea oil, tar sands, or oil in seismically unstable regions, the unremitting demands of industrial civillisation for this product seem to require that every kind of oil - no matter how dirty or dangerous - is extracted and the costs held down by the standard operating procedures that BP, like every other oil company, deployed in the Gulf.

THE oil disaster does not however seem to have affected Americans' appetite for the stuff. The well BP were hoping to bring into production contained an estimated 300 million barrells which is enough oil to supply the USA for just ten days. Nor in interviews at the pump do people express any sense of a connection between their demand for the stuff and the damaged fisheries and bust businesses on the Gulf. Protests are much more likely to be heard at the pump about rising prices than about the pollution, or the wars, that America's thirst for oil continues to require. 

Consumers do not feel responsible for what is happening in the Gulf, and nor do the regulators and planners of America's oil-dependent electricity generation and transport systems. Blaming BP is an easy option for a President who has been unable to persaude the US Congress or Senate to respond to the twin threats of climate
change and peak oil by regulating for a lower energy, and renewable energy, future.

Ultimately BP is doing the bidding of the American people and its government. The chain of responsibility for the Gulf disaster does not stop with its CEO but goes all the way from the bottom of the ocean to the ignition keys and temperature dials of American car, home and office owners. And although we in the UK use less than one
third per person the quantity of fossil fuels our American friends consume, most of us are also invested in the same low cost, high profit oil industry. Not only do most of us continue to fly and drive and centrally heat our homes, but those of us in pension schemes are also invested in oil stocks more than in any other industrial activity, and this is as true for the Church of England's pension fund as it is for my own which is now with the Universities Superannuation Scheme.

Industrial civilisation is unthinkable without oil. Oil grows and transports most of our food, supplies the materials for our clothes, cools, heats and insulates our homes and offices, provides the plastics and smelts and transports the ores that constitute our computers, cars, electronic entertainment devices, flys the planes, cars and trains that have made us the most mobile people in history and fuels our wars. But oil is running out. And the environmental costs of extracting the rest will only grow.

The reason we are hearing about the Gulf disaster is because it has taken place in US waters. But the people of the Niger Delta have endured the equivalent of an Exxon Valdez disaster - on land and water - every six months for the last forty years. There are lakes of crude oil, and leaking pipes, all over the region and the environmental disaster has given rise to a civil war that has seen thousands killed and maimed. There is a mud volcano called 'Lucy' in Java,  Indonesia that has sunk whole villages and spews out an olympic swimming pool of mud every few days. That volcano began the day a poorly cemented oil well blew out, although the company involved called it a natural disaster.

AND the biggest environmental burden of oil is not the wreckage of environments and civil peace in the present but the burden of anthropogenic climate change we are imposing on future generations, and on farmers and fishers already suffering from climate-change related droughts and floods in places such as Bangladesh and Tanzania.

This is why it is so important that every one of us takes responsibility for living in ways that are less dependent on oil and coal and gas.

Peak oil and climate change are no longer futuristic predictions but already present realities. We know the behaviours that advance getting off oil: cycling and walking instead of driving, taking the train instead of the plane, eating local food and growing what we can, buying fewer clothes, shoes, and electronic goods, contracting with renewable energy suppliers to heat our homes, businesses and churches, and calling on our pension fund managers to invest for a sustainable and post-oil and coal economy.

Taking personal responsibility for our own ecological footprint, and then starting to work with others - as the Transition movement is already doing - on the footprints of our towns and cities, the organisations for whom we work, and where we worship, is the only way to end the blame game indulged in against BP. And when we do this we start to live more hopefully and truthfully because we stop pretending that the myriad hidden costs and connections that sustain our ecologically rapacious and wasteful civilisation are not moral burdens that we share with the CEOs that do its bidding.

Michael Northcott's latest book Cuttlefish, Clones and Clusterbombs: Preaching, Politics and Ecology is published in July by Darton Longman and Todd.